 |
|
| |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| 2012 Election: | Obama's book | Biden's book | Romney's book | Ryan's book | | | Jill Stein's interview | Gary Johnson's interview | | | 2012 Debates |
Against the Tide How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President by Lincoln Chafee  (Click for Amazon book review)
BOOK REVIEW by OnTheIssues.org: Linc Chafee does not like George W. Bush. And he dislikes even more Dick Cheney. And according to this book, that's the reason Chafee left the Republican Party. Chafee was elected as a Republican to the Senate in 2000 (after having served briefly as an appointed Senator in 1999 when his father, Sen. John Chafee, died; the senior Chafee had already announced his retirement and the junior Chafee was already running for the seat in 2000). Chafee proudly joined the group of moderate Republican Senators. Vice President-Elect Cheney met with that group in early 2001 (pp. 14ff) and that's when the real trouble began. Chafee expected Cheney (and through him, President-Elect Bush) to accommodate the moderates, perhaps by focusing on common interests of the moderate parts of the Bush-Cheney agenda. Instead, Cheney ordered them (in Chafee's view) to vote in support of a more radicalized version of GOP platform -- in other words, to yield to partisan pressure. Chafee views that event as the indicator that the partisanship of the (then recent) Clinton impeachment was to be extended rather than healed. The real break with Bush-Cheney came two years later, in the run-up to the Iraq War. Chafee believes, along with most progressive Democrats, that Bush and Cheney used 9-11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, as part of a bellicose neoconservative agenda for the Middle East. He voted against the Iraq War authorization (p. 164 and p. 203) -- the only Republican Senator to do so -- and he considers the Iraq War to be symbolic of Bush's arrogance in foreign policy as well as lying to the American people. In that context, Chafee came up for re-election in 2006. He was met by a hard-core Republican in the primary, whose story is told in detail (pp. 176-8), but whose name is omitted from this book (it was Stephen Laffey). Chafee won in a bruising primary, but went on to lose the general election to Sheldon Whitehouse (whose name Chafee does mention, pp. 179-80) in heavily-Democratic Rhode Island. Chafee blamed hyper-partisanship for his Senate loss, and switched his party affiliation to "independent." He ran for Governor of Rhode Island in 2010 as an independent and is currently the only independent governor. This book was published after the loss of his Senate seat in 2006 and before his announcement for the Governorship in 2010 -- hence it is a public declaration of his party affiliation switch. This book is a good read for political junkies. However, it reads as "bitter": a lot of bitterness about the Republican Party and what could have been; and even more bitterness about Bush and Cheney and what should have been. One can view the Republican Party's loss of Chafee as a victim of Bush-Cheney partisanship. And one can view the Republican Party's loss of the entirety of its moderate wing as the eventual outcome of that same partisanship. Perhaps that's true -- Chafee certainly believes it. -- Jesse Gordon, jesse@OnTheIssues.org, February 2013
How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President by Lincoln Chafee.
Page last edited: Feb 13, 2013 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
