Lincoln Chafee Announces 2010 Bid For Rhode Island Governor

Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island GOP Senator turned independent Obama supporter, says he will run for governor of Rhode Island in 2010. Chafee has been an outspoken supporter of marriage equality, the only GOP Senator to do so.

Mr. Chafee, 56, left the Republican Party after his loss to Sheldon Whitehouse, saying the party’s agenda had become too conservative. He opposed President Bush’s tax cuts and was the only Senate Republican to vote against authorizing the war in Iraq in 2003. Gov. Donald Carcieri, a Republican who took office in 2003, cannot seek re-election due to term limits, and the only Republican who had entered the race dropped out last month. On the Democratic side, Patrick Lynch, the state’s attorney general, and Frank Caprio, its general treasurer, are competing for their party’s nomination. Both are well known in the state, but so is Mr. Chafee, whose family has loomed large in Rhode Island politics for more than a century. His father, John, served in the Senate for two decades and earlier as the state’s governor.

This will be very interesting. There are presently no independent governors in the U.S., but the last two have both been from New England.

(Tipped by JMG reader Bill)