Three strikes and you’re out?
First there was Minnesota with former wrestler Jesse Ventura whose celebrity and charisma propelled him into the governor’s chair. But he fizzled in office and no one seriously talks about him running for President on a third party ticket anymore. The came actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose biceps proved to be a lot bigger than his political smart and skills: he utterly bombed after sailing into office as a recall Governor replacement. He was a Republican but many believed he didn’t quite fit into either party. At first, Californians (and I am one) affectionately smiled at Arnold and by the end of his unhappy term he was considered a bit of a disgraced joke.
Now you have Lincoln Chafee formerly a moderate Republican and now Governor of the beautiful state of Rhode Island:
Hard as it is to imagine, Congressman David Cicilline and Gov. Lincoln Chafee have managed to lose even more public support.
Cicilline’s job approval rating has sunk to just 15% among all Rhode Island voters, down from 24% in December, according to a new Brown University poll released Thursday morning. Chafee’s approval rating isn’t much higher at 22%, down from 27%.
To put those numbers in perspective, President Richard Nixon’s approval rating was 24% a week before he resigned over Watergate in 1974. Slightly more voters rated Chafee’s job performance as poor (45%) than said so about Cicilline’s (43%).
Cicilline’s successor, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, is the most popular elected official in Rhode Island based on Brown’s polling. The mayor’s statewide job approval rating is up to 60%. Treasurer Gina Raimondo comes next with 58% approving of her job performance.
In the future when someone who’s an independent wins an election perhaps pundits (yours truly included) might take a deep breath and safe a column or post in “draft” hailing the election of an independent or partisan who doesn’t fit into a cookie cutter political mode. Just being more independent doesn’t always spell success — and, in fact, sometimes it may mean success is more difficult to achieve.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.