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There is nothing wrong with being concerned about a bad political climate. And things are not particularly good right now. I'm confident that it will improve, as it did in 2002 and 2004, but we should never be overconfident. Bad things happen to good people all the time.

And, while I admire Laffey as an excellent Mayor, it's legitimate to be concerned about his electability. He has the potential to exceed expectations, but whether he'll do that remains to be seen.

"There is nothing wrong with being concerned about a bad political climate."

There's a huge difference between being concerned about a "bad political climate" and predicting that the Democrats will pick up 5 net Senate seats in 2006 (which is what I referred to as "living in a land of confusion").

As for Laffey's electability in a statewide race, you're right, it's not altogether certain right now. But he has been able to run and win in a city that is as heavily Democrat as the rest of the state (Cranston was 1% less for Bush in 2000 and 2% more for Bush in 2004 than the state as a whole). Besides, his positions are really quite moderate; while he is a "conservative" by RI standards, he's probably not as conservative as Governor Carcieri, who was able to win statewide with 55% in 2002 and will be on the ballot (perhaps providing coattails) in 2006.

But the main reason why I'm not all that worried about whether Laffey is "electable" is that I don't think we lose *anything* if a Democrat replaces Chafee in the Senate (in fact, we gain 2 net Republicans on the committees on which Chafee sits). As I've said before, Chafee is only useful to the GOP in case we only have 50 or 51 Senators, which is highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, and in the odd chance that Chafee was the 50th or 51st Republican he would likely make it official and jump to the Democrats. So I'll take my chances with Laffey.

I'd like to comment on your last statement. It should be noted that Linc Chaffee was also a Mayor, City of Warwick.
Before that, he was a blacksmith. If his father hadn't died, Linc would still be a Mayor. RI politics in a nutshell.

One of the first things Laffey did was take on the unions, and in a truly priceless "Only in RI" moment, hired a private investigator to videotape Cranston DPW crooks stealing their paychecks. My absolute favourite was the moron who drove the street sweeper in circles on Reservoir Ave. to run up the mileage, rather than actually do his job!
Second, Laffey actually tried to fire the Cranston fireman who was smoking dope in the bathroom of a SCHOOL on ELECTION DAY. The union still has this case tied up.

RI is a totally corrupt place that has practically no redeeming value. Don Cacieri is a Republican Governor and he gets massacred daily by the criminal Legislature. No help there from the National Republicans.

What do RIer's have to lose by electing Laffey? Not much.