Posted on 04/03/2007 11:35:26 PM PDT by Doofer
Five years ago, former Senator Fred Thompson seemed ready to say goodbye to White House dreams for good. Hed announced his re-election campaign in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, but seemed to lose steam after the death of his daughter a few months later, ultimately abandoning the run in the spring of 2002.
At the funeral, I went over to him, and he was obviously just drained, recalled Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee. And he said to me, Ive just lost my heart for [public] service. Ive lost my heart.
So, like his fellow Tennessean, Al Gore, Mr. Thompson wound up nursing his psychic wounds in Hollywoods warm embrace. And he married again, this time to Jeri Kehn, then a 35-year-old political-media consultant for Verner Liipfert in Washington; the couple now has two young children and a gorgeous home in the well-heeled Republican suburb of McLean, Va.
Its a story that helps explain both his exit from and return to the national political stage in a tidy, family-friendly packagea parable of loss and restoration, with the hero rescued by the role of a lifetime, the love of a good woman and a return to domestic bliss. (The Barbara Walters special, as one political consultant noted, practically scripts itself.)
But it doesnt quite explain the mystery of how and why the 64-year-old mid-level actor suddenly finds himself a news cycle or two away from joining the top tier of Republican Presidential candidates.
Right now, the former Senator is everywhere and nowherea man whose screen presence is ubiquitous, but who is, for the moment, rationing out major media interviews like a late-era Brando. Ever since he told Foxs Chris Wallace on March 11 that he was contemplating a Presidential runIm giving some thought to it. Im going to leave the door openRepublicans have been obsessively parsing his handful of public statements for clues to his intentions.
Draft Thompson Web sites appeared and exploded overnightone site run by a 27-year-old salesman from Memphis received thousands of visitors in its first week alone. And Mr. Thompsons home-state surrogates, former Senator Howard Baker and Mr. Wamp, flooded the airwaves with Thompson boosterism, racing through dozens of media requests.
(I have a very good feeling about this, Mr. Wamp said, juggling a cell phone in a Senate elevator as he squeezed in one last interview on his way from a hearing back to his office. Very good.)
Spurred by the flawed Republican line-up of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney, conservative pundits and opinion journals fanned the flames. In late March, a National Review headline read, Run, Fred, Run! And in a column on April 2, Robert Novak called the former Senator a front-runner for the role of conservative messiah.
Meanwhile, the national press plunged dutifully into the Thompson-linked frenzy, with The Washington Post and USA Today leading a procession of inevitable Law & Order candidate headlines.
And Mr. Thompsons every move across town is, suddenly, news, from his chummy lunch with Romney consultant Alex Castellanos at the Alexandria watering hole Landinis, to his marathon Mayflower Hotel meetings with former R.N.C. chair Ed Gillespie and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.
The buzz has been meticulously cultivated. In addition to the yeoman press work done by his surrogates, Mr. Thompson has now hired former Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo to handle national press. And his planned return to Washington later this month is being plotted with the precision of a military campaign. One advisor says there will likely be an official announcement of some kind within the next two months, if not sooner.
[Thompson]s not new at this game, said Republican consultant Rich Galen. He just wiggled his nose like that lady on Bewitched, and people swooned. Theyre still swooning.
I think its fascinating, Mr. Galen added, that by merely, in essence, verbally raising an eyebrow, he goes from not on the [Presidential] list at all to 12 percent. (He was referring to the latest Rasmussen poll, which has the former Tennessee Senator in third place for the nomination.)
[continued at the link]
It’s no mystery.
Currently there’s no one to get excited about. They all lean to the left.
It is not a bad thing to walk away from power.
Actually it is damn comforting to hear for a change.
So give us some reason to vote for Fred. He’s a good man, however, He couldn’t even control his own Government Committee Chairmanship, and capitulated to John Glenn, the minority man.
What did he do impressive while he was Senator? I’d like some reasons to support him.
We know the secret!
FRed!
I’ll give you one reason to support him “if” he is
the republican candidate. Hillary
Because Thompson's first (partial) term was for the remainder of Al Gore's seat, had Thompson run again for the Senate, he would have had to resign after 3 years 11 months to stay under his own proposed cap.
Atually, Thompson has mad lots of appearances and written a spate of recent articles, but he's chosen to do it on conservative forums. Which means that the NY Observer is unaware of them.
Novak recently noted..
“....his lifetime Senate voting record as measured by the American Conservative Union was 86 percent.”
I will give you another reason. Fred is not Rudy, Newt or John.
Thompson has concluded that traditional investigative hearings are a thing of the past. As it stands, “You have to find out all you’re going to find out beforehand and use your hearings to demonstrate what you’ve already discovered.” Why? Because “there’s too much partisanship and too short an attention span among the media, especially television. We were deemed a failure literally the day after our hearings started.” Most of the press considered the hearings too dull, too cautious, too fussy. Thompson held some off-the-record meetings with reporters, “and I said, ‘Look, guys: Pay attention. I don’t have John Dean and a taping system, but there’s some very interesting stuff here. This was the most corrupt political campaign we’ve ever seen. You need to keep up with it, even if it doesn’t seem blockbuster.’ And they all nodded, said they understood. Bullsh**: They didn’t. I should have saved my breath. The name of the game is the president: Are you going to get him or not?”
