TALKING POLITICS Brown edges steadily closer to Senate run BY IAN DONNIS

Backers of Secretary of State Matthew A. Brown are organizing to expand his number of campaign volunteers – the latest sign that the Democrat will likely run in 2006 for the US Senate seat held by Lincoln Chafee.

Brown has steadily sidestepped questions about his political plans for the next election season, telling me last spring, for example, "I don’t know, and I keep getting asked" (see "The world could be his oyster," News, April 2, 2004). Similarly, Brown on Tuesday said he continues to think about a Senate run, and is "talking to people about it, but I don’t have a decision yet. [There’s] nothing sort of more formal to announce at this point, but when I do, I’ll definitely call you!" The Phoenix has learned, however, that outreach efforts to attract fresh volunteers for Brown are ongoing.

Although his political experience consists just of his current tenure as secretary of state, Brown, 35, has an impressive resume. The East Side native, a graduate of Columbia University and Yale Law School, previously directed the youth-service program City Year in Providence, and he galvanized the Democracy Compact, a get-out-the-vote effort in 2000 that some perceived even then as a vessel for his political ambitions. Doing little to damper such thinking, Brown in 2003 donated $25,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee while he was still paying off debt from his 2002 campaign.

There remain a host of unknowns about the prospective field of challengers for the Senate seat held by Chafee since shortly after his father, the Republican icon John H. Chafee, died in October 1999. About the only settled question is that of US Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, who recently announced his intention to remain in the House.

US Representative James R. Langevin — who has sought input from his constituents on whether he should run for the Senate — holds a key role in the makeup of potential Senate challengers. Although Langevin could certainly maintain his House seat for the indefinite future, his status — like Chafee — as a well-liked official from Warwick, the largest city in the Second Congressional District, offers a potential edge in a Senate contest.

Lieutenant Governor Charles Fogarty, who is prevented by term limits from running for the same office, and who bowed out and then backed fellow Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in the 2002 gubernatorial contest, seems likely to challenge Republican governor Donald L. Carcieri. Whitehouse, meanwhile, a former attorney general who lost a close Democratic primary to Myrth York in 2002, has talked of running for governor or US Senate. Some Democratic operatives, mindful of how Richard Licht and Robert Weygand flayed each other during the bruising 2000 Senate primary that paved the way for Chafee’s election, believe the party’s gubernatorial hopes will founder without a united front. How to do this, though, remains to be resolved.

Then there’s Cranston Mayor Stephen P. Laffey, a proven fundraiser and headline-grabber, who has also been mentioned, despite his personality as far more of an executive than a legislator, as a potential Senate candidate. Like Brown, Laffey is intelligent and ambitious.

The general thinking has been that Laffey could beat the more moderate Chafee in a Republican primary, although he would face a tougher challenge squaring off against a Democrat in the general election. Then again, although Chafee has been loath to switch his party affiliation, despite periodic flirting with the concept, his surest path to reelection in such a scenario could come straight from the Buddy Cianci playbook — divide and conquer by running as an independent.