An endangered species: Senator John Chafee is fighting an uphill battle to moderate the Republican "revolution."

It is not every day that one sees a United States senator atop a dozen-foot tall herbivorous mammal. But there it is, hanging outside John Chafee's office, a black-and-white photo of the senator as a younger man, wearing a broad smile, astride a mammoth gray elephant.

"Pretty good, wasn't it?" Chafee asks in a thick Rhode Island accent. He laughs. "I'm not sure I qualify as an expert elephant rider, but I hung on then."

He's still hanging on. A moderate Republican in an era of conservative politicians, Chafee is known among party leaders as a "problem senator." Though he voted to approve the budget, it was only after grumbling loudly about tax cuts. "Bad policy and bad politics," he calls them. Chafee signed onto Medicaid reform only after pushing for--and winning, with the help of other moderates--revisions in the plan to turn the entire program over to the states. He voted for a reduction in student aid but only after reducing the cuts by one-hall "I am an enthusiastic supporter" of the GOP program, he tells me. But he has to tell me. Unlike with other Republicans, asking, "What does Chafee think of the GOP program?" is not a stupid question.

The "hollowing of the center," as Brookings scholar Robert Reischauer describes current trends, is perhaps the central story of modem politics-particularly among Republicans. Due to changes in the nominating process, redistricting, and the impact of a few dynamic personalities, the Republican party is now controlled by a faction of extreme conservatives. The territory held by truly centrist legislators, those willing and interested in building bridges across party lines, is shrinking. Those who remain feel the sand shifting beneath their feet.

John Chafee stands in that center and is for that reason, among others, an intriguing figure: He's a hero of sorts to liberals who might consider him a dubious ally. He's a heretic to party leaders who nevertheless need his support. He is both an inspiring reminder of the tradition of moderation, consensus, and principle and a compelling example of how even the most strong-willed of moderates have been brought on board--or simply squelched--by the radical right. If Republicans continue to shove aside the mainstream bloc of their own party, the country will suffer--and, in the end, so might the GOP itself.

Chafee won his Senate seat in 1976, strangely enough, buttressed by voters' memory of an election he had lost. Running for his fourth two-year term as governor in 1968, Chafee told voters he would need to raise the state income tax. His opponent, Democrat Frank Licht, seized the issue, promised to avoid a tax and won the election. After he took office, Licht raised the tax anyway.

Rhode Islanders later rewarded Chafee's honesty. "I remember hearing people say in `76, `Oh well, Chafee told the truth back then, and that's why I'm voting for him'," says John Mulligan, Washington bureau chief of the Providence Journal-Bulletin. "He has this image of Yankee rectitude, and it's held him in pretty good stead."

That rectitude comes largely from Chafee's background. His father, a tool manufacturer and the descendant of a Rhode Island family that stretches to the 17th century, placed such great emphasis on manners that he once chastised his son for tooting his car horn at a farmhand on a country road. And Chafee's children remember their grandfather paying them 50 cents for every aphorism they'd memorize. Lincoln Chafee, the senator's son and the mayor of his father's home town of Warwick, Rhode Island, rattles them off "Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, do without," he says. "Make haste, not waste."

John Chafee says he had few thoughts of entering politics while growing up. His great-grandfather and great uncle had both served as governor, he says, but "in those days, you were governor of Rhode Island for a year so everybody and his brother had served as governor. I never met a politician before I went to college."

At Yale, Chafee brushed against prominent politicians, as well as future statesmen. Along with George Bush, he was "tapped" into the prestigious secret society Skull and Bones. Also like Bush, he fought in World War R, with the Marines in the historic landing at Guadalcanal. When he returned, he finished at Yale, then Harvard Law School, and practiced law in Providence before heading off to Korea, where he commanded a rifle company.

"You learned from men like Chafee," writes James Brady, a lieutenant under the captain's command in Korea, in his memoir The Coldest War, "a Yalie with a law degree from Harvard, who came from money, a handsome, patrician man, physically courageous and tireless. From all that could have come arrogance, snobbery. He possessed neither of those traits, he was only calm and vigorous and efficient, usually cheerful, decent and humane, a good man, a fine officer."

It was rare for men of Chafee's generation who weren't professional soldiers to serve double-duty in both World War II and Korea. But Chafee's background pointed him to military service--his father was an ambulance driver for the French Army in World War I--and he did it enthusiastically. The future senator appears personally in only a dozen or so scenes of Brady's book. But he is mentioned constantly: On a mission, Brady concentrated on staying cool, "the way Chafee would have." Brady admires an officer who goes "up and down a hill a dozen times, looking as tireless as Chafee."

