Whitehouse has also cited how, while AG, he had convinced Urciuoli to pay Roger Williams for the $85,000 that it had spent probing his alleged abuse of hospital funds. Chafee maintains that the Democrat fell down on the larger issue, placing his political ambition ahead of his public responsibility.

The problem for the incumbent Republican in all this, notes Brown’s Darrell West, is how “he has to go back five to 10 years to make that argument, and voters are more persuaded by contemporary problems. People discount things from the past.” 
Countdown to November 7.

After John H. Chafee died in 1999, Bill Clinton told the Associated Press that the venerable Republican senator “proved that politics can be an honorable profession. He embodied the decent center which has carried America from triumph to triumph for over 200 years.”

Yet when Clinton came to Providence for an October 16 fundraiser at the Rhode Island Convention Center, it was the rabidly ideological bent of the ruling Republicans in Washington that fueled his enthusiastic support for Sheldon Whitehouse.

It’s no wonder that Lincoln Chafee — whose signature stances have been against the invasion of Iraq, against tax cuts for the rich, and for environmental protection — has been a famously uncomfortable member of the national GOP, yet one who seems constitutionally incapable of bolting from the party.

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The senator has made plain his disappointment with the rightward lurch of George W. Bush, in part by repeatedly speaking about how he wrote-in the name of the president’s father in 2004. The down-to-earth lawmaker is all the more likeable because of how he speaks candidly and like a human being, not as a pre-programmed, consultant-vetted spin machine.

Campaign bluster aside, there’s not all that much difference in the views of Chafee and Whitehouse on various issues.

According to a recent story by the AP’s M.L. Johnson, the two opponents did not meet until 1992, when Chafee was elected mayor of Warwick and Whitehouse was named state director of business regulation, although they currently see each other at the Wheeler School in Providence, where their 13-year-old sons are friends.

While Whitehouse stared down Chafee at one point during their October 19 debate on WPRI, there was no apparent animosity between the two men, even with the hurling of bitter charges. One suspects that this hard-fought multi-million-dollar scrap, even with the very high stakes, isn’t being taken personally.

Rhode Islanders have been voting for a Chafee for so long that they may prove incapable of turning one out of office.

This stems from the Rhode Island GOP’s difference from its counterparts in most other places. To a large degree, it’s a reform party, dedicated more to good government than to rigid ideology. The Chafees epitomize this.

Then again, Lincoln Chafee was keenly aware of the fragility of his position, right from the moment in November 1999 when then-Governor Lincoln Almond selected him to serve the remainder of his late father’s unexpired term in the Senate.

As Chafee told a State House news conference at the time, with words that could prove decisive on November 7, “I’m a Republican in a heavily Democratic state. I can’t ever imagine a Republican having an advantage in this state.”

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Ian Donnis : idonnis@thephoenix.com