Posted on 02/01/2008 7:44:42 AM PST by TheThirdRuffian
Editor's Note: Fred Thompson will appear as the second candidate on Connecticut's Republican primary ballot, even though he has withdrawn from the campaign.
WASHINGTON — Fatherhood and ambition. In Fred Thompson's life, they rise and fall together, a recurring couplet in the nostalgic story of a Tennessee fella who's guided more by life's surprises and others' expectations than he is by any master plan.
Consider:
The small-town jock called "Freddie" and "Moose," who, at 17, upon getting his high school girlfriend pregnant, married her, heeded her politically connected family and made something of himself.
The divorced U.S. senator, lawyer, lobbyist and actor who dropped out of politics when one of his three grown children died from a prescription drug overdose.
The unlikely 65-year-old comeback kid, now remarried with a 4-year-old girl and a 1-old boy, who's running for the Republican nomination for president.
On the campaign trail, Thompson treats criticism that he doesn't have enough fire in the belly with a father-knows-best attitude.
"I've had the worst thing that can happen to a father, and the best thing that can happen to a father," Thompson told retirees this fall in South Carolina, in the drawl that's central to his persona. "I think you come out from the other end of that with a sense of what's important and not important."
Two of Thompson's most important experiences played out in the public eye: the Watergate hearings and his 1985 movie debut, "Marie." But with voters, he talks about parenting as much as he does about politics and acting.
Seeing daughter Hayden's sonogram — the first time he'd glimpsed any of his children in the womb — strengthened his anti-abortion views, he says. Wanting a stable world for his second family helped nudge him to audition for a part that would be less fun than TV shoots, but more consequential.
His wife, Jeri, a former Republican consultant, said that one night while they were still mulling whether to make the race, they sat at their kitchen table in Northern Virginia and saw their little girl perched at the top of the staircase.
"He had this very strange look on his face," she recalled of her husband. "I said, 'What are you thinking?' and he said, 'A lot goes through my mind from the time she's at the top step to the time she's at the bottom.' It's when he decided, I think. In his mind, there was a decision made."
Thompson has children older than his wife, 41, and younger than his grandchildren.
His progeny span two generations, bookends like the Vietnam and Iraq wars to the major societal, economic and global changes that have rocked America in his lifetime.
Thompson was born in Alabama and raised in Tennessee by parents whose formal education ended with junior high school. He graduated from Memphis State University and the Vanderbilt University law school while working and raising children.
He read Barry Goldwater's "The Conscience of a Conservative," started a Young Republicans group and worked on a congressional campaign, as a federal prosecutor and for the re-election of Tennessee Republican Sen. Howard Baker Jr.
Baker became a powerful mentor. He gave the young Thompson, whom Richard Nixon once called "dumb as hell," a job as chief Republican counsel on the committee investigating Watergate.
Thompson wasn't the staffer who discovered Nixon's secret audio taping system, and he later admitted that he warned the White House that it would be revealed. He didn't initially understand the administration's culpability. But Baker arranged for Thompson to ask about the tapes in televised hearings, and that helped bring down the president.
Thompson got national exposure; a book deal and an anti-corruption reputation that drew clients, including state parole official Marie Ragghianti, to his new law practice.
Ragghianti exposed a cash-for-clemency scheme under Tennessee Gov. Ray Blanton, lost her job and hired Thompson to clear her name.
"He's personable and straightforward, and he was just what I needed at a very dark hour in my life," Ragghianti said in an interview.
There was a book about the case, then a movie with Sissy Spacek — "Marie" — in which Thompson played himself. That launched his career as an actor even as he kept a hand in on Capitol Hill.
Celebrity eased Thompson's election to an open Senate seat; he replaced Tennessee's Al Gore, who became Bill Clinton's vice president.
Serving from 1994 through 2002, Thompson got mixed reviews. He was a reliable Republican vote, but critics said he lacked the appetite for the long hours and tedium and didn't leave much of a legacy.
In 1997, he was chosen to lead a Senate inquiry into alleged campaign finance abuses by the Clinton afministration. Expanding that to look at Republican wrongdoing won him points with Democrats and independents, but angered many in his party.
