WASHINGTON -- You have 9 minutes and 32 seconds before the vote, the president's chief of staff said in Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee's ear. Chafee agonized at his desk, near a set of chromed horseshoes -- a memento of a former life more arduous than this one, but not nearly as complicated.
Andrew H. Card Jr. was tuned to C-SPAN, too, watching the clock tick on the climactic Senate vote -- as were squadrons of lobbyists and bureaucrats from K Street to Capitol Hill. Card was on the phone because President Bush needed Chafee's help to save his landmark Medicare drug bill from a final attack by the Democrats.
This would be perhaps the thorniest and most consequential vote in the young career of the Senate's most liberal Republican. Despite a campaign pledge to try to deliver cheaper drugs to Rhode Island's elderly, Chafee was on record as opposing the historic expansion of Medicare, chiefly on grounds of its $400-billion cost.
But Chafee also saw the bill -- imperfect and disappointing as it might be to many old people -- as possibly the last chance for years to put that kind of Medicare money on the table.
Now there was the offer of a deal for Chafee's vote. The calls had come in from new Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, of Tennessee, and his deputies. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson stood in the wings, and here was Card, the president's man, seeking help from Chafee, who so rarely helped his party on the big issues: war in Iraq, tax cuts, Mr. Bush's cherished energy bill.
Halting and self-effacing as Chafee, 50, still seemed after four years in the Senate, he had learned this much about the demands of Party: "There's only so often you can stick a sharp stick in the side of the beast."
Chafee listened patiently but gave Card no commitment. "I'm still struggling," he said.
EVEN BEFORE he joined the club upon the death of his father, Sen. John H. Chafee, in the fall of 1999, Lincoln Chafee had found Senate mentors. His father had introduced him to Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, earlier that year.
McConnell, 61, took an instant liking to the younger Chafee, who told of his time at The Red Mile, a harness-racing track in Lexington where he had landed his first blacksmith's job in 1975, not long after graduating from Brown University.
They qualified as strange bedfellows: McConnell, the high-powered veteran famed as an infighter for tobacco farmers and against campaign-finance reformers; and Chafee, the earnest, late-vocation politician.
As chief of the Senate GOP campaign office, McConnell said, "I was interested in electing Republican senators." After seven years on the racing circuit and a time of casting about in Rhode Island, Chafee found local politics on the Warwick City Council, and in 1993, he began his seven years as mayor.
The year after his Senate appointment, he was elected in his own right, with the help of a McConnell brainchild, a TV ad praising his stands against the Grand Old Party.
"He is smart," Chafee said of McConnell. "And I'm always impressed at how he treats me. He's not happy with some of my votes, but he never gets angry."
For that matter, according to Chafee, leading Republicans have been more tolerant of his liberal votes than their hardball reputation would suggest.
Not that he hasn't tested their patience.
The day of President-elect George W. Bush's acceptance speech, on Dec. 13, 2001, Chafee raised eyebrows around Washington by criticizing Vice President-elect Richard B. Cheney's remarks at a luncheon with the five Senate moderates from the Northeast. "My eyes widened," Chafee said afterward, as Cheney said Mr. Bush would press ahead with his conservative campaign platform.
More quietly, Chafee entertained offers to switch parties and help the Democrats seize control of an evenly split Senate. While Chafee pondered, Vermont Sen. James M. Jeffords made the jump, handing the Democrats a majority that lasted until the 2002 elections.
Chafee has said it is "inconceivable" that he would leave the GOP. "I've always supported my party's nominee for every city council, every state representative, every state senator," he said recently.
Party-switching at this point would cost Chafee. Republicans would still control the Senate, and he would lose his subcommittee chairmanship on the Environment and Public Works Committee -- an assignment rich in what his father, with much affection and no compunction, used to hail as "local pork."
FOR ALL the signs of a strengthening grasp of his job, Chafee retains an air of tentativeness. Seventeen years into his political career, he is capable of utterances that can land -- depending upon who is listening -- like a breath of fresh air or a slap in the face.
Chafee's deepest rift with Mr. Bush opened in the fall of 2002, when he became the only Republican to vote against the Senate resolution authorizing the president to use force in Iraq. His opposition grew more visceral after the U.S. invasion in March.
Chafee nonetheless declared his intention to support the president for reelection, during a Rhode Island television appearance in June. As he has since explained himself, "They don't come any more loyal than I am."
So Chafee's reaction was puzzling when he got a late-summer offer from the White House to join Governor Carcieri as cochairman of the Bush-Cheney reelection committee in Rhode Island. It was a light-duty assignment, tailor-made to let Chafee -- so often allied with Mr. Bush's enemies -- do his president a favor without compromising his conscience or his constituents on policy.
Carcieri snapped up the offer, sealing it during a personal call from Mr. Bush. Chafee passed it up. "Too early" in the campaign, he reasoned.
When the episode came to light, Chafee was asked whether he would vote for Mr. Bush. "I'm a good Republican," he answered. "That's as far as I'll go."
Why make public such a change of heart? "Well, the war," he answered, forehead creased, hands folded on a polished table in his office. Democratic constituents who agree with his opposition to the war "get angry" and ask how he can support the president.
Chafee did not explain why he had reaffirmed his support for Mr. Bush in June, or what had made him rethink it in the fall. But he did repeat, "I'm a party loyalist."
SWITCHBACKS and non sequiturs of this kind are a feature of conversations with Chafee, and of his journey through the thicket of national politics. When the talk turns to issues he finds difficult, he is given to painful pauses in mid-thought, sentence fragments, sudden bursts of awkward laughter.
