Lincoln Chafee Enters Race For Democratic Nomination–Attacks Clinton On Iraq

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Lincoln Chafee has become the fourth candidate for the Democratic nomination, becoming the third liberal to enter the race along with front-runner Hillary Clinton. Bloomberg reported earlier in the day:

Chafee, 62, left the governor’s mansion in January and announced in April he had formed an exploratory committee. He has said he would focus a presidential campaign on growing the middle class by raising the minimum wage and supporting social programs such as Head Start. He has also indicated he will target primary frontrunner Hillary Clinton on her vote to authorize the Iraq War when they both served in the Senate. The vote, which hurt Clinton in her 2008 bid, raises questions about her judgment, Chafee has said.

“I don’t think anybody should be president of the United States that made that mistake,” Chafee told the Washington Post in April. “It’s a huge mistake, and we live with broad, broad ramifications today—of instability not only in the Middle East but far beyond and the loss of American credibility. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”

Environmental stewardship and “protection of personal liberties,” such as freedom from phone searches and the right to an abortion, are other priorities of Chafee’s, according to his exploratory committee website.

I will put aside the horse race matters for now, with us all knowing he is a long shot, and give him a chance to make the case for his candidacy. Clinton’s poor showing in the recent polls certainly does leave her looking far less inevitable.

It would be good to have a candidate challenging Clinton on her foreign policy issues. I do hope that he goes beyond just her support for the Iraq War and looks at her overall hawkish world view which is virtually indistinguishable from the neocons. In looking at her position on Iraq, I would also suggest that Chafee go beyond just her vote to authorize force. While any Democrat who voted for the war was wrong at the time, there was a considerable variation in views among those who did vote to authorize force. Some, such as John Kerry, looked at the evidence, and in the lead up to the war argued many times that there was no justification to use the authorization and go to war. On the other extreme were Democrats such as Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton, who strongly supported going to war. Clinton went far beyond most Democratic supporters of the war in making false claims of a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Chafee is having some trouble being taken seriously as a Democratic candidate due to only joining the Democratic Party two years ago. Bernie Sanders has also been an independent, but he has also been consistently liberal and was never a Republican. Chafee points out that, “Jim Webb was a Republican and Senator Clinton was a Goldwater Girl.” In many ways Hillary Clinton’s views have not changed very much from when she was a Goldwater Girl, except that Barry Goldwater was more liberal on social liberal than Clinton and would probably condemn Clinton’s association with the religious right. Clinton is even using a variation of Goldwater’s old campaign logo as her current campaign logo.

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