Discussion for article #235167
Candidate You’ve Never Heard Of Just Tossed His Hat Into The 2016 Ring
I beg your pardon? Perhaps a candidate we never expected. Never heard of? Who do you think we are? Red Staters? Of course we know about Lincoln Chafee.
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Of course we’ve heard of Lincoln Chaffee. Maybe the title should be changed to “Candidate I’ve Never Heard Of Just Tossed His Hat Into The 2016 Ring”?
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just because you’re clueless about chafee, doesn’t mean the typically well-informed readers of tpm aren’t. it’s really unfortunate to see what is being covered on this site these days – from the gossip-heavy irrelevant posts to these insulting assumptions, tpm might want to reconsider what it’s doing…
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Oh, excellent. I just popped in to boggle at the utterly obnoxious headline, but you’re all ahead of me. Carry on!
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Exactly, Chafee used to be the one Republican I would actually vote for. He’s fantastic.
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Seconded. I was easily consider Chafee.
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Perhaps not as left as some would like, but we could do a hell of a lot worse than Lincoln Chafee.
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Shouldn’t we all run for President so these guys look less silly?
True. Chafee is very smart, fair, and honest. I hope he does run because I think he’s just the type to take on HRC in an intelligent, thoughtful way that will make her a much better candidate in the general election.
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And that may be the very reason he’s considering running. He may have been recruited because nobody else is running.
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Could be. But there will be many others running. Martin O’Malley certainly is. Yes, there will be others.
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Daniel Strauss, Linc Chaffee, for years and years was known by everyone remotely interested in national elective politics as pretty much the definitive above-the-fray national pol, a blue-blooded, above-reproach definitive ‘bi-partisan’, ‘centrist’, ‘cross-over’ - and as such a potential RNC nominee for president. For a long time, whenever the subject was how to tone down Washintgon DC’s increasingly partisan politics, his name was the first out of the chute or close to it in pretty much every opinion piece.
What Chaffee’s career story is actually sort of important, for concerns what happened to him from the early 1990s on. As a nominal Republican, he was long assumed to be pretty much unbeatable in his own state and potentially able to carry New England or some of its states if nominated by the RNC for president, or even vice-president.
The lesson part comes from his fall from being discussed as White House material deriving entirely form his being attacked from within his own party. Following the election of Bill Clinton and Gingrich rising to being made speaker, he became a huge target for being primaried as the Republican party’s extremism grew so virulent and pervasive that it began to occupy mainstream Republicanism.
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I am perplexed by the headline. Perhaps Daniel Strauss is too young to have ever heard of former RepublicanSenator Chafee but maybe he or whoever chooses the headlines for stories should have checked before this ridiculous headline
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A very decent man who was run out of the republican party because he doesn’t meet their standards o rightwing nuttery
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I’m more inclined to think that it’s quite understandable that the earliest self-announced candidates for nomination would come from the piles of Most Extreme and Most Unlikely. Once the Big Girls announce, everyone who announces thereafter is bound to get measured against the Biggees and come off looking if anything even crazier and more unlikely. The only way around this is to announce SO early that, for a while at least, every newly announced candidate gets measured against YOU. Thus, one would expect something like a direct relationship between the assumed public perception of a given candidate as being extremist, fringe, crank, marginal, regional, issue-motivated or otherwise unlikely to be nominated on the one hand, and how early in the line of candidate announcements that given candidate chimes in on the other.
Didn’t Michele Bachmann announce first in 2012? So, if anything,Cruz going first suggests even he sees himself as greatly unlikely (tho I suppose it’s possible his ego makes him think he radiates so brightly that every subsequent candidate’s bound to look diminished in comparison), and further that he hastily slapped together that ridiculous announcement theater in order to get out of the chute just before the far more elaborate (tho not markedly more impressive) display form Randy Paul.
FWIW, IMO the whole dynamic of crank candidates announcing early presenting any advantage is completely exhausted after the first few. For example, if Carly Fiorina were to announce now, that’d be understandable but her relevance would be instantly down-graded; and Huckabee might just as well save powder and hold fire because there’s just no upside left for him to take advantage of in announcing early.
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Sorry, but he could not get re-elected in Rhode Island because he was terrible on economic policies in his state. I think that Rhode Island went into debt when he was governor.
Absolutely. The fact that he chose to leave the party instead of seeking more power and holding his stature within the party is also another example of why he’s a decent man. I believe wholeheartedly that there’s a not small number of long term, Republican office holders in DC and around the country who absolutely despise what’s become of the party, but happily pretend they’re in lockstep agreement with the far right. They don’t care what they’re doing to their party or their country, they only care about saying whatever will get them reelected. (glares at Mitch McConnell)
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Being the charitable person that I am [ok, maybe not so much], the author may have been thinking “unexpected” or “out of left field” but it came out the way it did. Maybe??
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OK. Will have to see how this goes. He’s not a bad guy, but I’m not terribly familiar with his politics and policy positions either.
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