Welcome to What’s Up With Lincoln Chafee, a new weekly series at Vox lovingly inspired by Videogum’s classic What’s Up With Topher Grace, in which we check in on the life and times of Lincoln Chafee. Chafee is the former moderate Republican senator turned independent governor of Rhode Island turned underdog Democratic presidential candidate who’s turning the 2016 race upside down and captivating America with his dovish foreign policy views and fierce commitment to the metric system.
This week on “What’s Up with Lincoln Chafee,” Conan O’Brien climbs on board the Lincoln train
Dylan Matthews was a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.
This week Chafee has picked up an important quasi-supporter: Conan O’Brien. Dismayed by a national Democratic primary poll from July in which literally no one picked Chafee over Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, or Jim Webb, O’Brien launched a campaign to at least get Chafee to 1 percent in polling. “Let’s be honest, I’m not trying to get him elected. In fact, I’m personally not going to vote for him,” O’Brien explained. “But I think we should at least get him on the board so he’s not humiliated. It seems like the nice thing to do.”
Conan even got Aimee Mann and Ted Leo to write a peppy campaign song for the Orator from the Ocean State, set to the tune of Fine Young Cannibals’ classic “She Drives Me Crazy.” Mann and Leo get one tiny fact wrong (Chafee became a Democrat in 2013, not 2010), but this is still easily the most media exposure Chafee has gotten to date.
This has been What’s Up With Lincoln Chafee. Be sure to stop by next week.
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