Posted on 06/20/2007 5:19:05 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Fred Thompson has played many roles in a long and successful Hollywood career. He was a White House chief of staff alongside Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire, director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Kevin Costner hit No Way Out and, for the past five years, has been the gruff New York district attorney in Law & Order, the long-running tele-vision crime drama.
Now he has confirmed that he is ready to play the biggest role of his career – this time not in the shiny, fictional world of Hollywood but in the gritty reality of Washington. After months of preparation, and with polls starting to show that he has leapt to an improbable lead in the race for the Republican nomination for the American presidential election next year, the former actor is set to ignite American politics by declaring his candidacy.
In London yesterday he sat down with The Times for his first interview with a nonUS news organisation and gave the clearest indication yet of his ambitions: “As we say where I grew up, ‘This ain’t my first rodeo’. I’ve seen it up close and personal. I’ve had good friends run for president; I’ve campaigned for them; I’ve known a few presidents. I understand what the job is about and I wouldn’t run for it if I wasn’t willing to pay the price.”
Though he will not declare formally for a few more weeks, aides say, Mr Thompson has most of the machinery of a campaign in place. He has been hiring managers, pollsters and lawyers and as soon as he fires the starting gun he will be in a position to raise tens of millions of dollars in record time.
President Bush remains deeply unpopular among Americans. So far the three main candidates for the Republican nomination to succeed him – Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York Mayor; John McCain, the Arizona senator; and Mitt Romney, the former Mas-sachusetts Governor – have signally failed to lift Republicans from their general gloom. So Mr Thompson, even without declaring formally, has jumped to the front of the pack.
He acknowledges that he carries into the campaign an extraordinarily high level of expectations, but he sees the flip side of that burden. “You start out with these kinds of poll numbers and you have a level of expectation. But, frankly, I’d rather have that problem than the problem that some of the others have.”
Mr Thompson was in London at the invitation of Policy Exchange, the conservative-leaning think-tank. He met David Cameron, the Tory leader, and in an indication of the pull that Baroness Thatcher still has for American conservatives, he dropped in on the former Prime Minister.
“I wanted to remind her of America’s affection for her and pay our respects,” he said.
He is clearly enjoying the turmoil that his sudden emergence as a contender has produced for the Republican field, noting that for months many of the party’s leading pundits have been saying that he is leaving it too late to enter.
“I imagine all those who’ve been saying, ‘Its late, late, late’, will now be saying, ‘It’s early, early, early’. We’re finally in agreement. I believe it’s still quite early and none of us has really been tested yet, but that’s what campaigns are all about.”
To outsiders Mr Thompson’s ascent is another sign that celebrity trumps all in American life. But Mr Thompson is not just an actor. He started his professional life as a lawyer, working on the impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1973, before getting a late career break into Hollywood. From 1994 to 2002 he was a senator from Tennessee.
He did not distinguish himself in Washington. He had divorced recently and was known for enjoying some of the nonpolitical, more physical pleasures Washington had to offer. As he remarked recently: “I chased a lot of women and some women chased me. And the women who chased me usually caught me.”
Mr Thompson is married now, with two small children, and is keen to undermine suggestions that he may not have enough fire for the battle. He insists that his sudden popularity among Republicans is not just the result of his being a film star. “When I’m greeted by a stranger they nearly always address me as Senator Thompson or Fred – not . . . ‘Hey, there’s the district attorney from NY’. In other words,” he grins here for effect, deepening the creases on his craggy 64-year-old face, “I’m not just another pretty face.”
In fact, it is the perception of his politics rather than his celebrity that is generating so much excitement among Republicans. The party’s activists are deeply unhappy with most of the candidates on offer and yearn for a Reagan-like figure, a natural conservative with charisma, to champion.
Mr Thompson had a conservative voting record in the Senate on issues such as abortion and gun control, and, with his Southern drawl and cigar-chomping manner, he seems culturally in tune with the party base. This will be one of the many challenges he faces when he starts campaigning in earnest. Most voters do not really know most of his views yet and it is possible that he may disappoint. “I call myself a conservative,” he says, “but does that mean I’ll agree with every conservative on every issue? The answer is no.”
He points out that he voted against two of the four impeachment counts against President Clinton when he was in the Senate in 1999, when his party’s right wing was calling for the President’s blood. Today the biggest challenge for him and other Republicans is how to deal with the current President.
