Word: laffey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...just saw you on television," the elderly woman is saying from behind her screen door. "Were they attacking me, or was I talking?" Steve Laffey, a Republican running for the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island, asks. It was an ad, the woman says. About your parents. Alzheimer's, she says. Laffey's father has Alzheimer's. The ad is about the working-class modesty of the Laffey family. The candidate is going door to door on Lionel Avenue in Coventry, R.I., on a soft summer evening. He is accompanied by a mob that includes his wife and five children, plus...
...bleached landscape of American politics, this year's Republican U.S. Senate primary in Rhode Island is grand opera in Technicolor. Laffey is a conservative, supported by a virulently antitax group, the Club for Growth. The incumbent, Lincoln Chafee, is a breathtakingly courageous moderate: he opposed the Bush tax cuts and was the only Republican to vote against the war in Iraq. But there is a lot more going on here than dueling political philosophies. There is a truckload of New England sociology...
...recently, though. Laffey represents the Republican Party that Ronald Reagan built. His father was a union machinist. Laffey was the first in his family to go to college (Bowdoin, and then Harvard Business School). But the family story was far more complicated than that. His eldest brother, whom Laffey describes as a "promiscuous homosexual," died of aids. His elder brother and a younger sister suffer from schizophrenia. "These guys saved me," he says, pointing toward his childhood pals blitzing the suburban street in Coventry. "We were a tribe. Their parents took me in. I only made it out because...
...Laffey is all adrenaline, the metabolic opposite of Chafee. And despite espousing the usual grab bag of social and economic conservative positions, he seems to most enjoy populist tirades against corporate special interests (especially the oil companies: he favors a robust alternative-energy plan for national-security reasons) and also against federal spending. "If you want big checks like the $150 million Chafee brought back from the $27 billion highway bill, vote for him. Rhode Island gets the short end of the stick when it comes to earmarks. I mean, the bridge to nowhere alone was $223 million," he says...