Less surprising than Lincoln Chafee's departure from the race is the fact that he was even in it to begin with. Running for president and participating in the first Democratic debate gave Chafee a level of notoriety he never previously experienced – none of it good. I don't have an answer as to why he took our time with this – many people loyal to his father were wondering the same thing – but I would point out that this is far from the first time Chafee has made baffling choices. Given a do-over in life, one suspects he would have been better off staying out of politics altogether.
In summer 2001, in the wake of Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords's dramatic defection from the GOP caucus, Michael Crowley profiled the junior senator from Rhode Island. Democrats were keen to sway Chafee, all the better to further add to their precarious edge in the Senate. Chafee sat theatrically on the fence for a while, but demurred.
Considering the Jeffords-Chafee comparisons, Crowley wrote, aptly:
But the comparisons between Chafee and Jeffords overlook some rather significant differences. Jeffords is widely considered to be one of the strongest minds in the Senate. Chafee--sometimes called "Missing Linc" during his time on the city council in Warwick, Rhode Island--is not. Jeffords's defection was the culmination of decades of congressional conflict over cherished policies like special education and the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact. Chafee, a kind of accidental senator, has served less than two years. No one really knows what he cares about, which makes him dangerously unpredictable. One Rhode Island politico suspects Chafee doesn't take being a senator--or being a Republican--very seriously at all and might switch because "[h]e's the kind of guy who can wake up one day and say, `Yeah, I'll do it.'" Another observer compares him to Chauncy Gardner, the charmed naif from the Peter Sellers film Being There who blunders obliviously into Washington power games and becomes a celebrity when his simple aphorisms about gardening are misinterpreted as profound political insights.
While seeming to consider a switch – early in the Bush administration and before September 11 – Chafee never quite worked himself up to doing so. As Bush veered to the right and edged toward the invasion of Iraq, Chafee stayed within the caucus. That's why his denunciation of Clinton's 2002 vote rings false. By remaining a Republican - indeed the only Republican capable of being elected in Rhode Island - Chafee continued to enable Dubya. The Bush White House had, as the old Seinfeld line goes, "the hand" in that relationship and it wasn't shy about making it known. Chafee's most cited reason for not defecting from a party he professed to disagree with was loyalty to his father. With considerable respect to the late Senator John Chafee, there were far more important things afoot in the world, between 2001 and 2006.
Along the way, Chafee assuaged his anxiety and conscience by engaging in meaningless acts of dissent. None of them amounted to a hill of beans in the real world, but in Lincolnland they constituted great acts of defiance. In 2004, rather than break with the party and endorse John Kerry (a war hero like his own father), he wrote in Bush's father on his presidential ballot. No one cared.
In 2005, Bush nominated the certifiably insane John Bolton to represent the United States at the UN. Chafee sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was present when the Bolton nomination ran into some sharp headwinds. An NGO official, who had questioned Bolton's judgment, complained that he had stalked and harassed her in a Central Asian hotel, tracking her to her room, and slipping threatening notes under the door. Ohio Republican George Voinovich said, flat out, that he could not support someone who behaved so erratically. Chafee, present in the hearing, asked Chairman Richard Lugar if his own views had changed. If he wanted permission to change his vote, he didn't get it. Lugar replied blithely that the nomination was on track.
Voinovich - the deciding vote on a committee split 10-8 - held up the nomination for three weeks and then came to a split decision. He announced his opposition to Bolton, but voted to send the nomination to the Senate floor. Not the best choice, but Voinovich had at least acted on his suspicions. Chafee weakly cited Bolton's numerous deficiencies and then endorsed him, claiming to be convinced that Bolton would do better in the future.
Afterward, Slate's Fred Kaplan wrote righteously that: "A special place in the halls of cowardice should be reserved for Sen. Lincoln Chafee."
Six years of dithering did not help Chafee in his road to reelection. Having been against Bolton before he was for him, he did much the same in the case of Samuel Alito, supporting cloture and then voting against the nominee. The best opposition, he seemed to think, was of the purely symbolic yet ineffectual kind. Rhode Island got tired of the farce and elected Sheldon Whitehouse in 2006 by a comfortable margin.
Afterward Chafee became a Democrat. He endorsed Obama. He even got a second chance in life, when Rhode Island made him governor in a close three way race. I was happy for him. I hadn't thought him prepared for the challenges of the Bush-era Senate, but thought he might fare well at the state level. A term or two in Providence might provide him with a meaningful political legacy.
It did not. Chafee fared badly at the state level and opted not to run for reelection last year. Failing in his native Rhode Island, he took his act national, and added his own distinct comedic contributions to an already farcical election.
It was Lincoln Chafee's poor luck to enter politics at a time of polarization, to be asked to make hard choices upon which thousands of lives hinged. But no one put a gun to his head and made him do it. And so, his presidential campaign marks a grimly fitting end to a strange and often frustrating career in politics.