Chafee

Driven by his strong opposition to the war in Iraq, former Republican U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee may do something radical, at least for him: cast a vote in a Democratic primary.

Chafee, who lost his reelection race in 2006, left the GOP last summer and joined the ranks of Rhode Island’s unaffiliated voters, who can participate in either party’s primary on March 4.

In his deliberative manner, the former senator says he is considering a vote for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning.

“It’s a big decision to go into the Democratic primary,” Chafee said in an interview yesterday.

Chafee was once a leader of the Rhode Island Republican Party, as his father, John Chafee, a former governor and U.S. senator, was before him.

But the moderate Lincoln Chafee found himself increasingly at odds with a party that had moved to the political right. “It’s not my party anymore,” Chafee said last September.

No issue isolated Chafee among national Republicans more starkly than the war in Iraq. He was the only Republican senator to oppose it.

“It was such a critical time in our history, when we needed the Congress to act responsibly,” he said.

In his upcoming book, Against the Tide [due April 1 from St. Martin’s Press], Chafee excoriates congressional Democrats who voted in 2002 to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

He writes: “Being wrong about sending Americans to kill and be killed, maim and be maimed, is not like making a punctuation mistake in a highway bill.” Some leading Democrats “argue that the president duped them into war, but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

Obama was not in the U.S. Senate in 2002; he declared his opposition to the Iraq war in a speech delivered in Chicago that October.

Two other leading candidates, Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain, voted for the 2002 resolution that gave the president the authority to attack Iraq.

marsenau@projo.com