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Matt Collins
12-16-2007, 09:20 PM
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by Jeff Woods

Here comes another negative article about Fred Thompson. Big surprise. You’ve heard it all before: Fred got in too late; Fred’s cranky, lazy, a dumb Tennessee hick too, and does he even really want to be president? The headlines have been relentless: “Fred Thompson Bombs On Campaign Trail,” “Thompson’s Motivation Hard to Pinpoint,” “Thompson’s scarlet ‘L’,” “Fred’s Folly.” One story fuels another and another until Thompson fades into irrelevancy—at which point the media move on, their mission accomplished, leaving behind only the ravaged carcass of another presidential candidacy. For Thompson, that moment already may have arrived. Have you heard the latest? Another big surprise: Fred’s falling like a rock in the polls.

You can almost hear the laughter from all the writers, columnists, bloggers, radio talk-show hosts and TV blabbers—hah! Thompson thought he could run for president his own way, breaking rules imposed long ago by the national media/political establishment, and look where it’s gotten him: If he finishes poorly in the Iowa Republican caucuses in only three weeks—a weak third or even fourth is probable, according to the latest polls—then we won’t have Thompson to kick around anymore. “... [W]atching him campaign is like watching a big bear stand up and try to dance on ice,” the GOP media consultant Mike Murphy chortled on NBC’s Meet the Press back when they still spent time discussing Fred. Yes, the media can be a pitiless bitch.

I was channel-surfing the other night and there suddenly was the craggy-faced Thompson on my TV screen as District Attorney Arthur Branch in a particularly frustrating moment during an episode of Law & Order. “What the hell,” Thompson growled, throwing his spectacles on his desk. “At my age, I ought to be fishing anyway.” That’s funny, I thought, the real-life Thompson has got to be thinking the same thing.

Catching up with Thompson in South Carolina last week, I expected to find a doddering, dour shell of the likable ol’ Fred we once knew in Tennessee. Instead, he’s surprisingly energetic and appealing in his public appearances, not at all like what the media has been telling us. His audiences are enthusiastic and fairly robust by today’s campaign standards—well more than 100 people at each stop in the state’s rolling upcountry region. The crowds come alive when he emphasizes his big selling point, which is that he’s the one electable, true conservative in the race.

“The thing that I’m most proud of is that I am in the same place today in my principles as I was when I first set foot on the political stage. I’m the same guy now as I was then and I’ll be the same guy tomorrow. You can count on that,” Thompson says to applause at a Greenville cafe. “I can’ t help but get a little amused when I see my colleagues running for president coming here from other parts of the country and kind of remaking themselves against what they’ve been in their political careers for the last 20 years. I thought I was the only actor in this race. They’re putting me to shame.”

Thompson is besieged for snapshots and autographs at the end of each event, proof that he retains charisma at least for some. (“Just because he’s not jumping up and down screaming like Hillary hopped up on diet pills, that doesn’t mean he’s lazy,” one woman assures me.) If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was doing fairly well in this campaign. Too bad for Thompson he’s not attracting much news coverage anymore since his poll numbers went south.
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In a Wall Street Journal interview back in March, Thompson mused aloud about the nature of his then-unannounced candidacy: “Politics is now one big 24-hour news cycle, but we seem to spend less time than ever on real substance. What if someone harnessed the Internet and other technologies and insisted on talking about real issues in more depth than consultants would advise? What if they took risks with their race in hopes that the risks to our children could be reduced through building a mandate for good policy?”

We now know the answer to those questions. That candidate would get creamed.

Congressman Zach Wamp, the Republican from Chattanooga who helped persuade Thompson to run in the first place, is one who thinks the national media have been out to get Fred. Thompson chose to declare late, thumbing his nose at the system, telling Jay Leno when he announced in September, in fact, that he “wasn’t in the room when they made the rules.” He would decline to join the rest of the candidates in the money-grubbing, poll-driven, sound bite-dominated, nonstop bullshit of modern presidential campaigning. Or at least he wouldn’t do it until he felt like it. And for that, Wamp tells the Scene, the media are making Thompson pay.

“If they would have treated Ronald Reagan the same way they’ve treated Fred, Reagan never would have been president,” Wamp says flatly. “The national media didn’t like Fred because he wasn’t willing to dance to their tune. So what if Fred didn’t meet their schedule? The coverage has not been very balanced.”

Who would have thought that Thompson of all people, an actor who has profited greatly in politics by marketing himself as someone he’s not, would ever suffer from image difficulties? What goes around comes around, Tennessee Democrats might say. Through his two lopsided Senate races here, Democrats ridiculed Thompson’s political persona as mere image. In truth, Thompson was a Gucci-wearing lawyer/lobbyist and Washington insider who drove a Lincoln Town Car, not a red pickup truck, and only played tough guys in the movies. But in voters’ minds, he became a straight-talking bubba determined to change Washington. Democrats contended the Tennessee media treated the senator too nicely and gave the crafty Thompson a free ride to bewitch the credulous electorate. And there is certainly some truth to that.

