EAST GREENWICH, Rhode Island — It’s dinner time in this suburban neighborhood of green front lawns and roomy homes as Stephen Laffey, the Republican Mayor of Cranston, races across a front yard and up a set of stairs to greet a potential voter.

In New England, door-to-door canvassing — “door-knocking” — is a fixture of retail politics. It’s common for candidates for city council, state representative and state senate to privately boast about the number of houses they hit in a day of campaigning. Even in the context of that long tradition, I’ve never seen anything like the frenetic pace kept up by 44-year-old Mr. Laffey, who hits house after house pointed out by one of a small group of longtime pals who lead the grassroots effort. Included in the entourage, among others are two old friends from Mr. Laffey’s Cranston upbringing, who high-five when they successfully scout out a voter for the candidate to meet, his roommate from Harvard Business School, his wife Kelly, pushing two of his toddler children in a stroller, and his ten-year-old son Sam. His nine-year-old roller-skating daughter, Sarah Grace, meanwhile, whizzes by the group on Heelys Wheel Shoes. At one point, one old-school white-haired neighborhood gent opens his front door and asks “what’s the racket?”

The noise out in the streets is nothing compared to the trouble Mr. Laffey is stirring up in the Republican Senate primary where he is challenging incumbent Senator Chafee. Mr. Chafee’s Senate seat has been in held in the family name since his father was elected in 1976. With a week to go before the vote, the latest polls show the men even, with Mr. Laffey pulling ahead. The battle pits the scion of a prominent Yankee family against the son of a union tool-maker who was the first in his family to go to college. Although the conventional wisdom of the race says that a larger primary turnout favors Mr. Chafee, Mr. Laffey sees his real appeal as being to so-called Reagan Democrats, “like my dad, private union guys, steamfitter, a toolmaker… a contractor.”

Indeed, Mr. Laffey’s personal story is the stuff of Horatio Alger and the film “Wall Street.” Growing up he worked in such jobs as boat-washer, bathroom cleaner, operator of a kick-press, used in Rhode Island’s jewelry industry, baker’s helper. After graduating from Bowdoin College, he went directly to the Harvard Business School, which typically requires students to work prior to attending. A succession of Wall Street jobs lead this Rhode Island-native to the Memphis investment firm of Morgan Keegan, which he left in 2001. But the crucible of Mr. Laffey’s political career was a messy fiscal conflict in his hometown.

The story of how Mr. Laffey convinced his constituents to approve the termination of unionized crossing guards is well-reported. Cranston employed these crossing guards for an hour-per-day granting them health insurance and other benefits, which cost the city $500,000. Still, the magnitude of this achievement should not be missed. Among the most agonizing issues for any mayor is labor strife.

Mr. Laffey’s move to dispense of the crossing guards — which he terms the “metaphor” for the city’s fiscal resurgence — was given momentum, paradoxically, by the crisis his city faced. With the bond-rating downgraded to its lowest level ever, Mr. Laffey made the case that Cranston had to change. The mayor has subsequently followed up this reform with municipal labor contracts that require union members to contribute up to 20% in health care co-payments. In the private sector such co-payments, even at much higher levels, are par for the course; on the municipal level in the Northeast, they are near unheard of. The process was contentious and resulted in him facing a primary challenge in 2004.

The Chafee campaign is trying to use some of the bad feeling generated by the political travails against the Cranston mayor. “The mayor is often over-the-top and bombastic and not ready for the U.S. Senate,” says Ian Lang, Mr. Chafee’s campaign manager. Supporters of Mr. Chafee also argue that Mr. Laffey, whom polls show as falling far behind the likely Democratic candidate, Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island’s former Attorney General, risks delivering the Senate to the Democrats.

Those arguments fall on deaf ears with Mr. Laffey, who equate the patrician Mr. Chafee and Mr. Whitehouse. “If you need a senator to go down to Washington and sit up in the stands and eat a couple hot dogs, then you want Linc Chafee or Sheldon Whitehouse,” says Mr. Laffey in his Cranston Irish rasp reminiscent of Alec Baldwin. “If you want somebody to get on the mound and throw some fastballs, you want me.” Mr. Laffey refuses to accept the notion that he trails Mr. Whitehouse, saying “when he’s done with Linc Chafee” he’ll deal with Mr. Whitehouse.

The hard-nosed Mr. Laffey is also tough-talking when it comes to Israel and the War on Terror. He took issue with a statement of Mr. Chafee’s during a debate last month: “My view is that a bad peace is better than a good war,” Mr. Chafee was quoted as saying in the August 10 edition of the Providence Journal. “What he fails to understand is that bad peace leads to more wars,” says Mr. Laffey. “When he said that what went through my mind is Neville Chamberlain, the Sudatenland, 1938, coming back and saying ‘we have peace for our time’.” The Chafee campaign counters that “the Senator believes Israel has a right to defend itself”. It also supplied a statement of Senator Chafee stating “I realize that it is easy to talk of diplomacy and difficult to measure results. In this, we should rely on Ronald Reagan’s maxim “Trust, but verify.” We need to be clear in our discussions, create achievable and knowable benchmarks for cooperation, and monitor the agreed-upon activities with all appropriate assets, including our intelligence services.” A lot of words, by Chamberlainesque, if you ask me.

Mr. Laffey, who began to sit at the head of his family’s table at age 11 even with two older brothers, is an unusual candidate in many ways. One way is his refusal to factor political risk into his personal calculations. When he stops into a Cranston League for Cranston’s Future sports banquet, he receives only mild applause. I ask a woman at a table who has just meekly applauded him whether he was a good mayor. “He did what he had to do,” she whispers. He also refuses to take into account conventional party wisdom into his decision making. What are the implications for the Republican Senate should he defeat Mr. Chafee only to fall to Mr. Whitehouse?

“I’m running for the United States Senate, everybody get out of the way,” he says bringing to mind the old battery ads in the 1970s where tough-guy Robert Conrad dared viewers to knock his block off. “I’ve got big ideas, big solutions to big problems, and a relevant track record of actually being successful.” If I were Mr. Chafee or Mr. Whitehouse, I’d watch out.

Mr. Gitell is a contributing editor of the Sun.