They also he let the Clinton probe fizzle.
"He was rolled by Senate opponents and the Clinton machine," said Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
"He did not act with the aggressiveness and energy appropriate, given the allegations."
The final year of Thompson's Senate career, his daughter Betsy, who had bipolar disorder, died from what was deemed an accidental overdose of painkillers.
"That basically took all the proverbial wind out of his sail," said Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., who attended the funeral in 2002 and began pushing last year for Thompson to run for president.
"It took his heart right out of his body."
Thompson went back to acting, and making money, as fictional District Attorney Arthur Branch on TV's "Law & Order." He also gave up the single life, marrying Jeri, whom he'd met years earlier while grocery shopping. Then they had children.
His wife said they neither planned it nor ruled it out. "We do both believe in God having his hand in things," she said. "We went with that."
"I saw him completely get a second lease on life with Jeri and the kids," Wamp said.
About this time, Thompson was diagnosed with a non-fatal lymphoma, which required chemotherapy.
But he had a new appetite for GOP politics. He helped manage Chief Justice John Roberts' confirmation to the Supreme Court in 2005, was chairman of the State Department's International Security Advisory Board and championed President Bush's commutation of White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence in the CIA leak case — all while taping the crime series and working for ABC Radio.
When retiring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee said last year that he wouldn't seek the presidency, Wamp pressed Thompson to get in.
Thompson wasn't interested, Wamp said. But Baker intervened, and Jeri encouraged him.
No other Republican had an easy lock on the nomination.
Wamp thinks that Thompson's image and message are selling points, and so is his personal experience of "raising a second family in a different generation than the first."
"I remember when Bush 41 didn't know the price of a gallon of milk," Wamp said, referring to a much-hyped 1992 campaign incident when the first President Bush was reportedly surprised by grocery store scanners, and his critics seized on that to charge that he was out of touch with ordinary Americans.
Thompson, on the other hand, has a campaign bus with a diaper-changing table.
God given right to vote? That's a new one.
The liberal policies that Hitlery or Obama or McVain or Huckfeller will enact will cause a disaster that will redound to the discredit of the party in power. Republicans will not oppose these disastrous policies if it's a Republican president, but will do so if it's a Democrat president. And taht opposition (and the fact that the Democrats will own the disaster) will bring about a Republican Congress in 2010 and a Republican Presidential victory -- with someone more conservative than any of these folks -- in 2012.
Sorry, I’m voting for Fred. Romney talks conservative, but when it comes down to it, he has a more liberal record than McCain. It’s like being forced to choose between spoiled milk and rotten meat.
(brokered convention, brokered convention, brokered convention...)
I’m votin’ for the “oh, shiit!” candidate. FRed Thompson.
I call it that because, when they tally up the write ins, regardless of what was written in, they’ll look at each other, and all will say a collective...”Oh, shiit!”
That’s how people will write in this time around.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Vote your conscience.
Ping!
Rush Limbaugh, January 14, 2008:
Well, conservatism isn't dead because it cannot be dead. Conservatism is not manmade. Conservatism is a philosophy. It's not a scheme. It's not a plan to figure out what the American people need and want, and then give it to them. That's populism! Conservatism is a philosophy based on God-given natural rights. The Declaration of Independence, is that dead? Of course not! What's dead is leadership on the Republican side, and because there is a lack of leadership of someone who the substantive understanding of liberty and the political skills to advance it, we get all this cockamamie nonsense about the death of our principles. Our principles are not dead! Our principles cannot die. I'll tell you, in a lot of ways this reminds me of Jimmy Carter and his malaise speech. He blamed the American people for his miserable failures as president. Now we have conservatives and conservative wannabes, many of whom have held high office or hold high office or speak and write from formerly conservative outposts, who blame conservatives for their own miserable failures. What is lacking is not ideas and principles. What's lacking is the right people to speak those ideas and principles, folks. Admit it.
Fred Thompson, January 18, 2008, Greenville, South Carolina:
“The Founding Fathers had it right from the very beginning,” Thompson said. “The wisdom of the ages, the fact that our basic rights come from God and not from government, the notion that a government big enough and powerful enough to give you anything is big enough and powerful enough to take anything away from you…respect for the rule of law…the institution of the market economy…[the belief] that if a person earned a dollar, that dollar belonged in the person’s pocket…” Those should be our guiding principles, he said.
