WARWICK -- It is a muggy afternoon in the backyard of the Oakland Beach Elks Lodge. The burgers and hot dogs are sizzling on the grill, and Sheldon Whitehouse is fielding questions from voters who are angry and confused about the Iraq war, the soaring price of gasoline and the cost of health care.

These are Rhode Islanders who feel the middle-class pinch: wages and pensions that are not keeping up with the costs of everything from college tuition to prescription drugs to heating fuel.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl

U.S. Senate candidate Sheldon Whitehouse listens to a joke told by Warwick resident Bill Callanan during a community dinner held in July at the Warwick Elks club. At right is Rose Hughes, also of Warwick.

Reminding the crowd of more than 250 that Republicans control the presidency and both chambers of Congress, Whitehouse says that the only thing Rhode Island voters can do to change the calculus in Washington is to vote for him.

Whatever the problem, Whitehouse says, Republicans have had six years of control in Washington and "they have done nothing about it."

With a nod to Democratic Rep. James Langevin, Whitehouse notes that both Langevin and the state's other House member, Patrick Kennedy, are Democrats who have challenged President Bush's agenda.

"We've done everything we can do about the House of Representatives," says Whitehouse. "Now we can do something about the Senate."

Dressed in jeans, paint-flecked Sperry topsiders sans socks and a blue polo shirt, Whitehouse tells the crowd he won't leave the event until everyone who wants to ask a question or speak to him gets a chance.

While the Republican Senate candidates -- Sen. Lincoln Chafee and Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey -- carve each other up in a tough primary fight -- Whitehouse has the comparative luxury of a clear path to the Democratic nomination.

His primary opponent is the little-known Carl Sheeler, a West Greenwich business consultant who has never held elective office.

No matter which candidate wins the GOP nomination, Whitehouse says, neither can effect significant change in Washington because the first vote either would cast in the Senate would be to keep the GOP in the majority.

With his political future probably on the line, Whitehouse has so far run a textbook campaign. He has raised a lot of money -- more than $1 million in the three-month period that ended June 30 -- and for months has been meeting and greeting voters at a series of community dinners and cookouts.

Whitehouse's challenge is to connect with the everyday Rhode Islanders who decide elections in a quirky state that usually runs as deep blue as Scarborough Beach on a sunny afternoon.

At 50, he is seeking to regain a career that stalled after a disastrous 2002 campaign for governor. Whitehouse started that campaign as the consensus winner, but he never made it out of the Democratic primary, losing to former state Sen. Myrth York, of Providence.

This time, Whitehouse says, "I really want to get it right."

In 2002, "a lot of times I was talking over people's heads or past them instead of with them."

The questions at the cookout are mostly on economics, though the war in Iraq is on their minds,too. Whitehouse pledges to work to set a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, then listens as voter after potential voter gripes about national policies.

"I don't think President Bush knows what a loaf of bread costs," said Nora Maher, who said she has lived in Warwick for more than 30 years. "We in the middle class are getting squeezed. We need a shake-up."

Whitehouse speaks about the record profits of Exxon-Mobil and rattles off a series of environmental policies that he says will lessen global warming and lead to a decline in U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

He wants to raise the efficiency of U.S.-manufactured cars and employ new technologies that he believes will both create jobs and wean the econonmy off oil.

"People are seeing kitchen-table problems that affect their families very directly," says Whitehouse -- "retirement security, health care, education and college costs. They are not seeing things get any better."

The GOP hierarchy in Washington wastes too much time, Whitehouse asserts, on divisive moral issues that most Rhode Island Democrats don't get overly excited about -- banning abortion, same-sex marriage and flag burning.

"I think people are on to them [Republicans] now, all these distractions with flag burning and cut-and-run," says Whitehouse in an interview after the Warwick event. "We have seniors who lived through World War II to defeat two empires and put that generation through college in, what, 6 years, and we're saying we can't get ourselves off Saudi and Iranian oil?"

Whitehouse is in the mold of the blue-bloods who represented blue-collar Rhode Island in the Senate for much of the 20th century -- think Claiborne Pell, Theodore Francis Green and John H. Chafee.

Scion of diplomats, Whitehouse was educated at St. Paul's, Yale and the University of Virginia Law School. Raised as an Episcopalian, he now worships at Central Congregational Church, in Providence. He is the married father of two children. His wife, Sandra Whitehouse, and daughter, Molly Whitehouse, are fixtures at his campaign events.

Whitehouse has a long résumé in government and politics, having served as an assistant attorney general, as legal counsel to former Gov. Bruce Sundlun during the state credit union crisis of the early 1990s, as director of the state Department of Business Regulation, and as U.S. Attorney under President Bill Clinton. He won election as state attorney general in 1998 but narrowly lost the 2002 Democratic primary for governor.

After his 900-vote loss to York, Whitehouse sank into what he acknowledges was a funk. He joined Edwards & Angell, the white-shoe Providence law firm, but didn't care for it.

For a person who had been in politics or public service for most of his adult life, Whitehouse found little challenge in doing rich people's bidding in corporate practice.

J.B. Poersch, a former aide to Sen. Jack Reed who is now executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was startled one day when he visited Whitehouse at Edwards & Angell in a downtown office tower, only to find the former attorney general peering through binoculars at birds nesting in a nearby building.

"That was the best thing about that time -- watching those peregrine falcons," Whitehouse recalled in a recent interview. "They roost in the old Industrial National building. . . . I actually went there and got a tour."

"The people at E & A were nice to me, and it is a very, very good firm," said Whitehouse. But he said he missed the problem-solving aspects of public service and the ability to be dealing with people from all segments of society.

"Your universe constricts to the point of those who can pay you $350 an hour," said Whitehouse. "A bad day in public service is better than a good day in the private sector."

Whitehouse was ridiculed in state political circles when he made a candid -- if incautious -- comment to a Journal columnist in 2004, saying that public service was a field he was "trained and basically bred to do."

He now says that it was a "stupid" and "idiotic" comment; he says he simply meant that the public sector is his passion and that it runs in his family. Both his grandfather and father were diplomats. His father, Charles Whitehouse, a Yale University roommate of John Chafee, was a CIA officer and ambassador to Laos and Thailand.

"If you talk to somebody who is a musician and if they can't do it, life is not complete," said Whitehouse. "This aplies to anybody who cares deeply about doing something, whether it is driving in NASCAR or performing surgery or caring for people in the ministry or tending bar."

Whitehouse believes he learned from his 2002 defeat. "Being, I think, seasoned by defeat helps," says Whitehouse. "It knocked a little starch out of me and taught me how much I really love this."

smackay@projo.com / (401) 277-7321