Linc Chafee speaks

As a rule, senatorial memoirs aren’t especially exciting. They’re frequently exercises in vanity, with personal anecdotes that aren’t quite as interesting as the lawmakers tend to believe.

But former Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who left the Republican Party after losing his re-election bid in 2006, actually seems to have put an interesting book together.

Former U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee’s new political memoir is remarkable for its candor, its delicious window into life in America’s most exclusive club, and its condemnation of President Bush and the combination of right-wing Republicans and Democratic enablers who plunged the nation into an ill-fated war without end in Iraq.

The most startling revelation: Chafee must be the only senator in U.S. political history who says his defeat was the result of voters acting logically.

“The system works best when power remains in the hands of the voters,” writes Chafee. “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.”

That’s a little unusual, isn’t it? Complimenting the voters who threw you out of office?

Chafee directs some of his fiercest criticism at Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, the latter of which he actually considered challenging in the New Hampshire primary.

On the Democratic frontrunner:

The book excoriates Mr. Bush and his GOP allies who repeatedly fanned such wedge issues as changing the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage, abortion and flag-burning. But he saves some of his harshest words for Democrats who paved the way for Mr. Bush to use the U.S. military to invade Iraq. That includes New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, whom Chafee says put her presidential ambitions above standing up to Mr. Bush and the rush to war in Iraq.

“I find it surprising now, in 2008, how many Democrats are running for president after shirking their constitutional duty to check and balance this president,” writes Chafee. “Being wrong about sending Americans to kill and be killed, maim and be maimed, is not like making a punctuation mistake in a highway bill.

“They argue that the president duped them into war, but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against prosecuting the war. “The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were,” writes Chafee. “They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom.”

But Chafee really unloads on Bush:

He has nothing good to say about Mr. Bush, whom he did not vote for in 2004. He writes that he even flirted with running against Mr. Bush in the 2004 New Hampshire primary and had hoped that a leading Republican would challenge the president.

(In the 2004 general election, Chafee wrote in the name of Mr. Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, whose foreign policies were in the internationalist vein favored by Chafee’s northeastern wing of the GOP.) Chafee makes the case that Mr. Bush fudged all of his campaign pledges of 2000, especially the promises about running a bipartisan administration, running a “humble” foreign policy that would eschew nation-building military adventures abroad, and being a “uniter not a divider.”

As senatorial memoirs go, it sounds like interesting stuff.

The most startling revelation: Chafee must be the only senator in U.S. political history who says his defeat was the result of voters acting logically.

He’s absolutely right. A vote for him was a vote for continued lack of oversight in the Senate. I’m glad he’s remoreseful.

  • He and his father were always the only republican I ever voted for and the only reason I registered as Independent.

  • Someone handed me one of the infamous aluminum tubes, the kind we were told Saddam was using to enrich weapons-grade uranium while plotting mushroom clouds over America, the ‘smoking gun’ that Condoleezza Rice warned about.

    “I looked at the aluminum tube, looked at the analysts and thought, I can go buy one of these at Adler’s Hardware,” the Providence hardware emporium, writes Chafee.

    Damn it. I know he voted the right way, but I can’t help but think about how helpful it would have been to, you know, point this out to the mass of the public that was running around scared of those “mushroom clouds over America”?

    Other things that might have been helpful: Chafee actually expressing his feelings about Bush in 2004 during the election (he could have swayed a few of those moderate voters who only finally came around in ’06), or Chafee actually dropping OUT of the Republican Party (again – point out loudly to the moderates that the party was insane). The lack of almost ANYONE in the Republican Party leadership speaking critically of Bush is one of the major reasons that Bush ended up winning in 2004. And Chafee dropping out early enough to be critical of the Democrats who enabled Bush might have gotten an actual critic of the war on the ticket instead of Kerry.

    I have some level of respect for Chafee overall, but the man seems to have the political brain of a walnut and a severe deficit of political courage. Had he taken a couple of bolder stances earlier in this whole nightmare he might have prevented or at least minimized some of this mess AND, as a bonus, he might still be in the damn Senate, if as an Independent.

  • Just another in the long line of America Haters…

    Why do you wackos keep critizing ‘Our Glorious Leader’?

    After all, President Bush combines many qualities from previous presidents and world leaders:
    – The economic foresight of Herbert Hoover
    – The political integrity of Calvin Coolidge
    – The morality of Genghis Kahn
    – The smirk of Alfred E. Neumann

    That having been said, I fully agree with Chaffee about Hillary & the other dumbocrats who seemed intent upon ‘protecting their asses’ from rethugnican condemnation for being ‘soft on terror’.