Phil Rivers, a longtime Chafee aid, says he always thought the military, with people of all different backgrounds gathered for a common purpose, had a deep effect on the senator's approach to the world. "He was curious about people's lives, constantly asking questions. . . . He'd see a mother on a street with little kids and ask, `What books are they reading? My kids always read Nancy Drew. Do they like that? What grades are they in? What do you do?

The Politics of Principle

When Chafee returned from Korea, he remembers finding his state "in shambles." "We were falling behind in everything," he says. "There was high unemployment, and all kinds of problems. The state wasn't moving ahead . . . and I said, `I can straighten this place out.'" Chafee won a seat as state representative in 1956 and his first term as governor in 1962. Two years later, Barry Goldwater's nomination signaled the rise of Republican conservatives--a trend that would lead to Ronald Reagan's presidency and the ascendency of Newt Gingrich.

Unlike those politicians, who came to power by blaming "big government" for the country's problems, Chafee is an enthusiastic public servant. Bruce Selya, a longtime friend and advisor of Chafee's, worked in a law office in the same building with him in the early 1970s. "I cannot tell you," he says, "the number of times he would come from the 26th floor to the 25th floor and sit down across from me and say, `How could you do this for a living?' He was just so bored." Chafee was always trying to lure lawyers into his administration, Selya says, "so they could get a feel for public service. He thought they would get hooked--because it happened to him." In an interview, Chafee proudly shows me a 1964 cartoon in a Providence paper. It shows him as a hockey player on skates, slamming pucks into the net, each one representing an appointment he had made as governor. "Looking pretty good," the caption reads.

At times, Chafee's Senate seat has been in doubt. Rhode Island is a mostly Democratic state, and challengers from the left have given him some tough races. Still, Chafee has tended to avoid attack politics, preferring to emphasize his record. He also has kept his distance from a new breed of campaign professionals who don't mind winning an election while leaving deep scars in the electorate.

In one campaign, his advisors thought they had scored a coup by signing up Harry Treleavan, the star GOP media consultant who was given much credit for Nixon's win in 1968. Treleavan flew in to meet with the candidate and his staff at Selya's home. At one point, Selya noticed Chafee had been gone from the meeting for 10 or 20 minutes, and found him in an upstairs bedroom--sitting on the floor playing Go Fish with Selya's five-year-old daughter, Dawn.

"I said, `John, what the hell are you doing?'" Selya remembers. "And he said, `I just don't have any patience for that guy. I'm going to run as me. You all do what you have to do, but Dawn and I are having a very nice game here.'"

In Rhode Island, Chafee is known mostly for a simple slogan: "The man you can trust." Although he defies clear ideological categories--supporting abortion rights, a balanced budget, gun control and low taxes--voters in his state know where he stands. Chafee is a rare sort of politician these days. He articulates principles and goals, then seeks to develop a consensus for legislation to best serve that purpose. More common, unfortunately, are politicians who do what's expedient, then find a principle to suit the occasion.

Take the health care debate of 1993 and 1994. For decades, both Bob Dole, then Senate minority leader, and John Chafee pushed to overhaul the country's health care system. As early as 1971, Dole bemoaned the "health care crisis in our nation" from the Senate floor. He gave a similar speech in 1991, again describing a "crisis." Chafee, too, had long fretted over exploding costs and a steadily increasing number of uninsured.

In the spring and summer of 1994, with the country closer than ever to major reform, strategist William Kristol began to whisper in Republican ears that they ought not support a bill--any bill--lest President Clinton get the credit. A dismayed Chafee urged his colleagues to ignore Kristol. He was trying to build support for a bill he had written with input from moderates of both parties.

On a typically frantic day in May 1994, Chafee was explaining the plan's details--universal coverage by the year 2005, cost control, and other reforms-to a reporter outside the Finance Committee's hearing room when Dole walked by. "Do you support the Chafee plan?" the reporter asked. "Some days," Dole quipped and quickly exited.

Dole was only half joking. While Chafee was trying to make reform happen, Dole and other conservatives simply walked away from the discussion. All of a sudden, Dole decided there was no crisis after all. Chafee's bill--along with the dozen or so others in the House and Senate--was suffocated by gridlock, even though a number of reforms had broad bipartisan support. At the time, there were 30-some million Americans without health insurance. Today, that number is 41 million.

Whatever you think of Chafee's health care plan, the point is that he stayed focused on governing. With his fellow moderates, Chafee understands what "some days" Bob Dole forgets: You can't run the government while running against it. Indeed, Chafee is the rare Republican who believes that government can work, that it can help improve people's lives. This is most clear in his commitment to environmental protection, which stretches back to his Green Acres plan as governor, when he purchased huge swaths of land to set aside for public preserves. In the Senate, he has played a role in most major environmental bills since 1977, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and Superfund. Over the years, he has withstood enormous pressure from business interests, whether by pushing a moratorium on the fishing of striped bass in the early eighties, by tightening restrictions on wetland development, or by banning federal subsidies for development of coastal islands.

