Meghan Palmieri works the prompter during the Channel 6 debate between Sen. Lincoln Chafee and Sheldon Whitehouse.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

PROVIDENCE – While commending his opponent, U.S. Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee, for casting the lone Republican vote against the war in Iraq, Democratic challenger Sheldon Whitehouse yesterday told Chafee what he would have considered a real “gutsy vote.”

“The principle gutsy vote for Senator Chafee would have been, as [Vermont Sen. James Jeffords did], to leave the Republican Party when it left all of us. He didn’t do that.”

In his own turn, Chafee chided Whitehouse for bringing a parade of high-profile Democratic senators who voted for the war in Iraq — including Charles Schumer, Christopher Dodd, Mary Landrieu and today’s Whitehouse headliner, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton — to Rhode Island to campaign for him, while he repeatedly calls the war a “tragic mistake.”

“As far as guts,” said Chafee, “they should be coming here and saying Linc Chafee was right on the war. I was wrong. We should keep people like Linc Chafee in the Senate because he was right on the key issue of our time … 29 Democrats voted for the war. The majority leader was a Democrat, Tom Daschle. I was the only Republican to vote against it.”

And so it went as the two combatants wrangled during the taping of a Channel 6 (WLNE) TV debate that will air Sunday (10 a.m. and 11:35 p.m.) over such national issues as Social Security reform and the war, and more parochial issues, such as Whitehouse’s handling — as the state’s attorney general from 1998 to 2002 — of the first signs of wrongdoing by Robert Urciuoli, the recently convicted former president of Roger Williams Medical Center.

“That begs the question,” said Chafee again during yesterday’s face-off: “What other crimes were coming to the top law enforecment official in the state….that he was opening the bottom drawer and sticking them in?”

After two weeks of pummeling by Chafee over the Roger Williams case, Whitehouse yesterday produced a copy of a letter that, he suggested, takes him off the hook for not pursuing allegations of expense-account fraud by Urciuoli and the camouflaged hiring of then-state Sen. John A. Celona to do the hospital’s bidding at the State House.

First, Whitehouse fumed: “This is the Karl Rove playbook. This is where they go in the final days of a campaign.” Then came a reminder from Whitehouse of the settlement that he approved as attorney general, requiring Urciuoli to repay the hospital for the $85,000 cost of its investigation into his alleged improprieties. “Senator Chafee has faulted me for not prosecuting the president of Roger Williams Hospital as a criminal…and instead only — ONLY — getting $85,000 paid by him back for a $15,000 expense account violation.

“What he didn’t tell you is that the executive committee of that hospital, which insisted that I not prosecute, which said it would not press charges, which did everything it could to stop the criminal prosecution — and I can tell you as a prosecutor when you have a victim that won’t say there is a crime that disables a prosecution.”

And “right in the middle,” said Whitehouse, was Chafee’s nominee in February 2003 for U.S. Attorney, Bradford Gorham, a former head of the state Republican Party.

“If this was such an awful thing, why was Brad Gorham qualified to be Lincoln Chafee’s United States Attorney when he was the guy stopping me. ... It just doesn’t make sense,” Whitehouse said.

But Gorham yesterday said Whitehouse had mischaracterized the letter, addressed to deputy Attorney General Gerald Coyne, that he approved.

He produced an unsigned copy, from his law office files, of a letter that said it would “not be in the best interest of the hospital” for the attorney general to pursue a criminal prosecution while the hospital was engaged in potential merger talks, “but the decision on prosecution is entirely the attorney general’s.” It was dated June 14, 1999.

Gorham said he may have signed another draft, but was insistent on language to this effect. “Everyone else on the board wanted language that said: don’t prosecute…I rejected that.” He also recalled F. Dennis Saylor, the former federal prosecutor who reviewed the Urciuoli allegations for the hospital’s board, “being asked a question at a board meeting whether he considered this fraud. He gave an unequivocal answer that it was.”

The Whitehouse campaign produced a somewhat different version of the letter, dated June 21, 1999. Signed by all six members of the hospital’s executive committee, including Gorham, it said: “The committee recognizes that while Mr. Urciuoli exhibited poor judgment … his conduct did not warrant referral by the board for consideration as a criminal offense. While the committee recognizes that the Department of Attorney General has a distinctly different decision-making process, we respectfully believe that a criminal prosecution of this matter is not in the best interests of the hospital.”

Late last night, the Whitehouse campaign cried foul. With signatures, spokeswoman Alex Swartsel said the version the Whitehouse campaign produced is clearly the real thing.

Regardless, Chafee campaign manager Ian Lang said: “Here is the issue as far as I understand it. The buck stops with the attorney general and the attorney general’s decision whether to prosecute or not, so I think there are still questions about Mr. Whitehouse’s decision not to prosecute.” (He also said Chafee knew nothing about the Urciuoli imbroglio — or Gorham’s role in deciding what to do about it — when he nominated him for U.S. Attorney. Gorham withdrew, citing health problems. )

In one of the lighter moments, Channel 6 reporter Jim Hummel asked Whitehouse to state why he would make a better senator without once mentionning President Bush or the Republican Party.

“That’s asking a lot with the stakes as high as they are and you know who and you know which party causing the problems that they are,” said Whitehouse.

Chafee’s response: “Well, I give Mr. Whitehouse credit. He made it through without saying the words: President Bush. Maybe for the rest of this debate we could be so lucky because this is a race between Sheldon Whitehouse and Lincoln Chafee.”

Asked what might happen if he went to Washington as a rookie Democratic senator and Republicans retained control, Whitehouse said: “Well, first of all, I can’t give up on the chance that we have to take back the Senate. It’s the most important issue in the country right now….[and] it will never happen if we don’t win Rhode Island.” But what if he were to end up in the minority party? “Then we’ll win in ’08.”

Chafee accused Whitehouse of misrepresenting his stance on Social Security reform and falsely accusing him of trying to “cut benefits” in a deliberate attempt to scare seniors.

“We’ll never solve Social Security if politicians are going to continually trot it out as a scare tactic for the seniors.”

Whitehouse’s retort: “Actually Senator, seniors have a lot to be scared about from a Bush White House and a rollover Republican that won’t stand up to him on the issue of Social Security. The president has made it clear just recently that he’s going to take another run at Social Security and try to push it into the stock market.

“ I think that’s a terrible idea and I know you agree with me,” Whitehouse said, “but you will vote for the Republican Senate leadership that will allow that to happen.”

The debate was cosponsored by the Rhode Island chapter of the AARP.