Lincoln Chafee Wishes He'd Never Brought Up The Stinking Metric System 

Politics

Lincoln Chafee, former Democratic presidential candidate and a cheerful papa squirrel gathering nuts for the winter, has been located at long last. He is, according to a short interview with Esquire, on a “sabbatical year” right now, and very much regrets that his campaign focused so much on converting the United States to the metric system.

From Esquire:

Looking back on the primary, are there things you wish you did better?
I guess the big mistake—I went back and forth on including the metric system angle. I was just crossing my fingers there would be some intellectual approach to the various proposals I put out in my announcement speech, which kind of covered the gamut, from ending capital punishment, to bringing Edward Snowden home. Also, I was for TPP. Unfortunately, my crossed fingers didn’t work, and it just turned into more of a joke about metric, not “let’s look at the bigger picture.” I think, and it’s a trend, there’s just less of a Walter Cronkite, I call it, approach to the news. It’s entertainment. Donald Trump, early on, said: I’m just going to push every possible emotional button I can. I don’t care! And he crushed the nomination.

I love, so much, that “crossed fingers” played such a large role in Lincoln Chafee’s primary campaign. My fingers have been crossed, too—ever since that fateful day when he withdrew from the race with a reference to Lysistrata—that I will one day bump into Lincoln Chafee, perhaps tasting soup options at my local Hale and Hearty, or sitting underneath a large tree, humming a Fleetwood Mac song.

Chafee also told Esquire that if he could do last year’s Democratic debate over again, he would have stood the heck up to Anderson Cooper: “If I had to do it over again I would’ve engaged more and said, ‘I didn’t come here to debate five people, I came to debate these four people!’”

What might the world look like today?

 
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