Less than a decade ago, George W. Bush endorsed him for reelection in a Republican primary. Now he is a Democrat running against Hillary Clinton.
Lincoln Chafee announced Wednesday that he was running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, speaking to a small audience at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. He was an Independent as governor of Rhode Island, a Republican as a U.S. senator and mayor of Warwick, R.I. and has only been a Democrat for a little over two years.
But Chafee has always been a liberal. In 2005, while still a Republican senator, he had just a 12 percent rating from the American Conservative Union. That’s the same score Clinton, then a senator from New York, racked up that year.
Chafee was one of just two Republican senators who voted against the 2001 Bush tax cuts, which attracted 12 Democratic votes. He was also the only GOP senator to vote against the Iraq war. In a thinly veiled shot at Clinton, who voted for the war, “Too many senators forget too quickly about the tragedy of Vietnam.”
“Twenty-three senators voted against the Iraq war,” Chafee remarked. “Eighteen of us are still alive.” Concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he said, “Flawed intelligence is completely inaccurate, there was no intelligence.”
While Chafee’s first reference to Clinton was calling her “the main Democratic candidate” rather than calling her by name, he directly criticized Bush, Dick Cheney and the “neocons” who advised them, including the Project for a New American Century. “We need to be very smart in these volatile times overseas,” Chafee said, arguing the U.S. must extricate itself from wars in the Middle East. He has claimed in the past that no one who supported the Iraq invasion, like Clinton, should be president.
Chafee’s announcement included calls for abolishing the death penalty, adopting the metric system, attacking climate change, curtailing drone strikes and embracing gay marriage. He said Edward Snowden, who revealed the NSA’s surveillance program, should be welcomed back to the United States. He also endorsed a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and called on spending the money currently going to wars on domestic programs.
Chafee’s father, who graduated from Brown University and later attended horseshoeing school in Montana, was a liberal Republican governor and senator from Rhode Island.
Lincoln Chafee did not register in a late May CNN/ORC poll of national Democratic voters, though he is tied with Martin O’Malley in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
