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.