Posted on 04/27/2007 5:44:08 AM PDT by areafiftyone
First off, rent some movies. Watch Journeys with George and The War Room to get a reminder of how intense, grueling, and intrusive presidential campaigns are. And if anyone advises you that you can run “a different kind of campaign” that is less demanding, be very skeptical. And while you have seen negative ads against you, of course, in a presidential campaign they will reach an entirely new level.
Second, announce your decision soon. A Republican strategist went through the calendar with me. Many states are holding their primaries on Feb. 5. In those that allow mail-in votes for the previous month, voting will start on Jan. 5. That means you will need more than enough signatures to file by around Thanksgiving. And that, in turn, means that you need to have an organization and money in place “well before Labor Day.” August is mostly lost time, notes this strategist, so you need to “be up and running by Memorial Day at the latest.” Plus, people might get tired of waiting for you to commit.
Third, acknowledge that you’ve gotten more pro-life over time. Twice in recent weeks, you have expressed perplexity that anyone thinks you were once pro-choice. Stephen Hayes quoted you in The Weekly Standard:
“I have read these accounts and tried to think back 13 years ago as to what may have given rise to them. Although I don’t remember it, I must have said something to someone as I was getting my campaign started that led to a story. Apparently, another story was based upon that story, and then another was based upon that, concluding I was pro-choice.”
But, he adds: “I was interviewed and rated pro-life by the National Right to Life folks in 1994, and I had a 100 percent voting record on abortion issues while in the Senate.”
Your record in the mid-1990s was a bit less solidly pro-life than that. A 1994 issue of Republican Liberty apparently quotes you opposing public financing of abortion but adding: “The ultimate decision must be made by the woman. Government should treat its citizens as adults capable of making moral decisions on their own.” That same year, in which you ran for the Senate (and won), you said something similar in a debate: There should be no federal funding, and states should be allowed to enact parental notification and other “reasonable controls,” but government should not “come in and criminalize, let’s say, a young girl and her parents and her doctor as aiders and abettors that would be involved.”
News accounts treated you as pro-choice, and there is no record of your campaign’s trying to dispute that characterization. The National Right to Life Committee did indeed endorse you in that race, and their post-election newsletter listed you among the victorious “pro-life candidates” that year. But that newsletter also grouped you with candidates who were opposed to the Freedom of Choice Act and federal funding of abortion, rather than with candidates who were pro-life across the board.
In 1997, finally, your office sent a constituent a letter about abortion that included this line: “I believe that government should not interfere with individual convictions and actions in this area.”
I think the record suggests that you were always uncomfortable with abortion and prepared to support some restrictions on it, but that your opposition deepened over the course of your time in public life. The whole country’s discomfort with abortion seems to have deepened over that time, too. (In part, that was a result of the partial-birth abortion debate in which you were involved.) If that is what happened, I don’t think pro-lifers will hold it against you to say so. Those pro-lifers who worry about the sincerity of Mitt Romney’s conversion do so because he seemed ardently pro-choice not long ago. As you said, you have a strong record of voting with pro-lifers that goes back to 1995.
Fourth, bone up on stem cells. You’ve managed to avoid taking a detailed position on the issue. And it’s not a top-tier issue. But the issue can get pretty complicated, and you’ll buy yourself trouble if your first remarks on the question have to be modified or elaborated later. I hope that you’ll agree with the president’s position on the issue: against human cloning, and against federal funding for research that involves the destruction of human embryos. If that is your position, it will be advantageous in the primaries, putting you to the right of John McCain and (one assumes) Rudy Giuliani while leaving Mitt Romney no room to your right. And it won’t hurt you in the general election. Very few people vote for candidates based on their position on stem cells, and the pro-life position can be explained in a way that sounds reasonable to most voters within Republican reach, even if they do not themselves share that position.
I would suggest saying something like the following: “I strongly support stem-cell research, including federal funding for stem-cell research. Adult stem-cell research has already led to benefits for some patients. Additional exciting research is being done on stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood and amniotic fluid, and a few researchers are looking at cutting-edge methods of stem-cell research that were hardly imaginable a few years ago. All of us, however, want this research to proceed with ethical guidelines. My own view is that those lines should be drawn in a way that protects human life in all its stages. Human embryos should not be created for research, and taxpayer money should not be spent on destroying them for research either.”
Fifth, don’t feel pressured to flip-flop on campaign-finance reform. You supported it. So did all the top-tier candidates: McCain, Giuliani, and Romney. More recently, you have said that it might be wiser to remove the limits on contributions and just have full disclosure. This isn’t as contradictory as it may sound to some people, since you were for raising the contribution limits all the way through the process. (And McCain-Feingold did indeed raise them.) I think the line-up of candidates give you more or less complete freedom to say whatever you want to say on this topic. While I myself favor the libertarian line on it, you shouldn’t feel any need to reverse yourself in some dramatic way to win conservatives’ favor.