Although Richard Nixon initiated the modem era of environmental protection, "pro-environment Republican" has become something of an oxymoron. The Reagan Administration went after regulations with a gusto, and Chafee says the new threat to the environment may be the most serious ever. "In the [James] Watt days," he says, "it wasn't so much changing the laws as it was what they were doing by [weakening] regulation. Now they are going straight for the laws"--including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act, all of which Chafee has vowed to improve where necessary but defend resolutely. While conservatives have tried to cripple the EPA with cuts and riders to its budget that forbid the enforcement of certain rules, Chafee has defended the agency. He negotiated with Budget Committee Chairman Christopher Bond this summer to keep many of the more noxious riders from the House bill off the Senate bill. House moderates, waging similar--and similarly lonely--battles, later won a big victory in striking the budget riders entirely.

Although the EPA battle was one of several important victories, the story of moderates in the House is mostly one of Gingrich's success in keeping them on board. Indeed, the House has become synonymous with a steamroller of hard-right conservatism. But the Senate, traditionally the chamber of sensibility and moderation, has in many ways become an appendage of that "revolution'--going even further, in some areas, in dismantling programs that serve the poor and working class and pushing measures to help the wealthy. While the House's fiscal 1996 budget, for example, calls for $21 billion in cuts from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Senate Finance Committee doubled that figure.

Given the strength of the right wing, the successes of moderate Republicans in the Senate are impressive. In the past few months, they have:

* scaled back EITC cuts by $10 billion;

* removed a plank in the welfare reform package that would have cut off funds to women who had more children;

* stopped a GOP plan to allow corporations to raid their employees' pensions, something that would have put workers' hard-earned retirement money in jeopardy;

* and added $5.9 billion to the budget for student loans and $1.2 billion for teaching hospitals.

They've also vowed to oppose a movement in the House that would forbid charity groups receiving public money to lobby with private funds, while exempting defense contractors and other business interests from these restrictions.

Like the other moderates, Chafee supports the goal of a balanced budget. But with their ranks thinning--and with Majority Leader Bob Dole anxious to please the extremists who are essential to his bid for the presidency--moderates have an uphill battle curbing the right wing's excesses. Where Chafee has fought and won, he has shown the good that moderates can do. Where he has been unable--or perhaps unwilling--to block legislation that he disagrees with, he has shown the extent to which "moderate Republican" is fast becoming an oxymoron.

On Medicaid, for example, Republicans wanted to turn the whole program over to the states, ending the 30-year-old program's commitment to serve all poor and disabled people in need of health care. From the beginning, Chafee argued that the federal government would be irresponsible to simply write a $500 billion check to the states and abandon all federal control. Party leaders agreed to maintain federal standards for nursing homes, and a guarantee of care for pregnant mothers, children under the age of 12, and disabled people in poverty--an important victory. Although he and other moderates wanted more in the way of federal protections--and though they had the votes to kill the block grant program--Chafee felt he had done as much as he could. (After the provision protecting the disabled was omitted, he even stormed to the floor and insisted it stay in. The bill passed with his support.

Chafee was also strongly opposed to the $245 billion in tax cuts in this year's budget, and his vote on the Finance Committee, where the Republicans have only an 11 to 9 majority, gave him the power to stop the budget in its tracks. He had strong public support: Polls show that Americans are less interested in a tax cut than a balanced budget and that the tax breaks for the wealthy are a clear political loser. Eliminating the tax cuts--48 percent of which, under the Senate plan, would benefit Americans making more than $100,000 a year--could ease draconian cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and other worthwhile programs.

Many observers were hoping Chafee would "pull a Hatfield" on tax cuts--after Oregon Republican Senator Mark Hatfield, who broke with his party to defeat the balanced budget amendment. But for his colleagues, the Hatfield example is less a model than a warning. After his vote, he was threatened with the loss of the Appropriations Committee chair, and leadership began to bypass him on important budget decisions. The pressure has been so intense that colleagues say Hatfield is losing his taste for public life, after nearly 30 years in the Senate. "It would be my guess that [Hatfield] won't run again," says Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic senator from West Virginia. "I don't think he likes the Senate much."

It's a lesson Chafee knows well; in the past, he has paid for his independence. In 1990, he lost the chair of the Republican Conference, the number three position in Senate leadership because he hadn't supported President Bush on some key votes. And there have been murmurs that he might be stripped of his chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee. "Chafee has been battered all over the building by his Republican colleagues, trying to get him off of stuff they couldn't get him off of," Rockefeller says.