Early in his ’94 Senate campaign, his first race for public office, he displayed many of the same tendencies that have drawn so much criticism in the media during the past three months. Thompson’s stump speech at first was an unimaginative mishmash. Thompson’s foe, Democrat Jim Cooper, who now represents Nashville in Congress, was whipping Fred at fund raising, and word was spreading around the state that Thompson was not engaged. (Sound familiar?) Thompson conceded to me during that campaign that he was unhappy at first. His main complaint was that he had to wear a suit and tie every day and cram his 6-foot-6 frame into the back of a red-white-and-blue campaign van to go to public appearances. The van was filled with beeping, flashing electronic gear—fax machines and cell phones and computers—and Thompson was annoyed by it all.

“I’m not having fun,” Thompson said then. “I’m riding around here in my rolling office and it just doesn’t feel right. It’s dark inside and it lulls you into a false sense that you can take a little nap every now and then, which you can’t do because the doggone thing is bouncing all over the road. What I’d really like to do is just get the hell out away from all the people who want to know how much money we raised today and what the polls showed yesterday, when I’m just trying to get my campaign together, and get in a truck and get in my work clothes and hit the road, go from one end of the state to the other.”

His campaign took off only after Thompson did just that, shedding the suit for blue jeans and rolling around the state in his now-famous truck—a 1990 Chevy that he had to rent from a friend. The point is that I can’t remember the Tennessee media, myself included, ever reporting that Thompson was lazy, disinterested or boring, even though all that was probably true early in that campaign. Local reporters typically are less critical of candidates than the national media. We don’t usually hold it against them if they are a little raw, especially in the beginning. The ability to wow crowds on the campaign trail and the ability to govern are different attributes. (Phil Bredesen, an abysmal speaker but a pretty decent governor in most people’s opinion, is Exhibit A for that point.)

And if Thompson was put off by the manic, often idiotic nature of political campaigns, wasn’t that a sign of sanity? When he conceded it took him a while to decide to give up his regular life to run for office—the same sort of stuff he’s been mocked for saying lately—we thought it made him seem, well, normal. We didn’t beat him up for it.

By 1996, when he was back in the truck and coasting toward reelection as perhaps the most popular politician in modern Tennessee history—almost a folk hero, really—Thompson seemed to have convinced even himself that he was actually the man voters thought he was. “[Y]ou’ve got to ask yourself, why does a person have the image that he has? You’ve got to consider the possibility that, to a certain extent, image mirrors reality,” he told me. I wonder if Thompson would still agree with that, after all the abuse he’s endured in this campaign. As it turns out, in presidential politics at least, reality is sometimes what the media/political elites decide it is.

Thompson was given no time to get his act together when he finally stepped into the spotlight as a full-fledged presidential candidate. Because he started late with sky-high expectations, the national media were after him from the beginning, pointing out his every misstep—and admittedly there were a lot of them. After speaking in Iowa, he had to ask an audience, “Can I have a round of applause?” In South Carolina, he actually said, “We need to do more of what is working and stop doing what isn’t working.” On Iraq, he made this profound point: “The solution is to do whatever we need to do, whatever is necessary to stabilize that place.” He seemed to dismiss Osama bin Laden, describing him as “more symbolism than anything else.” His first trip to Florida was really ugly. Among his faux pas, he couldn’t recall the details of Terri Schiavo’s right-to-die case. He was keeping a light schedule too and, when he did make appearances, he didn’t answer many questions from voters.

The media were in full predator mode, and it got a little ridiculous, with reporters twisting every little thing Thompson said to fit their new caricature of Fred as low-aptitude moron. Even an innocent off-air remark in New Hampshire became ammunition. Encouraging his studio to let him start his interview with Thompson, FOX News’ Carl Cameron said into his microphone: “The next president of the United States has a schedule to keep.” To which Thompson deadpanned, “And so do I.” Any reasonable person might find that self-deprecating joke refreshing in that it tended to demonstrate Thompson doesn’t have the usual politician’s Jupiter-sized ego. Instead, it produced a spate of articles and blog posts questioning whether he possessed the all-important “fire in the belly.” Here was one headline: “Even Fred Thompson Doubts He’ll Be President.”

(An aside: At a meat-and-three diner in Spartanburg, S.C., last week, Thompson joked that he misses his vegetables on the campaign trail: “If you can’t put it between two pieces of bread, I don’t get it anymore,” he said. “So I’m going to double up on vegetables when this campaign is over and I get back to normal life.” If national reporters had been there, the headline might have been: “Thompson Misses Veggies; Yearns for ‘Normal Life.’ ”)

“Fred stumbled coming out of the blocks,” one prominent Republican pollster says in an understatement. “He was rusty. His last serious campaign was 13 years ago. Nobody can stop doing something for so many years and then pick back up where he left off. That Florida trip was a real disaster. It created the impression that Fred wasn’t serious about running. That started all the stories. And there are a lot of things that fed into it. Expectations were through the roof for Fred, and they came crashing down to earth.”