    The first duty of a U.S. Senator should be to the Constitution & laws of our country, not to their own political future.

    Is this not the same mindset that has brought us the Nancy & Harry act!

    Impeach Bush. Impeach Cheney. Then turn them over to an International Tribunal for trials on ‘Crimes Against Humanity’!

  • Old line moderate Republicans like Chafee have themselves to blame for allowing the party to be taken over by the right-wing cowboys and religious wingnuts. If that was not preventable then they had, and still have, a responsibility to bolt the party, reorganize, and push back. Too few have. Chafee’s honest retrospecive analysis is certainly welcome, but where was he when it counted?

  • Nony – excellent points.

    There was a lot of that going on – a lot of people in a position to make a difference who chose to sit on the sidelines – and writing a book to tell us all how dumb the other guys were doesn’t excuse their own failures.

    Like many, I knew we were going to war in Iraq long before there was an AUMF. I knew that whatever Bush was saying about inspectors and diplomacy and sanctions and all the other non-war options was just talk – that no one who swaggered like he did was going to give any of these things much of a chance.

    I also can’t imagine the mindset of those who were in the Congress at the time, only a year removed from the worst attack we’d ever suffered, meeting in buildings that had been in the sights of the hijackers, anthrax attacks still on people’s minds, believing, as I think most people did for a long time, that another attack really could come at any time. And on top of that, there was that pervasive and toxic atmosphere of “who’s REALLY a patriotic American?”

    I think when it came down to it, people who voted for that AUMF were afraid that somewhere in all the chaff the administration was throwing at them, there might be some actual wheat – and then what? Then what happens if they don’t “give him the tools he needed?” This was the same reason we ended up with the Patriot Act, you know – can’t tie the hands of the president.

    It was, I think, a masterful psychological attack, complete with a ticking clock that had them convinced that time was running out. It was, but not for the reasons they feared; the more time the inspectors spent in Iraq, the more likely it was that they would report there were no WMD – “Curveball” be damned. And Bush and Cheney and the rest of the warmongering, power-hungry perpetrators of this plan, knew that – as did those of us able to look at the whole thing from a little distance and without the constant pressure to prove that we were loyal and patriotic Americans.

    The 29 Democrats who voted that AUMF didn’t listen to us, they didn’t listen to their colleagues who chose to vote the other way, they didn’t insist on seeing more evidence, or asking more questions. I’m not willing to accuse them of voting for political reasons, because some of what I would have considered to be eminently smart and experienced Senators voted for the AUMF.

    They all could have spoken up – including Chafee.

  • “They argue that the president duped them into war, but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

    Excellent point!

    I was planning to vote for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday (with uncertainty), but Chafee changed my mind. With thousands of American lives at stake and tens of of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives at stake, she applied poor judgement, voted based on personal ambition or both.

    I can’t, in good conscience, cast my vote for her.

  • Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.

    If her Iraq vote ends up destroying Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations, I’d hope this would serve to concentrate the minds of future senators and congresspeople when they face a war vote. Going to war should never be the path of least resistance, and politicians who do it ought to believe they are putting their careers on the line if they vote yes.

    Lincoln Chafee’s candor now is a nice thing. It would have been nicer had we had it back when he was in office. On the other hand, the good thing about his having never switched parties is that his Democratic replacement, Sheldon Whitehouse, is a far more effective advocate for our side than Chafee ever could have been. (There was a reason why Rove’s operation worked hard to save Chafee’s seat despite his history of bucking the GOP leadership – they knew he was as good as they were going to get in his state.)

  • Chafee always struck me as a really nice man, but never outspoken or wanting to upset the apple cart too much. Though he did vote the right way more than a few times which took some political courage. So I have a soft spot for him. I’m glad he wrote this book, which sounds like worthwhile reading.

    His replacement, Sheldon Whitehouse, OTOH, is outstanding, and we Dems are lucky to have him on our side. Back when I had more time to watch CSPAN, Whitehouse knocked my sox off with his questioning of witnesses at committee hearings. He doesn’t take cr*p from anyone.

    After the last diebolded presidential election, I was hoping that several of the moderate Rs (Chafee among them, also Hagel, and the Maine senators, though Collins is too in step with bush) would leave the party, go Independent and caucus with the Dems. I don’t know if there were any attempts by the Dems to get them in that direction, bad on them if they didn’t at least try.

