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Lincoln Chafee: 'I Didn't Vote for Bush'
Democratic Senate candidate Sheldon Whitehouse repeatedly used the president and the Republican Party to hammer Sen. Lincoln Chafee in their second TV debate, while the incumbent accused the former prosecutor of going easy on public corruption.
Chafee, one of the GOP's most liberal senators, also cited his own record of disagreement with his party, including his vote against authorizing war in Iraq and his dislike of President Bush.
"I didn't vote for him. Rhode Island didn't vote for him," Chafee said Thursday. "This is a race between Lincoln Chafee and Sheldon Whitehouse."
The campaign is among the nation's most closely watched as Democrats seek to win a majority in the Senate. The candidates met in an hourlong debate taped at WLNE-TV that is scheduled to air Sunday.
Story Continues Below Whitehouse stuck to his strategy of attacking Chafee through his party. At one point, when asked to say - without using the words "Republicans" and "George Bush" - why he should replace the senator, he referred to "you know who" and "you know which party."
Chafee said Rhode Island benefits from having members of both parties represent them in the Senate.
Chafee attacked Whitehouse's record as U.S. attorney from 1994 to 1998 and state attorney general from 1998 to 2002, saying he failed to secure a single conviction for public corruption in those eight years. At a news conference a day earlier, Chafee displayed a photo of a smiling Whitehouse with former Providence Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci, now in prison for corruption.
Whitehouse said Chafee's focus on corruption is "from the Karl Rove playbook," referring to the Republican political strategist.
"This is where they go in the final days of the campaign," he said.
A poll released Thursday by Rhode Island College found that Whitehouse might be opening up a slight lead in what has been a tight race.
Fifty-one percent of respondents said they would vote for Whitehouse or are leaning toward voting for him, while 43 percent said the same of Chafee. The poll's error margin is plus or minus 5 percentage points.
The telephone poll was conducted between Oct. 23 and 25 and surveyed 408 randomly selected likely voters from around the state.
© 2006 Associated Press.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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