Sixth, don’t (just) run on a conventional conservative platform. Right now, a big chunk of your appeal to the Right — aside from your celebrity and sober, no-nonsense manner — is that you have been more consistently conservative than McCain, Giuliani, or Romney. I don’t think that means you would be a weaker general-election candidate than them: Neither McCain’s heterodoxies nor Giuliani’s seem likely to win over independent voters, as Ross Douthat has pointed out, and Romney’s record of flip-flops won’t either.
But a lot of conservatives have been telling themselves that Republicans lost the election because they were insufficiently committed to conservative orthodoxy: that if they had just eschewed pork and prescription-drug benefits, the voters would have been kinder to them. It is a comforting theory with almost no basis in fact.
Running on a strictly conservative platform has not won Republicans the presidency since at least 1988. Since that campaign was heavy on flag-waving, it might be more accurate to say “since 1980.” Even in 1980, moreover, Reagan made some innovations to conservatism: adding supply-side tax cuts to the mix, and backing away from opposition to entitlement programs. More to the point, Reagan succeeded not because his platform conformed to a philosophy, but because it applied that philosophy, creatively, to the problems of the day. If you end up being a successful candidate, you’ll have done that too.
But as with most of this advice, I suspect you already know that.
“Republican Liberty apparently quotes you opposing public financing of abortion but adding: “The ultimate decision must be made by the woman. Government should treat its citizens as adults capable of making moral decisions on their own.”
“Apparently quotes”???? What the hell does that mean? Either it’s a direct quote or it’s not.
It would be interesting if Fred and Ramesh were to have these little back and forth essays every few days. I wonder if that is what they are planning to do.
I think its great! Good dialogue - and I think Ramesh has a new found respect for Fred Thompson.
Ramesh Ponnuru is a very smart writer. It would be wise for Fred Thompson to consider his advice ... maybe not follow everything, but give it serious thought.
“But a lot of conservatives have been telling themselves that Republicans lost the election because they were insufficiently committed to conservative orthodoxy: that if they had just eschewed pork and prescription-drug benefits, the voters would have been kinder to them. It is a comforting theory with almost no basis in fact.”
While it’s surely not the ONLY reason, it did play a large part. Our base was demoralized by the corruption, stupidity, inaction and indecisiveness of members of our own party.
When things are like that and we’re having trouble distinguishing some of our guys from the Dems, we don’t go out and work to convince the independents that our way is the right way. That’s how elections are lost and that is why we will never win by the party moving left.
I don’t trust Thompson on the immigration issue. It seems to me we will get more of the “comprehensive reform” nonsense from him.
His position is security first and then we worry about the ones already here. I agree with him 100%.
Fred will announce sometime next month, but I don't see the urgency. You think someone as popular as Fred needs 6 months to get on ballots? Fred is moving his way up in the polls. He is playing it right. Milk this a few more weeks, then come out and announce.
What is meant by security first? Does that mean an immediate end to the swarms of illegals coming accross the southern border? An immediate deportation of all criminal illegal aliens? Workplace enforcement of immigration laws? What . . . I think his record on this issue is as far in the mushy middle as you can get.
Ponnuru still smarting from the smackdown he got on the federalism debate?
Close the border to prevent additional illegal entry. Then deal with the ones already here.
But nothing short of rounding up 12 million illegals and shipping them out will please some. Mike Pense proposed a decent compromise which was about as tough of a immigration bill that could have been passed, and he got castrated for it from the rabid immigration folks. With the Dems now in power, expect full amnesty.
How about “I’m Fred Thompson and I’m running for President.”
...for a start.
As far as I know He was firmly in the Romney camp before FT was even thinking about running. Now it looks like he’s moving toward FT.
Honestly, I think looking at the records of the other frontrunners is much more depressing.
He hasn’t written a 100 page book on the subject, however he has expressed interest in securing the border first(so comprehensive reform is out) and then advocating policies that would make it less desirable for illegals to be here, so they go home of their own volition. I took that to mean enforcing existing law and perhaps strengthening them.
I imagine he will expound upon his illegal immigration beliefs in detail in the near future.
bookmark
Those guys can just write in Chris Simcox’s on their votes then, I guess.
It’s not my issue, but Fred makes a lot of sense and from his comments to Chris Wallace, he seems to have a firm grasp of how most of us feel about the problem and why. That’s a good first step to finding a solution we can all live with.
Guys like Fred attract guys like Ramesh who would presume to give him breathing lessons with his rule-based “India” tautology.
(YAWN!)
There’s no room nor patience for such tomfoolery in these United States.
His stated priorities: Fence and Security first (see the ?Fox news interview a couple of months ago). I agree, this is an area that he can and needs to shout out his opinion.
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