Laffey's Last Laugh

A rebel Republican whose cause has already won out

David Weigel | September 24, 2007

It was a good idea, bringing Steve Laffey to a bar. It was pure luck that our waitress was a looker.

"Hello, pretty lady," Laffey says when she hands us our menus. He pauses for emphasis and smiles. "Strikingly pretty lady."

No matter how it looks in print, this was pure charm. The waitress laughs. Laffey orders soup and a lettuce wedge, rolling up his sleeves.

"It's a good thing they've got food here," he says. "That last place I was at? Spaghetti lunch. I've been to a lot of spaghetti lunches, so I know what happens. I get up, I look down at my white shirt, and there's a nice red stain looking up at me."

We are a five-minute walk from the halls of Congress and it's awfully easy to imagine Laffey buttoning his sleeves and heading back there to joke around with colleagues, hash out, tell the female reporters how nice they look. But Steve Laffey isn't in Congress. He's smarting from defeat in a Senate primary last year and shopping a book, Primary Mistake, about how the Republican Party screwed him over.

"It's a fun book. I could have written the book at the 40,000 foot level, at the academic level," Laffey says. "I knew someone would do that, but I didn't know it would be Alan Greenspan, a week after me, from the same publisher! ‘Republicans put power over principle and they deserved to lose.' That's a direct quote from his book, and he's right. But I wanted to write a book from the crop-duster level."

What happened was this: In September 2005, midway through his second term as mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island, Laffey announced a run against incumbent Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee. Laffey was ambitious ("I love campaigning, I love raising money"), pro-life, economically conservative, and pro-Iraq War. Chafee was none of those things. He'd been elevated to the Senate when his father John died and had proudly voted against every major Bush-backed bill, as well as many of his nominees.

Laffey thought he was doing his beloved party a favor. "There is no way to grow the Republican Party without removing [Chafee]," he told then-Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman. Mehlman, Karl Rove and everyone else with pull in the GOP figured Chafee could hold the seat while Laffey would lose it for them. He met with Elizabeth Dole, then-head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who more or less admitted that Chafee was a traitor to the cause but that they would spend whatever it took to save him.

Spooning salad dressing onto his lettuce wedge, Laffey still scoffs at the smart boys who told him not to run. "They had their push polls, we had our real polls," he says. "I could have told you two years ago that Lincoln Chafee couldn't win the general election. Ninety-nine percent name recognition. Forty percent of people saying they'd vote for him. You don't win with those numbers."

Actually, the official GOP realized the problems with Chafee. It realized that if Republicans, and Republicans alone, decided his fate, then Chafee would lose. So the forces behind Chafee hunted down independent ("unaffiliated" in Rhode Island) voters and asked them to vote against Laffey. Direct mail twisting a Laffey comment to make him sound pro-choice was sent to Republican voters; liberals and independents were reminded that he was actually staunchly pro-life. Republicans were told Laffey was a crook who raised property taxes, and liberals were reminded that Chafee had stood like St. George against the Bush tax cuts.

"They weren't just attacking me," Laffey says. "They were attacking the capitalist system. They'd say, ‘Steve Laffey made money helping oil companies make money. Yeah! Darn right! Sure did! And restaurants, and retailers—I made our clients a lot of money."

Cash from the Club for Growth and far-flung conservative activists kept Laffey competitive with Chafee—he got around three-quarters of his funds from out of state to Chafee's fifty percent. But the pummeling worked, and Laffey's pleading, mostly positive, anti-Washington campaign was subsumed by attacks he didn't effectively rebut.

But what did Chafee's primary win mean for the GOP? In the long run, nothing. Chafee was an anomaly before the election, and after he lost to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse it seemed like history run its course. As Chafee went down, so did four of New England's five Republican congressmen. The party only backed their incumbent as a way of slowing the guillotine going down on Republicans in New England. Now that Chafee's gone, no Republican will bother bringing an indecisive, flawed, liberal back into the fold. (In 2000 Rhode Island Democratic Congressman Patrick Kennedy joked that "when I hear someone talking about a Rhode Island politician whose father was a senator and who got to Washington based on his family name, used cocaine and wasn't very smart, I know there is only a 50-50 chance it's me.")

In fact, if one of Laffey's goals is a more Reaganite, less liberal party, he's already won. I ask him what he thinks of the National Republican Senatorial Committee sitting on its hands when Nebraska Republican Jon Bruning entered the primary for Senate and scared Chuck Hagel out of politics, or what he thinks of establishment Republicans backing primary challenges against Maryland's Wayne Gilchrest, North Carolina's Walter Jones, and Ron Paul—the only anti-war Republicans left on the Hill. He shrugs.

Comments

|9.24.07 @ 1:59PM|#

Mr. Weigel, you meant Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, not "mayor," right?

|9.24.07 @ 2:12PM|#

Where's the live blogging from Columbia U right now?? You mean I have to go to the Times for this...

|9.24.07 @ 2:14PM|#

As the 12 steppers are wont to say: Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

|9.24.07 @ 2:16PM|#

Attention Karl Rove: Your getting your permanent Republican Democatic majority. You happy now?

rho|9.24.07 @ 2:45PM|#

I'm sick to death of "we have to win in Iraq!" No shit. Problem is, we don't know what "win" means in Iraq; and if we did, nobody knows how to do it without acting like assholes and bombing the place flat.

That said, the Party will kill itself before it allows change in inter-party politics. The GOP is cooked.

|9.24.07 @ 3:23PM|#

The party is unified: Anti-tax, anti-spending...

Huh? The current crop of GOP politicians, taken as a whole, are wishy-washy on taxes and absolutely love spending other people's money. The only reason the base hasn't abandoned their party for the Democrats, is that the other side is even worse. The GOP has become the "lesser of two greater evils" party.

|9.24.07 @ 3:53PM|#

The Party is unified.....

