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During my four years of college in Rhode Island, I came to deeply love the tiny Ocean State. It's flat, it's cold, and it's rainy, but damn, the politics are fascinating. (And Providence is an amazing food city. Really! With great architecture!) In 2006, Rhode Islanders reluctantly sent Sen. Lincoln Chafee packing, despite their affection for his family legacy. Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against authorizing President Bush to go to war in Iraq. He refused to vote for Bush in 2004, instead writing in the name of the president's father. Unsurprisingly, Chafee dropped out of the Republican Party last year. Now, in a memoir set to appear in April, Chafee becomes probably the only politician in America to laud his own defeat, writing:
I was a casualty of the system working in 2006, and while defeat is never easy, I give the voters credit: They made the connection between electing even popular Republicans at the cost of leaving the Senate in the hands of a leadership they had learned to mistrust.According to the Providence Journal, Chafee, who is so proud of his antiwar stance, doesn't mention in the book that pro-war Republicans flocked to Rhode Island to campaign for him in 2006. But he does take Democrats who supported the war to task in stinging prose:
“Instead of talking tough or meekly raising one’s hand to support the tough talk, it is far more muscular, I think, to find out what is really happening in the world and have a debate about what we really need to accomplish,” writes Chafee. “That is the hard work of governing, but it was swept aside once the fear, the war rhetoric and the political conniving took over.”Chafee writes of his surprise at “how quickly key Democrats crumbled.” Democratic senators, Chafee writes, “went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration’s nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?”I'm looking forward to reading the whole book and reviewing it for TAP.--Dana Goldstein