But on his adventures as the mayor of Democratic Warwick or the blacksmith on the tracks of Western Canada, Chafee opens like a blossom -- spreading his arms to gesture, mimicking characters from long-ago dialogues, speaking rapid-fire.
Chafee and his friends are anxious to portray his demeanor as thoughtful, patient, honest to a fault.
"The confusing part of it is that the senator is not the kind of person who is going to give you a sound byte or a quip or have a strong, sort of pat answer on things," explained his press secretary, Steve Hourahan. Chafee "does not fit the mold of any typical politician," he said.
Chafee said his toil on the tracks taught him the physical skills, the patience, and the psychology with which he had shod 3,000 horses. "You never want to wrestle him," he said of the horse. The horse is strong and smart and weighs 1,200 pounds, so if you do, "you're going to lose."
He is not clear on how the farrier's craft applies to major-league politics -- with its national stage, its crush of perplexing issues, and its large and shifting cast of allies and competitors.
But he plainly likes the sense of "not being completely predictable," of being easily underestimated, often misunderstood.
In politics, however, surprise and misunderstanding are not always welcome.
Chafee's friend McConnell is voluble in his praise of the Rhode Islander's independent streak. But asked recently about Chafee's public second thoughts on Mr. Bush, McConnell grew terse, suggesting that Republican tolerance of Chafee's heresies is not unlimited.
"I'd be very surprised if Linc opposed the president publicly," McConnell said. "I'm confident that Senator Chafee will support the party."
McCONNELL WAS happier to discuss Chafee's discoveries during a trip they shared to Iraq in October. Chafee did not swerve from his opposition to Mr. Bush's decision to invade, but he did come home with his most upbeat assessment, by far, of the U.S. enterprise in Iraq.
"I must say I was surprised," he said, by the progress in rebuilding Iraq's public works and -- in certain areas -- beginning the process of self-government. Chafee said his encounters with ordinary Iraqis had assured him that the sense of liberation from Saddam Hussein is widespread and real.
"The easy thing," McConnell said "would have been to make up his mind before he went, in order to justify" his vote against the war.
A mark of his bond with McConnell, Chafee said later, was that the senior Republican senator never tried to steer his views on the visit to Iraq.
Days after his return from Iraq, Chafee voted for Mr. Bush's $87-billion package for the fighting and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
ANOTHER NICE thing about McConnell: From his seat on the Appropriations Committee, he finds bacon for his friends to bring home. He called Chafee on Nov. 17 to say he had $5 million in a billfor the demolition of the abandoned Jamestown Bridge.
The news was a respite from Chafee's worrying over the biggest domestic issue of the year, the Medicare bill. Chafee had supported the Senate version of the bill in June, as a flawed but worthy downpayment on his promise to seek drug benefits for the elderly.
He feared that a compromise would emerge from Senate-House negotiations with too strong a dose of the House version's competition between traditional Medicare and the untested private insurance plans. But he concluded that the conservative public-private experiment was "pretty well neutralized" and "watered down" in the compromise unveiled the week before Thanksgiving.
There was some chance that Providence might be one of a handful of areas where a limited version of the competition might be tested in the year 2010. Chafee's staff painted this prospect in dire tones.
Chafee concentrated more on what he called "the collision" between his campaign pledge and his devotion to budget conservatism. He had reservations about various provisions of the bill, but did not embrace the liberal argument that it contained the seeds of Medicare's destruction, sown by foes of the program.
Chafee stayed uncomfortably on the fence until the Senate votes began, on Monday of Thanksgiving week. The first was on whether to shut off Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's filibuster against the Medicare package. Other leading Democrats declined to join Kennedy, so the filibuster seemed doomed.
The best chance to block a Bush victory on traditional Democratic turf would follow on some kind of procedural attack. That would be the "real" vote on the historic Medicare expansion.
That was all news to Chafee, however. When the roll was called after noon, he voted to continue Kennedy's filibuster, thinking this was the big stand against a Medicare bill that was too big a jolt to the federal deficit. When the Republicans broke the filibuster, with votes to spare, Chafee was surprised and irritated by what he viewed as Democratic timidity.
Later, in his office, as Chafee awaited the procedural fight, his phone began to ring. We need your help on this one, said one imposing Republican after another. Sen. John Kyl, of Arizona, asked what it would take. Perhaps an exemption for Providence from the experimental Medicare competition?
Leader Frist made an openly personal entreaty. "This is important to me," Chafee recalled his saying. "My leadership tenure is at stake" if the Medicare bill dies.
McConnell called on Chafee to reject "the trickery" of a Democratic attack on an obscure budget technicality.
And finally Andy Card, the onetime state representative from Massachusetts, entreated Chafee on behalf of the president.
This was not the first such request for a team play from the son of Rhode Island's ultimate Republican team player. "And whether it's energy or it's tax cuts or it's the war," the younger Chafee mused about his voting record, "it's always been, 'No. I'm sorry, I can't help you on this.' "
After entering the ornate Senate chamber, Chafee finally decided that "this vote was different." It was close enough, on the big policy questions, for him to leave the Democrats and come to the aid of his party.
Mr. Bush was on the way to winning his Medicare bill, and Chafee had been with the Republicans when it counted.
Chafee walked off the Senate floor into the tile-inlaid hallway that points to the Capitol steps. Half a dozen reporters closed in for the senator's explanation.
"I did not sell my vote," Chafee volunteered.
But would Chafee's help for the party win him tangible dividends from a grateful leadership? Would there be more local pork where the Jamestown Bridge demolition money came from?
"You bet," said McConnell. "You bet. We very much appreciated that vote," he said.
