Primary Mistake by Steve Laffey

Author:Steve Laffey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

But that’s not what this race was about. It wasn’t about sliming the other guy or deciding who was more outrageous when we were twenty years old. This race, at least from my end, was about who had a better track record of success and who had a more compelling vision for the future.

Throughout the campaign, Chafee claimed that his commercials were not negative ads but contrast ads that pointed out the differences between his record and my own. I don’t have a problem with contrast ads. In an early ad, I pointed out that Senator Chafee and the Democratic candidate, Sheldon Whitehouse, were really two peas in a pod—which would be later confirmed in the general election when a panelist in Chafee’s first televised debate with Whitehouse asked Linc what distinguished him from the Democrats, and Chafee stuttered and stammered about the tradition of moderate northeastern Republicans. The Club for Growth also ran ads attacking Senator Chafee for opposing tax cuts and supporting wasteful pork-barrel projects. These claims were legitimate, completely truthful, and publicly confirmed by Chafee himself.

What I object to—and what we should all object to—are outright lies and character assassination. Even Senator Chafee himself admitted three days before the primary that his ads were unfair, “saying he dislike[d] one that criticizes Laffey for raising taxes when Cranston was near bankruptcy,” according to the Associated Press. “Most voters think Laffey had to do it,” Chafee said.

The NRSC, too, came to appreciate the depth of its betrayal. As I was writing this chapter, I went to the NRSC’s Web site to review the negative ads it had aired against me. I found Chafee’s “I’m so wonderful” ads and the single commercial the NRSC ran against Sheldon Whitehouse, but the heaps of money wasted on attacking my character were nowhere to be seen. In contrast, a quick search of any other state with a competitive race—Tennessee, Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and New Jersey—provided a smorgasbord of negative NRSC ads run against Democrats in each of those states. I found out that Harold Ford partied with Playboy playmates in lingerie and Jon Tester voted against protecting our kids, but where were all the inventive lies the NRSC told about me? Liddy Dole may have persuaded herself of the Machiavellian virtue of her betrayal, but clearly someone at the NRSC realized that publicizing its knife-in-the-back routine was not the smartest idea.

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