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Lincoln Chafee a former Republican senator from Rhode Island announces his support for Obama on Thrusday morning in East Grand Rapids at the Obama headquarters. Paul L. Newby II I The Grand Rapids Press/caption
Is Hillary Clinton supporting policies that are un-American? So says her potential rival for the Democratic nomination former Rhode Island governor (and United States Senator) Lincoln Chafee in an exclusive interview today reported here.
Gov. Chafee has a credible claim to become the most potent threat to upset Mrs. Clintons nomination by the Democratic Party. Why does Lincoln Chafee present such a politically mortal threat to Mrs. Clinton (and potentially a serious contender for his partys nomination)?
The preternaturally perceptive Michael Tomasky writing in
The Daily Beast observed:
The issue as I
wrote two weeks ago in urging Hillary Clinton to go big is wage stagnation." Yes. And yet latently there is one potentially even bigger issue. Peace trumps prosperity.
Lincoln Chafee is intent on pushing the peace issue from latent to patent. He does so with exceptional authority.
Lincoln Chafee is the most credible peace candidate in the Democratic field. And the disproportionately influential Progressive base of the Democratic Party is deeply committed to restoring America to a peacetime footing a status which it has not quite yet secured.
As I elsewhere have written in a column entitled
Peace has tusks Will a substantial challenger within the Democratic Party arise to Secretary Clinton? Nobody thought Barack Obama was viable. Yet such is the popular yearning for peace Obama won and won and won again. Will some ambitious candidate play the role against Madam Clinton that Sen. Eugene McCarthy played to undermine the hawkish President Lyndon Johnson on an anti-war platform? It is a virtual certainty." Peace the invisible elephant in the room of the presidential race has tusks.
Thus I sought an opportunity to interview Gov. Chafee. His statements on April 28
th were bold staunch and unequivocal. Here is what Gov. Chafee forthrightly said to me:
Peace is the basis of my exploratory campaign. Where we are going in the world? Some of the issues that came in with the authorization after Sept 11 torture warrantless wiretapping extrajudicial assassination with drones are very dubious initiatives.
I think we should be taking a closer look at do they help or hurt us in the long term. The drone strikes now are in the news because of the deaths of an American and an Italian. Yet I had questioned them right from the beginning.
They might bring short-term gain. But the opposition from the countries in which we undertake these many say it provoked the revolt in Yemen the anger of the Pakistani people are potentially destabilizing.
I think we should be having these conversations as the Democratic Party. Sen. Clinton defends the drone strikes in her book in the chapter on Pakistan I think she underestimated how important this is to the Pakistani people and all throughout the Muslim world.
Warrantless wiretapping is another one. These all came about from one 8 by 10 sheet authorization that I was there for after September 11 which granted the president certain powers which is the legal justification for all these un-American activities. Wiretapping torture extrajudicial assassination.
Wiretapping torture extrajudicial assassination… un-American? Strong words indeed.
Moreover Gov. Chafee has unrivaled moral authority to utter them. Chafee then a Republican was the sole member of the U.S. Senate Republican caucus to vote against the use of force in Iraq. Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor.
Sen. Chafee later became an Independent and was elected as such governor of Rhode Island. In 2013 he registered as a Democrat. Ronald Reagan made a successful transition
from Democrat to Republican (as full disclosure I did appalled by Jimmy Carter and inspired by Reagan). And another Lincoln Abraham transitioned from Whig to Republican. Changing ones affiliation to the party better reflecting ones values does not impair ones viability as a potential nominee.
One critic at the
Huffington Post has called Chafee a strange bird as a pol awkward and odd." While she is not alone I myself find it charming that he rather than immediately following in his father Sen. John Chafees political footsteps spent the first seven years of his life after college as a
farrier shoeing racehorses. That however fits neatly within the observation of the late great Peter Drucker in
The Effective Executive:
Among the effective executives I have known and worked with there are extroverts and aloof retiring men some even morbidly shy. Some are eccentrics others painfully correct conformists. Some are fat and some are lean. Some are worriers some are relaxed. Some drink quite heavily others are total abstainers.
…
What all these effective executives have in common is the practices that make effective whatever they have and whatever they are.
And as the description at
Google Books of
The Effective Executive closes the loop: The measure of the executive… is the ability to get the right things done. Usually this involves doing what other people have overlooked…." Lincoln Chafee did the right thing when peace was unpopular when many others including Sen. Clinton overlooked it.
As Matt Bai in a 2003
New York Times Magazine profile of Chafee
Party of One wrote: He was the only G.O.P. senator to vote against the October resolution authorizing Bush to use force in Iraq and he has continued to voice his disdain even as the rest of the party along with many Democrats has rallied to the presidents side." Took guts. Chafee vocally is championing peace again.
The Progressive base of the Democratic Party almost and maybe entirely unanimously is
opposed to Mrs. Clintons nomination. Progressives are enamored with Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Yet as
The New Yorkers Ryan Lizza observes in its May 4 issue
The Virtual Candidate: Warren feels that she can accomplish more from the sidelines." He quotes Rep. Barney Frank as observing: Right now shes as powerful a spokesperson on public policy as you could be in the minority. … She has an absolute veto over certain public-policy issues because Democrats are not going to cross her. And if she were to even hint at being a candidate that would be over."
So… let the games begin. U.S. Senator
Bernie Sanders has declared his candidacy to prompt praise from …
Elizabeth Warren. While touching the peace base Sanders featured according to
CNN economic inequality climate change and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision…." It is nifty to see a self-described
socialist enter the race. And while a dove Sen. Sanders did not so prominently feature the lurking issue of winning the peace.
Former Maryland governor Martin OMalley is out there campaigning hard to some note if not yet much effect. As President Obama
needled him at the White House Correspondents Dinner recently Martin OMalley kicked things off by going completely unrecognized at a Martin OMalley campaign event." OMalley has charm and tenacity and checks most of the right Progressive boxes. And charmingly
in his own words on guitar he is a strummer Im a three-chord wonder." Whether or not the recent troubles in Baltimore where he served as mayor from 1999 2007 seriously undermines as implied by
NPR his nascent presidential campaign remains to be seen.
That said the issue that most attracted the Progressives
en masse to Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton and the general electorates sending him on to victory over the hawkish GOP nominees of 2008 and 2012 was Obamas clear commitment to bringing home the troops and restoring America to a peacetime footing. Perhaps Obamas having honored this pledge defuses peace as a central issue. Yet as the status of peace remains provisional perhaps it is not so defused as all that.
If Chafee as expected ignites a peace-driven
presidential campaign and if it attracts the attention … and devotion … of MoveOn Civic Action and other potent Progressive groups Gov. Chafee could knock over Mrs. Clintons palanquin. Chafee has a pretty impeccable across-the-board Progressive record and high moral authority as a champion of peace and Constitutional rights such as freedom from warrantless wiretapping.
Peace is a smooth stone. Lincoln Chafee slingshot in hand easily could prove a and perhaps the candidate to play David to Clintons Goliath. Will Chafee merely prove the Eugene McCarthy of this cycle driving out the hawkish dominant figure only to be eclipsed by someone like former Virginia Governor (now U.S. Senator) Mark Warner or even the Progressives doyenne Sen. Warren? Or … would Chafee prove capable of then credibly tackling equitable prosperity: the" issue wage stagnation? If so Chafee could shock the Keepers of the Conventional Wisdom and find himself the Democratic nominee.
