Waiting in the wings

As dissatisfaction with the top three Republican contenders for the 2008 nomination grow, there is more and more interest in Fred Thompson's undeclared candidacy. He may or may not have the right stuff, but he sure does have a talent for generating interest.

What I find intriguing is how he's breaking the standard rules of how politicians need to run these days. The rules say that June 2007 is too late to get into the race in terms of locking up political operatives and fund-raising. But by playing outside the lines, Thompson is keeping political junkies such as myself more interested than if he were doing the rounds in Iowa and New Hampshire. He is in the position of showing a little leg on whatever issues he wants to and keeping silent on those that he senses won't help him.

Bill Theobald in The Tennessean identifies three methods that Thompson is using to keep his name out there but to stay above the fray of the rest of the candidates in their cattle-call debates.

Talk directly to conservative voters by making extensive use of blogs, podcasts and the other tools of the new online political landscape.

Make regular public speeches in key locations to friendly audiences, and take no questions so the message is what you say in the address.

Schedule your appearances to coincide with events involving the 10 declared Republican presidential candidates.

I find Thompson's use of the Internet and talk radio to reach conservative activists fascinating. If he succeeds, he could rewrite the book on campaigning. As Salena Zito writes in the Pittsburgh Tribune, his web response to Michael Moore was a homerun for stroking conservatives just as we like to be stroked.

"We are in a time in which everybody is in the same boat, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't in media," said Breitbart from his office in California. "Fred Thompson just realized that running around the mainstream media in this particular instance worked."

"I think that in 38 seconds, he says so much," he added. "Fred Thompson knew the correct tone to take. He showed a level of sophistication that I think that people are looking for."

In one 38-second clip he bashed Moore, spoke up for freedom in Castro's Cuba, and used humor to do make his point. Exactly what conservatives such as myself enjoy. And he got all sorts of free media attention as cable news shows played the clip over and over.

His perch at ABC radio allows him the type of exposure Ronald Reagan had in the 1970. Both could have short essays on a whole variety of subjects that honed their writing skills and exposed them to the public. With conservative sites like National Review putting up Thompson's radio essays, he readily and painlessly reaches a conservative activist audience. So he had a ready platform for his criticism of the immigration bill that has so many on both sides of the ideological spectrum sputtering with anger. Yet he writes and speaks with the sort of homey metaphors that Americans since the time of Abraham Lincoln have enjoyed in their politicians .

No matter how much lipstick Washington tries to slap onto this legislative pig, it’s not going to win any beauty contests. In fact, given Congress’s track record, the bill will probably get a lot uglier — at least from the public’s point of view. And agreeing to policies before actually seeing what the policies are is a heck of a way to do business.

We should scrap this “comprehensive” immigration bill and the whole debate until the government can show the American people that we have secured the borders — or at least made great headway. That would give proponents of the bill a chance to explain why putting illegals in a more favorable position than those who play by the rules is not really amnesty.

He made me happy with his tribute to Victor Davis Hanson and the importance of teaching military history. As I was when I blogged about this subject last week, Thompson was struck by the New Republic essay by Daniel Bell on the diminishing attention paid to military history in our colleges. Thompson isn't going to go wrong with conservatives with this sort of recommendation.

If for no other reason than that we want to avoid war whenever we can, universities should at least offer the option of studying it. We know that students would sign up for the classes, because books on the subject are always reliable sellers. Television programmers have also responded to the sizable hunger for military history.

These alternate sources of information are important, but they don’t replace the need for serious scholarship in our universities. If you agree, I have a suggestion.

One thing we know for sure about colleges, they’re better than bill collectors at tracking you down. If you ever took a single class, you’ll be asked for contributions the rest of your life. Next time you get one of those calls, ask that student fundraiser to pass on the message that you’d probably give more money to the old alma mater if the school were offering more classes in military history. It’s worth a try, anyway.

Thompson has the sort of self-deprecating southern humor that appeals to the media in a way that two other Tennessee politicians, Al Gore and Bill Frist, just never had. Liz Garrigan of the Nashville Scene oozes over him in the Washington Post today while contrasting him with Al Gore.

