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Nice wishful thinking, but it won't happen.

As I've said many times, I'm interested in Fred running. We need the strongest electable conservative who isn't named Giuliani.

We've never seen Thompson in a national race. And while the Howard Baker political machine in TN is alive and well, it has never been tested nationally and produced a positive result. Make no mistake, the TN GOP elite has been hungry for decades to put a son of Tennessee in the White House.

I think a lot will depend on what the surviving GOP governors do and who party leaders support in the fall.

We need to recognize that Giuliani will almost certainly score a 30%-35% vote, no matter what. So we need to get serious about a candidate to make sure Rudi can't slip between two or more conservative candidates and grab the nomination when he is the candidate that 65%-70% of the party rejects.

“Thompson could deflate over time. Or even rather quickly.”

“Nice wishful thinking, but it won’t happen.”

I don’t consider it wishful thinking, but a cogent assessment of the possibilities.

Thompson imho throws open the race, but doesn’t close it. What if he jumps in, but runs a lousy campaign? So far as I can tell, only one GOP candidate is running a good campaign, and that is Romney.

For folks like me who were leaning Romney due to the “conservative-and-electable-enough” factor, it’s a reboot that could shake things up. Thompson may be better. But (see my previous post) Thompson is really the McCain-killer, and a good thing too; put that McCain campaign out of its misery, by giving us a maverick conservative to root for.

The challenge is that Thompson has the aura of the man with the fill-in-the-blanks set of beliefs, and his old senate votes (supportive open immigration and mccain-feingold, etc.) belies his current populism on that issue. And what about his cancer, or his suspiciously young wife (second wife)? Will that wear as badly as Rudy and Judith?

I’m not going to prejudge. It’s a good thing to have another marquee name in the race, but it’s far to early to assume he’ll run away with anything.

I’d leave open another possibility: Early primaries + multiple candidates in an open race could = convention decides the race!