In a blast from the past, former Rhode Island governor and senator Lincoln Chafee announced a presidential run on Wednesday.
Chafee, who announced his bid at George Mason University in northern Virginia, has no campaign infrastructure or popular support as he mounts his first candidacy as a registered Democrat. Unlike other candidates who announce behind scenic backdrops surrounded by supporters, Chafee’s event was in a half-empty college auditorium as part of a series of foreign policy speeches. But Chafee has long been unique.
The son of longtime Rhode Island Republican senator John Chafee, the presidential candidate’s biography brags that he “attended Montana State University horse shoeing school in Bozeman and worked as a farrier at harness racing tracks for seven years”. He was also a high school classmate of Jeb Bush (who also had a prominent Republican politician as a father) at the elite 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”.
The Rhode Island Democrat 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, Chafee 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 mounting a re-election bid.
Chafee may 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 been a socially liberal supporter of abortion rights with strong environmentalist credentials.
However, his campaign faces bigger obstacles in the meantime as it struggles to combat the Clinton juggernaut. His wife wrote a public Facebook post last week asking if anyone remembered the password to Chafee’s Facebook page and the lead testimonial on his website comes from former senator Robert Byrd, who has been dead for five years.
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