He is a genuine, thinking conservative. Read this page from his old Senate website and poke around in the links, there are plenty more pages. The more you read, the more you respect him.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010716095745/thompson.senate.gov/federalism.html
Thank you, Graymatter.
Good detective work there. The most appealing part of Thompson's candidacy would be that he is a federalist just like Reagan. The rest of the field doesn't even understand the term.