I am glad he's gone. I just wish we could have kept the Senate without him.
It's interesting, if all the races had turned out the same but Chafee won, the GOP would have 50 seats and could organize with Cheney's tie-breaking vote. Except you know that Chafee would have waited until spring just like Jeffords, then he'd say he couldn't tolerate the extremism of the Republican Party, and he'd switch to the Democrats.
That would have led to a bunch of newspaper articles and TV show appearances focusing on the evils of the Republican Party. Which is exactly what happened in the Jeffords case.
So it's just as well that the Republicans won 49 seats rather than 50 with Chafee being among the 50. It would still be 49 seats by some point next year.