In the face of this pressure--and insisting that he was acting to further the larger goal of a balanced budget--chafee voted to send the budget bill out of committee. He also voted against a floor amendment that would have delayed the tax cuts until the year 2002, when a budget surplus is supposed to materialize.

It was a disappointing moment. This was not the first time Chafee has fallen in line with his party's right wing--he voted to confirm Clarence Thomas and fought against Clinton's 1993 budget, wrongly calling it a "job killer." The legislation being pushed through Congress now may be the most important package of changes since the legislation on civil rights, Medicare and Medicaid passed in the sixties. And the principle of moderation has largely disappeared from both chambers. In The National Journal recently, Jeff Shear reported a conversation with Mark Hatfield shortly after he returned from a bicameral "budget steering group" established by Gingrich and Dole to coordinate their program. (A committee, it is widely agreed, that Gingrich dominates.) "I didn't hear much talk of compromise," Hatfield said.

With the Republican budget package headed for a certain veto, there is a chance that moderates could go even further in improving these bills. If President Clinton were smart, he'd fashion a coalition with them and construct a common sense compromise. Whatever the specific fate of the GOP program the legacy of the 104th Congress is unlikely to change: Conservatives run the show. As Danforth puts it, Republican moderates are "very rare. Dodo bird rare. No, I'd say more like Whooping Crane rare." That is to say, not extinct, but endangered. Moderate Republican senators can be counted on two hands, with fingers to spare: William S. Cohen and Olympia Snowe of Maine, James Jeffords of Vermont, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and, of course, John Chafee. Depending on the issue, Hatfield can sometimes be counted among their ranks, as can recent GOP convert Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado.

But the faction continues to erode. In recent years, David Durenberger, Bob Stafford and John Danforth have left. Bob Packwood's departure, though something to be cheered in many respects, was another blow to moderates. Had he been the chair of the Finance Committee (rather than William Roth)--and had he not vacated a seat that was filled by Phil Gramm--Packwood could have squelched the tax cuts or reduced them significantly. Nancy Kassebaum has sent signals that she, too, will be leaving. Moderate Democrats are vacating the Senate, as well; Sam Nunn and Bill Bradley are in their last year.

Sadly, many moderates are declining to run in the first place. The far right now has a tight grip on the Republican party in states from Oregon to Iowa. Former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean said recently that he would not pursue Bill Bradley's seat because his party is increasingly dominated by "right-wing radicals."

Dark-haired and vibrant at age 73, Chafee still has five years left in this term. "If there was ever a time he would give up in frustration," Lincoln Chafee says, "I think it would be now. . . . Some of the issues he does care deeply about, ironically in a Republican Congress, are now under attack. But he's as energetic and enthusiastic as ever." Lincoln says his father, who wrestled in college and as an amateur, has a wrestler's temperament--he's even in the Wrestling Hall of Fame. "He's a determined man," Lincoln says. "He married my mother by determination. His friends were telling him, `Don't bother.' She was giving him the run-around or whatever. But he wouldn't give up." Indeed, the senator shows no interest in retiring; he says he still has much left to do, on the environment, health care, and education. But the extent to which the bulk of the Republican program has gone through unscathed--including tax breaks for the wealthy and a dismantling of welfare and Medicaid--shows that the influence of Chafee and his fellow moderates is waning.

That's a loss for the country: Moderates have played a major role in everything from the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to the passage of President Clinton's national service program and student loan reform. The theme that runs through these programs is the idea that government can work to improve the country and the lives of its citizens. "You constantly have to reexamine the role of government," says Senator William S. Cohen. If you find "regulations are too cumbersome, too asphyxiating, we have to trim them back. But do it in a way that does good. . . . This attitude that government is the enemy of the people is inaccurate." Senators like Cohen, Kassebaum, and Chafee, in other words, push to reform and improve government, as opposed to slamming it with a wrecking ball.

Chafee's voice rises with emotion and disbelief as he speaks of many conservatives' penchant for "assailing everybody who works for government as a `bureaucrat.' Obviously that's a pejorative term; it's meant to be a demeaning term. We have some great people in government, and I'm dam proud of them."

Ironically, the squelching of moderates may turn out to be a loss for the Republican party. "The far-right," says Mark Rubke, executive director of the Ripon Society, a group of liberal Republicans, will look at a poll and see environment on the list of American's concerns at number 10 and say, `We don't have to deal with it. . . . Let's just give that to the business interests.'" But that's shortsighted, Rubke says. "We are handing this issue to the Democrats. It's so easy to get people worked up and worried [that] iron or whatnot will be flowing into the house."

John Chafee will continue to ride the elephant, prodding it in the right direction where he can. But, judging from the GOP's plummet in opinion polls, if his party continues to push him--and other voices of reason--away, the elephant may find itself out in the cold.