Posted on 08/07/2006 1:22:25 PM PDT by presidio9
It is hard to imagine two politicians less similar than Steve Laffey and the man whose job he’s trying to take, Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Laffey and Chafee both carry the Republican label. The similarity ends there.
Laffey, the mayor of Cranston, R.I., and the challenger in the Sept. 12 Republican primary, is a hyperkinetic, fast-talking son of the working class.
“My father was a tool maker, he never went to college. I’m the only Laffey in the history of Laffeys who ever went to college,” he said. He graduated from Bowdoin College and Harvard Business School, before launching a career which led to serving as president of the Morgan Keegan investment firm in Memphis.
“I grew up with no money. I watched my dad lose his job in the 1970s when foreign imports were taking jobs away,” Laffey said.
Growing up in Cranston, when the family would run short of money, his mother, a nurse who worked the late shift, would feed the kids on mayonnaise and ketchup sandwiches on day-old white bread.
Laffey is a Reagan-loving populist, but also idolizes Bobby Kennedy for his combativeness –- he cites the moment he saw film footage of Kennedy interrogating Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa before a Senate investigating committee.
Last Saturday Laffey went out for a hot day of sprinting from one house to another along Flint Corn Road and Dorothy Avenue in suburban Portsmouth, R.I.
Laffey’s fired-up advance team included pals such as Eddie Curran, his former junior high school classmate. “He’s knocked on 30,000 doors,” Laffey said.
Also fanning out to drum up support for Laffey were his wife Kelly and four of his five children.
Laffey tends towards the fleshy and after 20 minutes of campaigning, his shirt was drenched in sweat.
If perspiration were
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
"Chafee is endorsed by by the Log Cabin Republicans"
Is he comfortable with them behind him?
Well said Dan
Ha!
"When should we expect MSNBC to have an article, The Last of the Conservative Democrats?"
How about "The Last of the Conservative Republicans"?
Many Log Cabin Republicans espouse a small-government conservative view. They are arguably more conservative than those who advocate government intervention into people's personal lives. The same could not be said for those other groups if they existed.
Oh L-rd. LOL
No, and I think Chafee is the best candidate we'll get in Rhode Island, not to mention that I personally like having a more moderate voice on social issues within the party. But as I would with anyone else, I'll always voice my disagreements.
I wasn't too good for myself, either.
So I took myself out of my daily list of responsibilities and let G-d take over.
Things are going so much better now.
That's funny, I don't recall the LCR ever supporting a Democratic candidate. They've withheld endorsements of Republican candidates, but never endorsed a Dem. How is that supporting the Democrats exactly?
I'm aware of this...but the definition of "conservative" can differ depending who you talk to. To me, libertarian actually means the same thing as conservative - I use that term to distinguish myself from neo-conservatives and social conservatives. To me, conservatism is about small government.
These guys are socialists, not liberals. The word 'liberal' has been misused and maligned for too long.
Liberalism stands for open markets, liberal democracy abroad, and individual autonomy at home. It does not stand for being anti-war, a USSR-style government command economy, or social engineering. For example, consider the subject of war. John Stuart Mill, a liberal, once wrote that
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
I should have put some sort of sarcasm smilie on my last post.
As for Chaffee, I could care less if he lost.
Rhode Island has few republicans..
Ah the myth of the "fiscal conservative". We've heard it before. Guess what? They don't exist. Like Olympia Snow and Lincoln Chafee and Arnold Schwarzenegger these so called Libertarian-leaning "fiscal conservatives" always, without exception in my experience, wind up showing their colors as nothing more than plain old liberals.
I know Log Cabin Republicans personally. I've seen them campaign against fiscal conservatives like John Doolittle and former California Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle, in favor of their liberal Democrat opponents. I worked with one who placed a Clinton bumper sticker on his car and in his office window in 1992.
They are liberals. Period.
You should read about the Illinois Governor race and my post about it.
If you ask the Log Cabin boys, they'd say he was. If you asked Chafee himself, he'd claim to be one too.
My point was that there is no halfway to being conservative. There are people who claim to be there, but in the end when it comes to a tug of war on their pet issue (like public funding of abortions or AIDS reasearch) they ultimately take the liberal side.
I've been in this business too long and seen it too many times for anyone to convince me otherwise.
Well, Minnesota "Libertarian", you think the Libertarian Party would welcome "Libertarians for Gun Control" into their "coalition"? How about "Big Government Libertarian Alliance", or maybe "Libertarians for the Preservation of the Drug War"?
Just because you call yourself something doesn't make you part of their idealogy.
At the very least, any group with "Republican" in its title is expected to endorse like minded Republicans in the primary and THEN support the party's nominee in November.
The Log Cabin "Republicans" do NOT support fellow Republicans. Here in Illinois, they voted for Kerry over Bush, Obama over Keyes, and black panther Bobby Rush over Republican Ray Wardingley. That's supporting Dims at the Presidential, Senatorial, and Congressional level. If they like RATs so much, they should change their name to Log Cabin Democrats.
The Log Cabin "Republicans" is a Democrat front group and has repeatedly demonstrated that they will only support "Republicans" who vote like Democrats. Deal with it.
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