Lincoln Davenport Chafee is a former United States Senator from Rhode Island. Running as a Republican, he lost his re-election bid in 2006 to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. In the summer of 2007, he left the Republican Party and became an independent. He is currently a visiting scholar at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.
A Rhode Island native educated at Phillips Academy and Brown University, Chafee worked as a professional blacksmith for seven years before entering state politics in 1985. He was a delegate to the Rhode Island State Constitutional Convention, a member of the Warwick, Rhode Island city council, and later the mayor of Warwick. Chafee was appointed to the United States Senate in 1999 upon the death of his father, Senator John Chafee, and in 2000 was elected to a full six-year term.
A political iconoclast, Chafee was the only Republican senator to have expressed support for same-sex marriage; the only Republican to vote in favor of reinstating the top federal tax rate on upper-income payers; the only Republican in the Senate to have voted against authorization of the use of force in Iraq; the only Republican to vote for the Levin-Reed amendment calling for a nonbinding timetable for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq; and the only Republican to vote against Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Chafee favored increased federal funding for health care, supported affirmative action and gun control, supported women’s reproductive rights, and endorsed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Sometimes referred to by conservatives as a RINO (Republican in Name Only), Chafee turns the tables on the right and asks why it has enabled Bush Jr. to pull the GOP and the nation away from traditional principles of fiscal conservatism, respect for our environment, and aversion to foreign entanglements.
Chafee's book, AGAINST THE TIDE: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President, is an unabashedly frank, memoir recounting his political journey from small-town mayor to a voice crying from the congressional wilderness. It offers a forward-looking assessment of what comes next for the Republican and Democratic parties, and he also addresses the potential rise of a third party within the void created by bipartisan extremism. Most important, Chafee sounds a wake-up call to his Party, and to all Americans, by challenging our government to strive, as Abraham Lincoln once articulated, “to elevate the condition of men.”
Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) served in the United States Senate at a time when his Republican Party drifted so far right it no longer stood for its mainstream principles. In the face of his party's wrongheaded direction under George W. Bush, Lincoln Chafee became, even more fiercely, what he had always been...his own leader. Chafee’s ideological positions make his voting record among the most liberal of the Republicans in the Senate. And it's no surprise that he has an eye-opening story to tell about his 7-year journey in national politics, from small-town mayor to a unique national voice.
