The Republican senator says he could not vote for President Bush because he disagrees with him on several issues.

01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, November 3, 2004

BY TRACY BRETON
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Sen. Lincoln Chafee made good on his pledge yesterday: As a form of "symbolic protest," he cast a write-in ballot for former President George H.W. Bush instead of voting for his son, President George W. Bush. He also did not rule out the prospect of changing parties if the incumbent president is reelected.

In an afternoon interview in his Providence office, the maverick Republican senator said that his views were more in line with those of his colleague in the Senate, Democrat John F. Kerry, with whom he sits on the Foreign Relations Committee. But he said he couldn't bring himself to vote for a Democratic candidate as an elected Republican senator.

"I think it would have been important to get out of the [Republican] party if I'm going to vote for Kerry," said Chafee.

Asked if he planned to change parties and become a Democrat if Mr. Bush were reelected, Chafee said, "No, I don't at this minute," but then added, "I'm not ruling it out."

"I'll have to look and see what happens tonight, the makeup of everything" locally and nationally, said the senator, who in 1999 assumed the seat of his late father, John H. Chafee, the Republican icon.

If he were to change parties, Chafee said, "it would be with great sadness."

During the interview, Chafee called for reforms in the electoral system. He advocated abolishing the Electoral College and replacing it with a system where presidents are elected by popular vote.

Asked if he felt that he was wasting his vote by casting a write-in ballot for someone who is a former president, Chafee conceded that he had "hesitated for a moment" before writing in the elder Bush's name. But he said he felt that it would have been "impossible" to vote for the current president given their opposite views on important issues such as abortion, gay marriage, the deficit, tax cuts, the environment and the war in Iraq, which Chafee has opposed from the start. "The evidence was never there" that there were weapons of mass destruction "and now we are in a very, very costly quagmire," said Chafee.

Chafee also noted that under the current electoral system, "the cold reality is" that in heavily Democratic Rhode Island, a state that "was number one for Al Gore in 2000 . . . my vote will not make a difference. . . . It's a winner-take-all state."

Chafee said he much preferred the elder Bush to his son because the 41st president took steps to make sure the deficit didn't grow, was more of an environmentalist who addressed issues such as acid rain, and "who did the right thing by invading Kuwait and starting the Gulf War. I don't think he would have gone into Baghdad."

He said that when the current president was governor of Texas and running for president, he "talked about compassionate conservatism and being a uniter, not a divider, [but] it just seems as though since he's been in office, it's been an agenda of energizing the far-right-wing base, which is divisive. This country is very, very polarized and a lot of it revolves around social issues," said Chafee.

"Nobody likes abortion, but it's the law of the land," he said. "I think everybody's concerned about Roe versus Wade under a second Bush term."