“We’re having a little discussion in the party nowadays about what that means for the future,” Thompson told the crowd. “Some people think we need to get away from the Reagan coalition, because it doesn’t exist any more.” The audience erupted into boos. “Some people seem to think that we need to be a little bit more what they called progressive…Well, I reject that concept with every fiber of my being.”
Folks, we had the right person to speak these ideas and principles. IMHO, it wasn’t the GOP’s fault, it wasn’t the other RINO’s running faults, etc. They didn’t vote in the primaries. It was the electorate’s fault. Republicans (and some cross-over) are to blame. We’re too caught up in the world and the culture of the soundbite. Fred wasn’t pretty like Mitt, and he sure didn’t pander like the Huck, but he most certainly did give us the true “Straight Talk Express” (unlike that other charlatan). Unfortunately, there’s just not enough of us voting nowadays.
I don’t get this article. He withdrew his name from the nomination. In writing. If pre printed ballots still have his name on them, that’s administrative error.
He’s not a candidate for president.
Mickey Mouse isn’t running and he gets write ins every election. The lady behind the McDonald’s counter isn’t running and you could write her in, too.
Sort of cheapens your vote when you do.
what is wrong with these people?!
Maybe so, but by 1/1/2011 - the earliest when a POSSIBLE Republican Congress can do anything (and there's no guarantee of a repeat of 1994) - you may already have 2 or 3 new Supreme Court Justices put in place by Hillary or Obama.
Neither McCain nor Romney are my favorite people to make such a choice, or to be the CINC of our armed forces, but either of them or even Huck (again, gag me) will be better than Hillary or Obama. Some things don't depend on Congress, like Executive Orders, and some things are either irreversible (like foreign policy or defense disasters) or effectively irreversible (Supreme Court Justices - for 10-20 years, and sometimes longer).
I will fight tooth-and-claw to keep Hillary or Obama (especially Obama) out of the Oval Office. The stakes are too high, and I think that the nation will far better survive a moderate or even liberal Republican than a regime headed and staffed by the anti-American lunatics on the Left.
BTW, I'll make a gentlemen's bet with both of you that Fred Thompson will endorse the Republican Party's nominee and make some speeches on his behalf. So would Reagan, as he did in 1976. Fred understands and Reagan understood that the interests of the Republican Party - no matter how loyal you are to it and its core principles - HAVE to take a back seat to the interests of the nation. That thought is in the spirit of the Founders, who initially didn't want to allow political parties on the theory (proven by subsequent history) that people would give more loyalty to their particular party than to the country.
Sorry, I’m voting for Fred. Romney talks conservative, but when it comes down to it, he has a more liberal record than McCain. It’s like being forced to choose between spoiled milk and rotten meat.
On the Republican side, that is true. The only good food was thrown out by South Carolina. However, the Dems offer you a choice between strychnine and cyanide (arsenic having left the race earlier this week). You can recover from a dose of food poisoning, but not from real poison - and I think that the analogy applies to our political situation.
Please, both of you, think about it.
I’m gonna write him in.
I'll NEVER understand why conservatives didn't support his, Hunters and Tancredo's candidacies and supported far more leftist candidates, which has landed us in the pile of crap we're in.
Conservatives would rather have a Romney or McCain? Well they got em and now all they can do is gripe about it.
McCain didn't do this to us. CONSERVATIVES did this to themselves!
I was a FredHead but he left us before I had a chance to vote for him. I will vote for Romney because at least he still has a chance to defeat the McQueeg/Huckleberry cabal.
No, if one qualified to be on the ballot (which he did), he’s still legally running whether he’s doing so actively or not -— it is not an administrative error.
And the McCain appointees would be any better? Remember, it was Republicans of a McCain stripe who gave us Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter. McCain has already said he would NOT appoint strict constructionists of the Alito type. They're too conservative (and besides, they'd be likely to strike down McCain-Feingold.) So this is a non-issue.
I think you waste your vote if you vote for someone who has already said no to the job.
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