Lincoln Chafee: even on a metric ruler, campaign launch comes up a little short
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Version 0 of 1. Lincoln Chafee’s presidential announcement was weird, held at a half-empty college auditorium at George Mason University in suburban northern Virginia. Chafee is likely the only presidential candidate to endorse the metric system and equivocate on Isis. His speech seemed more appropriate for a candidate running against George W Bush than someone hoping to succeed Barack Obama. Chafee’s speech focused on the 2003 Iraq war and he repeatedly railed against “neocons”, making several references to the Project for a New American Century, a hawkish thinktank founded in the late 1990s. Chafee read at length from a 2002 Guardian article about the run up to the war. He also urged the government “ to allow Edward Snowden to come home”. Related: Lincoln Chafee joins presidential race as fourth official Democratic candidate These were the parts of his speech where he stayed on-message. Then the Rhode Island Democrat urged the United States to adopt the metric system. Chafee expounded his expertise on this subject, noting: “I happened to live in Canada as they completed the process. Believe me it is easy. It doesn’t take long before 34 degrees is hot.” Responding to a follow-up question Chafee said this would be “a symbolic integration of ourselves into the international community after mistakes of past 12 to 14 years”. For all of Chafee’s discussion of the Iraq war he foundered in questions from the press about more recent foreign policy issues. When asked about Islamic State he would not rule out negotiations with the group. “Isis is emerging,” he said. “It’s a phenomenon that’s ever changing and everyone is surprised what’s happened in Palmyra. We expected the devastation of antiquities and it hasn’t happened. We’re coming to grips as to who these people are and what they want.” The son of the longtime Rhode Island Republican senator John Chafee, the presidential hopeful has a biography that tells how he “attended Montana State University horse shoeing school in Bozeman and worked as a farrier at harness racing tracks for seven years”. He was a high school classmate of Jeb Bush at the Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts. Chafee’s candidacy seems targeted almost directly at Hillary Clinton and her foreign policy record – the Democratic equivalent of those conservative hawks who sought to enter the Republican primary solely to excoriate Rand Paul on the debate stage. In April Chafee told the Washington Post that Clinton’s vote for the Iraq war should prevent her from becoming president. “I don’t think anybody should be president of the United States that made that mistake,” he said. Chafee has also criticized Clinton’s conduct as secretary of state and her mishandling of the so-called “Russia reset”. On Wednesday Chafee offered veiled criticism of the former secretary of state and declined to mention her by name. He said: “It is critical that the integrity of the office of secretary of state never be questioned.” At one point, though, he went close to going after Clinton, saying neocons were advising “the main Democratic presidential candidate”. Chafee got his start in national politics in 1999 when he was appointed to the Senate as a Republican after his father’s death. He was elected to a full term in 2000 before losing his re-election bid in 2006. While in the Senate he was the only Republican to vote against the Iraq war and bragged about writing in George HW Bush for president in 2004 as a protest against what he saw as the too-conservative policies of George W Bush. After losing his re-election bid Chafee endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008 and was elected governor of Rhode Island as an independent in 2010. His tenure in the state house was rocky. In an attempt to shore up his political base Chafee formally changed parties to become a Democrat in 2013. But it was to no avail and he eventually decided against a re-election bid. Chafee could face some skepticism from voters as a former Republican but his liberal record may mitigate some of those concerns. Regardless of which party he’s belonged to Chafee has consistently been a socially liberal supporter of abortion rights with strong environmentalist credentials. He even called for the abolition of capital punishment in his speech on Wednesday. However, among those who showed up for his announcement, a number weren’t concerned about his political past or policy positions. Robert Winship and Kathleen Mundie are students in a summer course entitled Journalism Across Media and they had to be there for class credit. Winship said he might otherwise have come along voluntarily – “I’m a Democratic voter in DC” – but Mundie seemed less enthusiastic. Henry Kim, from South Korea and a graduate student in politics at Johns Hopkins University’s Washington DC campus, had thought it would be interesting to see a former senator and get more of a sense of American politics. But it’s hard to see how that would have been the case – instead of a huge crowd, video screens, loud music and booming introductions, Chafee entered the race in a partitioned-off section of a college lecture hall that was still probably only two-thirds full. Chafee’s campaign, though, is used to such privations in battling the Clinton juggernaut. His wife had to write a public Facebook post asking if anyone remembered the password to Chafee’s official page on the site, and the lead testimonial on his website comes from former senator Robert Byrd, who has been dead for five years. Then again, as a onetime Republican who opposed the Iraq war and champions the metric system, Chafee doesn’t seem scared of an uphill battle. |