Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Sheldon Whitehouse, above, greets a supporter during a campaign stop Tuesday at City View Manor, in East Providence.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

EAST PROVIDENCE — They grew up in wood-frame triple-deckers and worked in Rhode Island’s red-brick factories. They joined the military and fought the 20th-century scourge of fascism. They were married under vaulted church ceilings and moved to suburban split-levels, raised children and scraped to send them to college.

Now in life’s twilight, many of them get together each afternoon for lunch at senior citizen centers; others live in high-rise apartments for the elderly.

At hundreds of these gatherings across the state, this is the season of grandchild-crayoned Halloween goblins, pastry-bearing political candidates — and dollops of campaign rhetoric.

Shortly before noon Tuesday at City View Manor, the aroma of baking fish filled the big dining room.

Playing headwaiter was Democratic U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, who announced that lunch would be lemon-pepper haddock. Then Reed fervently urged the elderly voters to support fellow Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse for U.S. Senate.

This banter comes easily to Reed; he is the Roman Catholic working-class son of Cranston, whose mother, he reminds the East Providence crowd, punched a cash register at the Rose Furniture store nearby.

Whitehouse, son and grandson of moneyed Protestant Yankee diplomats, molded by fancy prep schools and summers in Newport, has had to work diligently over the years to learn the mores of meet-and-greet retail politics in a state where blue-collar attitudes and ethnic rivalries once dominated elections.

A tall, dapper man, Whitehouse, who is married with two children, has overcome an innate shyness and reserve to relish the “howareyah” greetings and the outstretched hand. He often uses a dash of self-deprecating humor to break the ice.

“I was walking in Oakland Beach a while back and I ran into this old fellow sitting on his porch,” Whitehouse told the elderly at City View, referring to the Warwick neighborhood.

“The guy yells, ‘Hey, Sonny, come over here.’ So I went, and he looks me over and he says, ‘You look better on TV,’ ” Whitehouse jokes to a ripple of gentle laughter.

At 51, Whitehouse is running furiously against incumbent Republican Lincoln Chafee, son of the late Sen. John H. Chafee and another member of a wealthy Protestant Yankee clan.

In the cozy neighborhood we call Rhode Island, it should not come as any surprise that Whitehouse’s father, Charles Whitehouse, a former U.S. ambassador to Laos and Cambodia, was the Yale college roommate of Chafee’s father. Or that Chafee’s brother, Zechariah Chafee, worked as a federal prosecutor under Whitehouse when he was U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island. Or that Sheldon Whitehouse’s and Lincoln Chafee’s sons both attend private Wheeler School in Providence.

The core of Whitehouse’s campaign is that oldest of slogans — It’s time for a change. Time, Whitehouse says, to change parties and direction in Washington.

President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress have set the nation out on a dangerous and unproductive path, Whitehouse says. The Bush administration got the United States into war in Iraq under false premises and so mismanaged the diplomatic and military missions there that American troops are now mired in a conflict with no solution or end in sight.

While middle-class citizens feel the pinch of higher health care costs and college tuitions, Mr. Bush and the GOP Congress cut taxes for the rich.

While 46 million Americans lack health insurance, the Republicans approve prescription drug coverage for the elderly that favors huge pharmaceutical companies rather than consumers. The federal deficit grows while Mr. Bush plans to privatize Social Security and cut benefits to the elderly.

Until recently, when Chafee began negative attacks on him, Whitehouse called Chafee a “gentleman” and a “good family man.” Now he says, “Linc is not a bad guy and I don’t intend to say he is a bad guy.”

The problem with Chafee, Whitehouse says, is substance, not personality. Nothing in Washington changes if Chafee is reelected and Republicans retain control of the Senate and House, Whitehouse says.

From Whitehouse’s vantage point, Chafee’s self-styled independence from the national Republican Party is mostly posturing. While Chafee was the only GOP senator to vote against the Iraq war, he didn’t persuade any other Republicans to follow.

Whitehouse and Democrats say neither the president nor the Republican leadership listens to Chafee; GOP Senate leaders wait until they have the votes lined up for whatever they want to do and then play a version of fishing’s “catch and release.” Chafee and other moderate Republicans are then released to vote their home state’s views.

For example, Whitehouse says, Chafee announced he would vote against Samuel Alito for the U.S. Supreme Court only after Republicans had the votes lined up to confirm him.

The consensus Washington view of Chafee, Whitehouse notes, is that Chafee will never be an important national GOP leader because he lacks gravitas and is a liberal from New England, a region loathed by the Southern-dominated, conservative Republican leadership.

While Chafee claims to be a strong environmentalist in the mode of his late father, Whitehouse says that Chafee’s first vote when he gets back to the Senate will be to keep the GOP in charge of the Senate. That means the chairman of the committee that handles environmental legislation will remain Sen. Jim Inhofe, of Oklahoma, a conservative who does not believe global warming exists.