Like Brandybuck says, Huh? The GOP doesn't seem to have any problem spending tons of money on unconstitutional things and are barely better than the Democrats if at all. The fact that the establishment is against Ron Paul indicates what an abysmal party the GOP has become. So he voted against the Iraq war, (which in hindsight makes lots of sense) but on spending, taxes, and regulations, you won't find a more principled and conservative person.

deron|9.24.07 @ 5:28PM|#

The only unifying factors left for the GOP are rhetoric, and not being Democrats.

SIV|9.24.07 @ 6:46PM|#

The only unifying factors left for the GOP are rhetoric, and not being Democrats.

They are pretty good on those qualities though.
When you listen to the speeches at the convention they sound like prudish pro-war libertarians.

|9.24.07 @ 8:41PM|#

When you listen to the speeches at the convention they sound like prudish pro-war libertarians.

...interspersed with those lovely little rounds of "flip-flop" chanting...

I can't wait until 2008!

[/sarcasm]

|9.24.07 @ 8:50PM|#

It's unfortunate that the president didn't just go in there and win.

Ah! Why wasn't this guy on the Bush strategery team during the invasion, so his brilliant tactic of just going in and winning could have been implemented?

Americans want to win. Ronald Reagan's vision of the Cold War was 'We win, they lose.'

If there's any justice, an undead Reagan is crawling out of his grave to seek vengeance against this Laffey character.

Gene Berkman|9.24.07 @ 8:56PM|#

So Laffey does not like Nelson Rockefeller, but he supports Rudy Giuliani for President.

Someone should tell him that Giuliani was backed by the Liberal Party all three times he ran for Mayor; his administration of New York City was even more free spending than Rockefeller's years as Governor of New York, and Giuliani is not just a liberal, he backed Mario Cuomo for Governor of New York.

|9.24.07 @ 11:15PM|#

Laffey blames everyone but himself for his defeat last September, and that's been his modus operandi for quite some time. He can blame the NRSC all he wants, but he still lost his home district to Chafee. The people just didn't love the populist as much as Laffey's convinced himself they did.

Elemenope|9.25.07 @ 8:50AM|#

I'm a Rhode Island native and a resident. I'm registered independent, and like many others as the article indicated I voted in the Republican primary for Chafee. Laffey was a nutball in every conceivable sense; unnecessarily belligerent, not well versed on issues, and kind of a nasty guy in general. An asshat, if you will.

Chafee was well-liked in the state, and he only lost by a hair following the wave of anti-Republican sentiment in 2006. Had the Republican Party not gone schizo in the primary and abandoned Chafee, he would have easily won, and the Republicans would still have control of the Senate.

|9.25.07 @ 12:52PM|#

"The party is unified: Anti-tax, anti-spending..." this is the kind of analysis that can get you a term membership at the CFR ....good work....and very nice touch , saying that "rockfeller is bad" very nice.

this magazine is a sham I can feel it who is it that helps this propaganda get through.

I just wish there was more attention paid to the fact that all of the media-hyped candidates are members of the CFR.


I hope you have heard of Clinton's much respected professor Carroll Quigley , here he states the nearly obvious idea that a group can get it's goals reached by controlling two parties and let them disagree on hyped up "political football" issues like gay marriage:


"The chief problem of American political life...has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy."

The goals of the CFR is best described by its very own members. Bill Clinton's Georgetown mentor and CFR member Carroll Quigley states: "The Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of a society which originated in England... (and) ...believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one world rule established."

You must know all this stuff as you write about politics for a living. Are you scared to write about it and inform the people? It is certainly interesting stuff.

|9.25.07 @ 1:40PM|#

do you call him a rebel of the republicans because he likes women?


nevemind, anyone who orders soup and a wedge of lettuce is a prime canidate for the the andavor male cheerleading fan club.

|9.25.07 @ 4:51PM|#

Hey, when's the next Reason Posters Writing Skills Workshop? Is it still being held at Bohemian Grove?

Tom Blanton|9.25.07 @ 11:12PM|#

I'm still wondering how it is that Laffey, another Republican crypto-fascist, go the last laugh. He lost. Is he laughing because he correctly predicted that Chafee would lose? That's not such a great feat. Lots of Republicans lost.

|9.26.07 @ 11:12AM|#

Brandy, do you think a real libertarian would write a article praising this pro-war, pro-no big governemnt laffey jerk?

Mike Reason|9.28.07 @ 12:32PM|#

Weigel doesn't understand that while Laffey has the same ideology as the insider Republicans, he probably means it. Alot of Republicans in Congress have talked tough on illegal immigration, fiscal responsibility, and the war, but when they get elected they compromise on every issue. A number of congressional Republicans are a bunch of pork masters with no sense of priority and spend billions of dollars that we don't have. The Republican leadership backed the Comprehensive Immigration Reform plan and derided their base as "nativists" and "bigots" because we were opposed to the idea of turning this country into a bilingual, manorial state. Finally, look at the number of Republicans who have defected to the retreat crowd, such as Luger. Some of the Republicans are worse surrender monkeys than the Democrat leadership.

Riomarcos|10.3.07 @ 5:07PM|#

I'm a pro-choice, anti-war, Republican. Laffey doesn't stand for my ideals, neither does he represent real Republican ideals. What Greenspan was saying was absolutely true. We went from being the party of small government and lower taxes to being the party of gay bashing, anti-immigrant hysteria and religious fanaticism. How the hell are you supposed to have a small, Federalist government without separation of Church and State? I think I'll just vote Libertarian until the Republican party comes back to its Reaganite common sense, if that ever happens...