- Jay Nordlinger in National Review, May 17, 1999
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1805040/replies?c=2
There’s a start....but you really don’t want to be convinced do you? You just want to throw some bombs in the Fred thread and wander off like “move on” protester.
“Myterious” appeal NY Observer? Hardly.
Thanks for sharing. But it doesn’t state why he rolled over to John Glenn, when Thompson was the Chairman of the committee. I was working for NASA and as a result, we got John Glenn as an astronaut again, as the CLINTON PAYOFF, to study some phony age related issues.
Well please tell me what his legacy is regarding politics? What has he done positive? A mayor, goveror has been an executive with a history. It’s not just Fred, it’s anyone who’s been a Senator and never having been Governor, Mayor or in an executive position.
I’ll surely support Fred Thompson, help him, send money, etc. if he’s the nominee. I personally like him a lot, but am worried that he’s rather wimpy like so many other Republicans, and I just want to see some sign that he has balls against our enemy.
On paper, he’s Wonderful.. and I’m a big fan of his, just don’t know if he has what it takes to stand up to the Islamofacists.
>>Another factor was that Thompson was a big pusher for “citizen legislators” and term limits<<
Interesting you should mention that. I was a junior in high school when Zach Wamp (the Tennessee Congressman quoted in this article) came to leadership conference to speak, and he was all for term limits.
I’m now in my third year of med school. And Zach Wamp is still in Congress. ;) Not that I disapprove of that. He seems to be a cool cat. It just amuses me, especially as I took a few years off to work inbetween.
* Fred Thompson has blasted more people in the face with a shotgun than even Dick Cheney.
* The masked executioner of Saddam Hussein: Fred Thompson.
* Every night before going to sleep, Osama bin Laden checks under his bed for Fred Thompson.
* Fred Thompson took over what was Al Gore's Senate seat, thereby dramatically reducing the Senate's carbon footprint. Fred Thompson then created carbon offset offsets by wastefully burning hippies.
* Fred Thompson reconsidered running for reelection after 9/11 but later decided to handle things on his own. He was soon seen entering the Middle East with a bottle of tequila in one hand an a handgun in the other. They're still counting the dead.
* Fred Thompson once ended a filibuster by ripping out a Senator's heart and showing it to him before he died.
* The actual cause of global warming: Fred Thompson's burning rage.
* Fred Thompson once stood on our south border and glared at Mexico. There was no illegal immigration for a month.
* Scientists predict that when Fred Thompson dies he'll explode taking out the five nearest planets before collapsing into a black hole.
* If you purchase a weather radio, it will wake you up with an alarm to warn you when Fred Thompson is pissed off.
* Webster's Dictionary defines "conservatism" as "how closely one's views resemble those of Fred Thompson."
* Fred Thompson's sense of strategy is so great that he can checkmate you using only a pawn and a knight.
* When terrorists get to the afterlife, they'll find that none of their seventy-two women are still virgins. Why? Because of Fred Thompson.
* Why does Iran want nuclear weapons? Out of fear of Fred Thompson.
“but am worried that hes rather wimpy like so many other Republicans, and I just want to see some sign that he has balls against our enemy.”
you hit the nail on the head. So far he’s seemed rather like the wimpy brand of republican
Precisely, Gracey.
EARTH TO LAMAR: FRED THOMPSON LOOKING THE PART AIN'T ENOUGH (41-second video fries Fred)
Back to RealityBut still. Mr. Thompson is a candidate without an exploratory committee, a campaign war chest or a full-time staff. Apart from a few close friends, Mr. Thompson has, as yet, no real inner circle and no coterie of trusted advisors guiding his campaign.
At a time when most G.O.P. Presidential hopefuls are putting as much distance as they can between themselves and the Bush administration, Mr. Thompson has made a point of fund-raising for Scooter Libby's defense fund.
And in terms of his actual policy positions, Mr. Thompson is hard to identify. He has supported drilling for oil in the Arctic, and is a supporter of gun-owners' rights. But in other ways, he takes after moderate Republican Howard Baker, his old boss on the Congressional committee that investigated Watergate.
He supported campaign-finance reform and opposed tort reform. He doesn't support gay marriage, but would still leave the issue up to the states rather than banning it outright. His position on abortion, while officially pro-life, can best be described as a work in progress.
And he supports some immigrant guest-worker programs.
It's too soon to know whether his ideological squishiness will be a problem. But given the irrelevance of actual details this far into Mr. Thompson's cinematic Presidential bid, maybe it won't matter.
"Fred Thompson--well, he's not Ronald Reagan," said Mr. Keene. "But he's done enough, and is well enough liked. He's a fallback."
The perfect role.
The Mysterious Appeal of Fred Thompson
BY REBECCA SINDERBRAND
The New York Observer
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