“Senator Chafee’s television ads just say that he is in the middle and that I am a bad guy,” says Whitehouse. “He has no agenda — he hasn’t said what he intends to accomplish if he goes back there.

“I think he pays a lot of attention to positioning himself, without having a strong agenda of his own,” says Whitehouse. “I’ve looked long and hard and I can’t see when his votes against the Bush administration have made any practical difference.”

By contrast, Whitehouse has outlined a series of goals — most of them from the national Democratic playbook — that he will pursue if elected: Bringing the troops home from Iraq in a reasonable time frame. Working to lower the cost of health insurance and increase accessibility for those who can’t afford it. Protection of the environment while weaning the nation off dependence on foreign oil. Maintaining Social Security benefits and even increasing Social Security taxes on the wealthy if needed. Protecting the right to legal abortion. Raising the minimum wage and cutting taxes for the middle-class rather than the super-rich.

Whitehouse is trying to regain a political career that stalled in 2002 when he was state attorney general and made an unsuccessful run at the governorship, losing the Democratic primary to former Providence state Sen. Myrth York by a slim 900 votes.

After the loss, which he took hard, Whitehouse went into private law practice, but missed the swirl of politics and “the ability to make a difference in the lives of average people” afforded by the public sector.

Whitehouse’s real education in Rhode Island politics and government began on New Year’s Eve in 1990 with all the subtlety of the icy rain that was falling outside the State House.

When Democrat Bruce Sundlun, a Whitehouse family friend, won election as governor in 1990, he appointed Whitehouse his State House legal counsel. At 5 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, the day before Sundlun’s inauguration, outgoing Gov. Edward D. DiPrete, who would later serve jail time for a job-related corruption conviction, finally gave the new administration access to information about a disastrous problem brewing in Rhode Island’s state-chartered banking institutions.

Forty-five banks and credit unions were teetering — some on the verge of collapse — after their state-sanctioned insurer left the accounts of 350,000 depositors in jeopardy.

“I told Sheldon urgently to see what could be done, what legal powers the state had,” Sundlun recalled in a recent interview. “Between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. that night, he outlined the legal framework and found a Depression-era law that gave the governor the power to close a financial institution that was uninsured and potentially insolvent.”

The next day, Sundlun’s first in office — Jan. 1, 1991 — was surreal.

As the new governor took the oath of office, he knew his first act would be to shutter the credit unions, denying the depositors access to the money.

Investigations showed that insider dealing by legislators, credit union executives and DiPrete administration regulators had caused the collapse.

Whitehouse quickly developed a sense of outraged idealism — and naiveté, he now acknowledges. “I remember when the word came down from Joe D.’s office (a reference to then-House Speaker Joseph DeAngelis) that the governor’s staff should meet with them. I said we shouldn’t do it because I figured they were the problem.

“Obviously that advice wasn’t followed; I was naive,” Whitehouse said.

In the early 1990s, Whitehouse decided that one of the biggest problems with Rhode Island’s government structure was that the state’s ancient Constitution gave the General Assembly too much power.

According to H. Philip West, executive director of Common Cause of Rhode Island, Whitehouse deserves as much credit as anyone for pushing the separation of powers constitutional amendment that voters approved in 2004 to curb legislative powers and remove lawmakers from state boards and commissions.

Chafee now claims that as attorney general and U.S. Attorney, Whitehouse refrained from prosecuting people — notably Roger Williams hospital executive Robert Urciuoli — with ties to leading state Democrats.

But West counters that Whitehouse’s aggressive support of separation of powers was a courageous stick in the eye to Democratic Assembly leaders that probably cost him the Democratic endorsement when he ran for governor.

Back at City View Manor, Whitehouse receives a warm reception. Josephine Pimental, 89, a retired jewelry worker, says she will support Whitehouse because she is upset with the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.

“We should never have gone there,” says Pimental. “That was a big mistake and now they should come home.”

Others in the crowd cheer Whitehouse’s support for a better prescription plan for the elderly and his pledge to preserve Social Security benefits. But support isn’t unanimous in a race polls show as close.

Charles Tuttle, 79, a retired car salesman, says, “I’m staying with Chafee. I knew his father and I think he does a decent job.”

These older people are mined like gold by candidates; compared with younger folks, raised on e-mails and iPods, voters who came of age dancing to Glenn Miller tunes are more likely to cast ballots on Nov. 7.

Every election, Reed tells them, is important, but this year is more crucial than most. “I can’t think of a time when the future is so dependent on making wise choices in Washington.”

“They [Republicans and Mr. Bush] are undercutting the fabric of this country. We have to send people to Washington who are going to do better,” says Reed. “If you want to change the agenda in Washington, you have to change the Congress. Support Sheldon; he is in this for the right reasons.”