  • Those who were silent are now accusing those who were also silent. I wish politicians as a class had more courage. But one mistake, one misjudgment loudly stated and that’s it. The system is built upon half steps.

  • Extremely well said, Anne. One question: Is it not correct that the AUMF vote was in October 2002, and that the roll-out of the propaganda for the war started in September 2002 (Andy Card’s comment that you don’t start an advertising campaign in August). Is it true or not true that it was absolutely clear that Bush was going to war as of the date of the AUMF vote? Certainly as time went on there was no doubt but was there room for any doubt as of the date of the vote?

    I also agree with Jen Flowers. I’d add that those who spoke up at the time – like Scott Ritter — were portrayed as (virtually) mentally impaired.

  • Fascinating comments by the former Senator, fascinating.

    During the AUMF debate, Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), the then-Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged his fellow senators in a floor speech to vote No. As I remember, he said as much as he could without breaking law by revealing classified information in public. And he urged fellow senators to go read the highly classified intelligence report that only senators (not staff because of it being highly classified) could read to understand why the arguments to go to war didn’t hold up. Only SIX Senators did (I think that includes Graham). We know because senators had to sign into a log in order to enter the room where the report was kept and where they were allowed to read it.

    Hillary has acknowledged that she wasn’t one of them but said her staff briefed her on it. That’s a lie that I can’t get over. Staff couldn’t have briefed her on it because the report was so highly classified that only senators were allowed to enter the room where the report was kept for their review. Staff could not enter or read, and senators were legally restrained from briefing them on the contents.

    I believe at least one Republican read it. Does anyone know if that was Chafee? And can anyone list who the six senators were?

  • Hillary has acknowledged that she wasn’t one of them but said her staff briefed her on it. That’s a lie that I can’t get over.

    Tip of the iceburg, I’m afraid.

  • I’m a little bothered by the fact that it’s Chaffee’s criticism of the Democrats that’s getting all the coverage. (Your post is much better than most, Steve.) Sure his slam on the Republicans is stuff that we all know by now, but so is his slam on the Democrats. You’d think that the “man bites dog” part of this would be that a Republican is actually speaking out against Republicans, not that a moderate Republican is criticizing Democrats.

  • I’ve always found Chafee a tragic character, someone of qualities who just happened to show up at the exact wrong time.

    His “Republicanism” was purely a matter of inheritance. His father was the hero of Rhode Island politics, a public figure almost universally beloved whose integrity and conscience was unquestioned and who fit in pretty comfortably in the moderate/left wing of his party through the 1960s. Then, of course, the ground shifted under him and by the time John Chafee passed away, he was an outlier.

    Linc Chafee was more of same, only more so. He was almost like the non-asshole version of Bush; he went to Brown (as I did, awhile later) and didn’t exactly recoil from it the way that, say, Bush did of Yale. Like Bush, he screwed around into his early 40s–then decided to enter public life. But Chafee was good at it, serving as a mayor in RI. When his dad passed away, he followed in his footsteps and was, if anything, more outspoken in his departures from increasingly strict right-wing orthodoxy. He hated it, clearly–but he never left the party out of a perhaps admirable and almost totally misplaced loyalty to his father. (Again, the opposite of Dubya who gleefully defecated on the more admirable parts of his father’s legacy at every opportunity.)

    The result was further enabling of all the right-wing bastards Chafee loathed–which was why he seemed so unhappy. When Whitehouse–who really has emerged as a standout Senator, probably the best of those 2006 winners along with Webb–beat him, Chafee seemed more relieved than anything else. And he left the Republican Party, finally, in 2007. I hope he stays in politics and either returns to the Senate or the Providence statehouse as an independent governor.

  • I’m not willing to accuse them of voting for political reasons, because some of what I would have considered to be eminently smart and experienced Senators voted for the AUMF

    Anne, this line of reasoning is backwards. A smart and experienced Senator wouldn’t be duped by Republican lies that fooled no one; instead, they’d have voted for it because they saw the writing on the wall and assumed it was pointless to fight the war and that an anti-war vote would hurt them politically. Only a fool would have been duped by the Bushies.

    And tied into that is something I wrote yesterday, which is that even Democrats who supported war should have opposed the authorization. It was nothing but a ruse designed to hurt Democrats. An official Declaration of War could have been made months later, and even this lame authorization should have waited until after the election; as they did before the first Gulf War. Even pro-war Democrats should have insisted that the vote wait until after the mid-terms, and they should have officially declared war, rather than signing away that right to the president. We got reamed with that vote, and all those “smart and experienced” Senators allowed it to happen.