Thompson never came off looking like a cardboard cutout -- the way Gore did as a presidential candidate -- because there was a kernel of truth to the image. Who could imagine a teenage Gore driving a pickup along Massachusetts Avenue on his way to the privileged academic bastion of St. Albans? But young Freddie Thompson probably did kick back in a Chevy, drinking a beer with his buds, after a Lawrence County High School football game. As Tennessee columnist Frank Cagle once put it, Thompson fit that truck in a way that Michael Dukakis never fit the tank.

Course, Thompson also tends to catch some slack because, at 6 feet 6 inches and with a charm and sense of humor that can crack even the most tightly clenched among us, he's someone men want to be and women want to be with. He's the John Wayne to Gore's professor. Gore was the prep-school son of a U.S. senator from Carthage, Tenn., spending most of his formative years not in the green hills of the Volunteer State but in the monument-dotted confines of Washington. Thompson was the son of a used-car salesman from Lawrenceburg, Tenn., who, like Thompson's mother, never graduated from high school.

Gore was always destined for the academic stratosphere, attending Harvard after his private-school grooming. Thompson was such a class clown and scholastic underachiever at Lawrence County High that a group of teachers got together to protest his being named "Most Athletic" by his classmates because they didn't want to reward the kid for being a goof-off.

And lines like these will disarm anyone set to criticize him for his reportedly heavy dating in between his marriages.

A case in point about Thompson's undeniable allure: At an April 18 gathering of about 60 members of Congress, organized by Rep. Zach Wamp, a Tennessee Republican, Thompson was asked about his dating history during the nearly two decades between his two marriages. In response, the one-time beau of country music singer Lorrie Morgan offered an honest assessment of his romantic history. "I was single for a long time, and, yep, I chased a lot of women," he said. "And a lot of women chased me. And those that chased me tended to catch me."

It was vintage Thompson, and there's more where that came from.

Shortly after I wrote in 2000 that Thompson bears a striking resemblance to the Klingon "Star Trek" character Worf -- high forehead, wide nose and a hairline that exposes a bald top (Google it) -- a package from the then-unmarried senator arrived in the mail. It was a picture of Worf that Thompson had signed with this message: "In the immortal words of Sawyer Brown, some girls don't like boys like me. Ah, but some girls do."

Just looking at Thompson, the allure seems rather elusive at first, but a few more lines like that and he'll have all sorts of women forgetting about voting for gender solidarity with Hillary. Gosh, he's already won the Peggy Noonan primary.

Having watched the second Republican debate the other night, it's clear to me the subject today is Fred Thompson, the man who wasn't there. While the other candidates bang away earnestly in a frozen format, Thompson continues to sneak up from the creek and steal their underwear--boxers, briefs and temple garments.

He is running a great campaign. It's just not a declared campaign. It's a guerrilla campaign whose informality is meant to obscure his intent. It has been going on for months and is aimed at the major pleasure zones of the Republican brain. In a series of pointed columns, commentaries and podcasts, Mr. Thompson has been talking about things conservatives actually talk about. Shouldn't homeowners have the right to own a gun? Isn't it bad that colleges don't teach military history? How about that Sarkozy--good news, isn't it? Did you see Tenet on Russert? His book sounds shallow, tell-all-y.

These comments and opinions are being read and forwarded in Internet Nation. They are revealing and interesting, but they're not heavy, not homework. They have an air of "This is the sound of a candidate thinking." That's an unusual sound.

Hugh Hewitt chides Noonan for her little anti-Mormon joke, but when a speechwriter of Noonan's skill notes that a soon-to-be candidate writes so as to present the unusual "sound of a candidate thinking" you know Thompsons has something.

I predict that Thompson will never be so popular as the first few weeks after he gets in. He'll draw seriously from both Giuliani and Romney. I think McCain has about reached his zenith with Republican voters after his angry advocacy of an immigration bill that infuriates so many of the base who might have been giving McCain a second look out of respect for his support of the war. And then along will stroll ol' Fred and no matter the doubts that many of us have about what exactly Thompson has done to qualify himself to be commander-in-chief, he'll just seem so much better than the current crew. Perhaps later after a few months of campaigning he'll seem more like the other politicians in the race and less like the second coming of a guy out of Hollywood to save the GOP. But until then, he sure seems to be having fun rewriting the political manuals about what a politician needs to do to run for president.