Lincoln Chafee’s Post-Debate Interview: When Will You Drop Out?

In a truly painful interview Wednesday afternoon on CNN, Wolf Blitzer repeatedly asked Lincoln Chafee a sharply focused set of questions: Why are you still running? And when will you drop out?

During the interview, the former Rhode Island governor and U.S. senator confirmed Blitzer’s statement that he has only raised $30,000 for his campaign.

Blitzer also read out newspaper headlines reviewing Chafee’s showing at the debate Tuesday night, such as “How To Disappear Completely, by Lincoln Chafee,” and “Lincoln Chafee’s No-Good Very Bad Night.”

“Here’s what worries me, governor, because of your distinguished career,” Blitzer said. “You’re going to wind up looking silly if you keep going on like this. At what point will you decide, ‘You know what, there are other things for me to do instead of a futile effort to try to get the Democratic presidential nomination’?”

“Well there was certainly a lesson last night,” Chafee countered, “to appear there and only get nine minutes out of two hours. And it reaffirmed what I thought when I got into the race — that the establishment just does not want to hear an anti-war voice. And that motivates me even more, to continue this campaign.”

After Blitzer suggested that Bernie Sanders is also an anti-war candidate — and is doing much better than Chafee — the latter man disagreed, arguing that Sanders “rarely talks about international issues” in the way that he does.