It is extremely rare for a party to win the White House when its incumbent is as unpopular as Mr Bush. Some Republicans think that to stand a chance next year they will have to run in effect against their own President, just as Nicolas Sarkozy did in his successful campaign in France this year. Mr Thompson is not sure. His approach seems to be: change the subject.
“I think the country is ready for a different approach to some things but it’s not all about Bush . . . Spending too much time in self-flagellation or worrying about the past or assessing blame is not a good thing. It’s time we move on and had a candidate talk about what he believes in.”
Mr Thompson seems ready to take advantage of the powerful sense of frustration among voters with all political leaders these days and run essentially on an anti-Washington, “a pox on all your Houses”, ticket. Americans are upset, he says, that “Washington is too much of a partisan maelstrom to deal with the serious times that we live in. I like to think they look at me and see that I’m doing the thing for the right reason.”
The would-be president is increasingly vocal about the mistakes that have been made in Iraq. “My own analysis is that we clearly were not prepared for the challenge we faced there,” he says. “It turned out to be different than what we thought: the nature of the enemy, the difficulties of that particular society that had been decaying from within because of Saddam. In retrospect we should have done more to establish stability very early.
“Any hints of anarchy should have been controlled at all costs on the very front end and the borders should have been better secured at all costs.”
Mr Thompson says that America will be much more cautious in future, but still insists that the nation’s cause was a worthy one. “I think there’ll be a new dose of realism in what we do in the future but we will not lose our idealism in the process. Democracy is not only a good thing in its own right. It is also a stabilising force in the long run and it has been introduced into a part of the world that has not had it before.”
A crucial early test for Mr Thompson will come in September, when General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, reports to Congress on the progress of the “surge” that began this year. General Petraeus is expected to ask for more time for the counter-insurgency to work but Democrats in Congress are almost certain to insist on a timetable for a speedy withdrawal of US forces. Many Republicans, fearful of fighting a presidential campaign while American troops are fighting a bloody war in Iraq, seem likely to side with the Democrats.
Mr Thompson says that he is leaning towards giving the surge more time. “My tendency would be to give us every possibility of success . . . If there’s no chance, that’s one scenario. If there’s still a chance, that’s another one, and I think the latter one will be the situation that prevails.”
In the end his biggest problem is going to be that, however appealing he may be, he will now start to experience a level of scrutiny that he has never seen before. As soon as he enters the race he will cease to be the putative saviour of his party, standing above the fray, and become just another candidate. As voters learn more about him it is not clear that they will feel as warmly as they seem to now.
Still, as befits an actor with some great lines to deliver in the denouement of a powerful drama, he speaks like a man of destiny. Asked why so many people seem to like the idea of his candidacy at this stage, he pauses and says: “I think they perceive the reality, and the reality is that perhaps this is the occasion where the man meets the times.”
Rudy Boosters soon to be deeply saddened.
I’d like to know more about this guy. I like his carriage and demeanor, as well as his ability to speak publicly (heck, he’s an actor), but I wonder how conservatives in his former district felt about him then and now. I imagine the feelings have been mostly positive.
I can’t believe that came from “The Times”
Can they be saddened and wide asleep at the same time?
ping a ling
Fred is the man to give Hillary a fight. This could be a fun election cycle after all.
“The Times” of the UK is slightly conservative.
That could be said of me between marriages. Anyone want to call me a pervert? I'm waiting?
saddened, no, dead from the neck up...most likely.
Start out with FDTVotingrecord.xls taken from the WaOp. Oh, there's an exam afterward.:)
For this?
Or because their campaign treasurer in South Carolina just got nailed for Coke?
His current wife made some kind of joke about it awhile back.
I'm a big guy. And I wouldn't run too fast, nor too far, to get away; but I'm married now these 27 years and that's an old story.
And my wife has made jokes about that.
lol........you and Fred. Such rascals.
Go FRED!
I could give you the names of two people who would do that...but I’ll pass. :)
They should speak for themselves :)
For me, I'm happy with the decision I made. I believe Fred is happy too. BTW, Fred is the common name among all the male members of my paternal ancestry; including myself (middle name).
Now that I can look back in hindsight he actually helped saved us from Prince Albore.
Need more information.
You used the whole chicken?
Read later, gosh I’m sleepy, self-ping.
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