Providence Journal - Debating Differences

Providence Journal - Debating differences
By Mark Arsenault
Journal Staff Writer

U.S. Senate candidates Lincoln Chafee, the incumbent, and his Republican primary challenger Stephen Laffey concluded their series of debates on familiar notes last night, contrasting their views on taxes, federal spending and energy policy, as their long and heated race now turns to an all-out sprint to the Sept. 12 GOP primary.

Last night's one-hour debate on Channel 10, with its loose, rapid-fire format, brought a number of sharp exchanges between the candidates, and may have been the liveliest of the four debates the two men have fought over the past two weeks.

The candidates had entered this month's debate schedule intending to highlight where they differ. On that score, the debates were a success -- their distinctions on major issues have been well-drawn.

"The issues always have been about taxes, spending, immigration. . ." Laffey said after last night's debate. "I got my views across very clearly."

Chafee said after the debate, "You always wish you could have done more, but I have tried to show how I'm consistent."

As he has throughout the campaign, Chafee portrayed himself last night as a moderate consensus builder with an independent streak, who isn't afraid to make the tough vote, as well as a keeper of the "traditional" Republican values of fiscal responsibility, personal freedoms, the environment, and healthy skepticism of "foreign entanglements." He complained about federal deficits, and accused Laffey of being in the pocket of the Club for Growth, a hard-line anti-tax group that has been generous in its support for Laffey's campaign.

"At the time of sharp divisions among those who lead our nation, the country calls out for those who can work together on constructive solutions," said Chafee, an oblique reference to his charges throughout the campaign that Laffey lacks the temperament to be a U.S. senator.

Laffey, the two-term mayor of Cranston, painted himself last night as the waste-cutting agitator, who won't stand for the pork-barrel, business-as-usual politicking of the U.S. Senate. Building on populist themes, Laffey stressed his middle-class background as the son of a toolmaker. He inherited a city in financial disarray when he won the mayor's job in 2002, and says that he righted Cranston, and changed the culture of municipal government, by picking the right fights on behalf of the taxpayers.

"Do you want more of the same?" Laffey asked voters last night. "Or do you want change?"

Laffey hammered his familiar campaign themes by criticizing federal pork-barrel spending, and by promoting his plan for U.S. energy independence as a critical component of the war on terror. "If we don't get off foreign oil now, with a program like putting a man on the moon, we will not win the war on terror," Laffey said.

Repeatedly last night, the discussion came back to taxes and fiscal policy.

Chafee was one of just three senators in 2004, Laffey charged, to vote against a "working families" tax relief act. "This tax relief was strictly for working families," Laffey said, needling Chafee directly. So how could he oppose it?

"That would have been a tax cut I could have supported before we got into the deep, deep tax cuts for the wealthy, which you support . . . that took us from surpluses to deficits," Chafee said.

"It luckily passed," Laffey continued, "with the other 90-some-odd senators voting for it. But if it hadn't passed you would have been responsible for raising the taxes $1,800 on a family of four making $35,000. I disagreed with that."

"That's why the Concord Coalition gave me the most fiscally responsible of all 100 senators award," Chafee said. "Because I'm willing to take the tough votes."

Chafee defended a voting record in which he sided with many Democrats against tax cuts and the war in Iraq, and in support of abortion rights and the federal financing of embryonic stem cell research.

So why should Republicans elect him?

"I consider myself a traditional Republican," Chafee said. "When I hear the Democrats talking about the deficit, it makes me nuts because that used to be a Republican issue."

So is Laffey closer to the GOP mainstream?

"I would refer to myself as a reformer and maybe a populist," Laffey said. "I saw when I came into office as mayor of Cranston not Republican or Democratic stuff, I saw a fiscal train wreck. . . . I aimed to change it. Laffey, like Ronald Regan, believes in cutting taxes to stimulate the economy. He cited tax cuts pushed by President John Kennedy, which he said "helped propel the economy of America in the 1960s."

"The proof of the recent tax cuts" by President Bush "is in the pudding," Laffey said. "Five hundred billion dollars of extra revenue to the U.S treasury in the last two years."

Why doesn't Chafee believe in the Bush tax cuts?

"Deficits . . ." he said. "Once you're in deficits it's like any addiction; they're easy to get into and very, very difficult to get out of."

In a "lightning round" of quick questions, the candidates fired back with short answers:

Why is gas $3 a gallon?

"Demand," Chafee said. "Demand is up. China is coming on the market, and there are storms" on the horizon.

"Lack of an energy policy," Laffey said.

What should the country do about Iran developing nuclear weapons?

"We tried diplomacy," Laffey said. "Sanctions and military is a last step."

"No," Chafee said about a military response. "We don't even have a diplomatic presence in Tehran."

On the issue of illegal immigrants, Laffey said the country's first priority should be securing the borders.

Chafee said one solution to reducing illegal immigration was to address poverty in the other countries. When Laffey attacked Chafee for his votes on immigration, the senator turned on him: "Again, you're a one-man filibuster. A lot of words, but not many solutions."

Do you support the U.S. House immigration bill? Chafee demanded.

"I have not read the bill," Laffey said. "But I would support one that secures our borders."

There has been very little public polling in this GOP race, with pollsters claiming it would be costly and potentially unreliable to poll the contest due to the historically low turnouts in Republican primaries in Rhode Island. Independent voters, who can vote in either Republican or Democratic primaries, are a wild card in this election. How many will show up? With a much lower profile race on the Democratic side, the indepdents could decide who survives Rhode Island's most watched Republican primary in many years.

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