    Besides, the only thing that changed after 9/11 was that attacking Iraq became a worse idea. And I don’t remember many of these Democrats supporting war with Iraq, back when they actually did have WMD’s. Nor was Saddam ever a threat to us. This wasn’t about lies. This was about politicians looking out for themselves. Even if you believed the Bush lies, war with Iraq was still irrational.

  • As an add-on to what I just wrote, the problem with Hillary and other important Dems voting yes on the authorization wasn’t that they were the deciding votes on it (though only 48 Republican Senators voted for it, so they did need a few Dems). But the main point was that the Bushies wanted political cover for it, so it didn’t look like this was only Bush’s war that he was going alone on. That’s also why they formed that sham coalition.

    And after it became obvious that the war was a huge mistake, the Bushies have repeatedly used these votes and the coaltion as a way of making it appear as if this wasn’t just Bush’s war. Sure, it was a sham, but it was an effective one. And for that, we have Hillary, Kerry, and many other foolish Democrats to thank. Rove totally routed them, and even now, Hillary won’t come clean on it. I think she’s a decent candidate, but this one issue is still an albatross around her neck.

  • My impression is that Lincoln Chafee is a nice guy, and he made the right vote on the AUMF. His judgement was sound, but I don’t recall by what margin the AUMF passed. Unless it was razor-thin, I’m not sure that it involved political courage. Chafee’s moderate POV did not seem to show up when his party’s chance of getting what it wanted was really on the line. Every time I see Sheldon Whitehouse questioning witnesses before a Senate committee, I am reminded how much the Rhode Island, the Democratic party, and the country has traded up. I wish Chafee well; I think he will be happier as an Independent. His party no longer has room or tolerance for those of his ilk.

  • Unless it was razor-thin, I’m not sure that it involved political courage.

    That’s not really correct. As I mentioned above, this wasn’t just about getting the authorization, but rather of providing Bush with political cover in order to bolster his argument for war; so they wanted as many votes as they could get. And that’s the main reason why they held it before the mid-term elections, as they correctly believed that they could hammer anyone who opposed it during the election. Particularly as they pulled a sham and acted as if the authorization was intended to pressure Saddam, and were only truthful about it after it passed and said it was a vote on war. But we all knew the truth anyway.

    It was a two-fer: Anyone who voted against it would be a bigger target in the election, and anyone who supported it were signing away their rights to fight against the war or complain about it afterwards. I have no doubts the vote would have been closer if they had held it after the mid-terms; as they had for the first Gulf War. Even now, politicians get beat up for approving of authorization and then complaining about it.

    Of course, Chafee wasn’t up for election that year, so the pressure wasn’t so great. But the entire Rove method was to punish dissenters, and you can bet Chafee got hurt for his vote. That’s why Republicans always stay in line. Besides, people focus more on what your vote was; not if you were the deciding vote. Chafee probably should have said more, but he was brave just for voting as he did. That’s why only 7 Republicans voted no, with Chafee being the only Senator among them.

  • Those who were silent are now accusing those who were also silent.

    What does this mean? If jen flowers is referring to Senator Chafee, a vote against the authorization, a vote against his own party and his own president is not silence. To the contrary.

  • Let’s not forget that as a direct result of the invasion a number of Iraqis GREATER that the entire population of Montana has been killed, wounded or forced to flee Iraq. That’s more than 2 MILLION people. Both Republicans AND Democrats who voted for the AUMF share in this shame. This was more than a mere lapse of judgement. This was the wholesale destruction of an entrie generation because it will take that long for Iraq to recover.

    Bush may be ultimately responsible for pulling the trigger, but every member of Congress that voted yes on the AUMF put the gun in his hand.

  • Re those who were silent are now accusing those who were also silent:

    Who had access to a public microphone and actually used it, vigorously and persistently, sometimes subjecting themselves to public ridicule?

    Scott Ritter
    Senator Byrd
    Brent Scocroft (once, I think, in an op-ed)

    Who else?

    Even Wesley Clark who I recall as being insightful and critical in writing, said nothing (that I recall) from his TV pundit position.

    For whatever it’s worth, British TV was far different. I was in London in December 2002 and there was lots of criticism on TV. I remember thinking how different that was from here.

    Perhaps I’m misinterpreting what Anne said above, but we forget the tenor of the times.

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