It all culminated in a politician’s nightmare: a wicked skit on Saturday Night Live starring Darrell Hammond impersonating Thompson as feeble and crabby: “How badly do I wanna be your president? On a scale of one to 10, I’m about six. I’m not saying I don’t want to be your president because I kinda do. A little bit. It’s just how do you campaign when you don’t like hard work and people make you sick?” Fairly or not, the media had succeeded in giving Fred a new public face. In a span of a few weeks, he had been transformed before our very eyes into a character more closely resembling Elmer Fudd than John Wayne.

As Jay Cost, a political scientist and blogger for Real Clear Politics, tells the Scene: “We don’t know big political people personally. We only know them through the media. They become caricatures. Take George W. Bush. Right now, everyone thinks he’s stubborn. But when he was reelected, at least 51 percent of the people thought he was resolute. With Thompson, the positive spin is that he’s not overwhelmed by ambition. The negative spin is the L word. He’s lazy. That caricature has seeped into the popular consciousness, and once something goes deep into the public mind, it’s really hard to get out. Fred at this point looks like an also-ran. He’s not dead yet, but he’s on life support.”

According to many in the media, it’s all Thompson’s fault that his candidacy is failing, and he deserves no less than the Fred-is-lazy lampoon. In one of several opinion pieces that have appeared on this topic, The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel castigated Thompson for playing “this election’s Don Quixote, the impractical idealist tilting at ‘the system’ ” and pointed out that, whatever you might think of the campaign’s so-called rules, “they’re set,” and candidates must play the game if they hope to win. She blamed Thompson’s late entry into the race and subsequent inept campaign apparatus for his failure to generate much attention to detailed position papers that he’s put forth on Social Security, tax reform and other issues.

“Voters may only pay attention at the end, but having an infrastructure to make sure those voters hear you in the final months is the work of years,” Strassel wrote. “By sitting back, Mr. Thompson allowed his rivals to scoop up the well-connected policy wonks, committed state activists and aggressive fund-raisers that oil a campaign.”

Even some close to Thompson, while they think the media have mistreated Fred, acknowledge he can be fairly criticized for running an ineffective campaign. “He needed to launch with a big bang. That did not happen,” one source says. “Fred has to be prepared intellectually for a campaign, and he was not. And he didn’t have an experienced, well-organized, well-structured campaign team put together. He had a few loyalists put together in sort of a haphazard way.”

Thompson also apparently overestimated what the Internet could do for his candidacy. “Fred surrounded himself with some folks who believed that this campaign could largely be won on Fred’s celebrity via new media, YouTube, blogs, that sort of thing,” one source says. “Now, new media is an incredible asset to any campaign, but you cannot forget the basics. The Internet cannot replace knocking on doors in Iowa. In Iowa, the voters want to look at you, and they want to look at you a lot.”

The campaign has all but abandoned its early Internet strategies, which keyed on using email and blogs to tap the energy of Thompson’s grassroots supporters—all those Fred Heads we used to hear a lot about. “Starting late was a pretty big barrier in a lot of ways,” another source says. “They realized that because they were getting such a late start that they really needed to focus on other parts of the campaign. New media has become an afterthought.”

Thompson has only belatedly recognized that, as one source says, “all the marbles are on the table for Fred in Iowa.” While Mike Huckabee has focused on Iowa and soared in the polls, uniting the social conservatives once thought to be likely Thompson voters, Fred has stuck to a Southern strategy that banks on winning South Carolina on Jan. 19. Even in South Carolina, though, Huckabee has now ridden a wave of positive publicity to the top spot in the polls. Most observers think Thompson, who has all but written off New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 8, needs to finish, at worst, a strong third in Iowa on Jan. 3 to maintain viability as a candidate. “He’s got to do a lot better than he’s doing now in Iowa or he won’t make it to South Carolina,” one Thompson friend says.

Thompson is starting a barnstorming bus tour of Iowa next week, but it’s probably too late. He says he’s resigned to whatever may come. “A lot of people expected me to be like Reagan, very well scripted and slick and polished,” he said on Sean Hannity’s radio show recently, “and when I wasn’t, when I was just Fred, they were disappointed. If you want a super Type A personality who pretends to be tickled to death 24 hours a day, there are guys out there like that. I ain’t one of ’em. I got into this to talk about issues that I think are important to our country. If the personality part outweighs all that, so be it. I’ve taken my shot.”

Source:
http://www.nashvillescene.com/Stories/Cover_Story/2007/12/13/What_s_the_Matter_with_Fred_/

xd9fan
12-16-2007, 09:21 PM
its called a nap....he needs one

ecoli
12-16-2007, 09:34 PM
It sounds like he was trying to do what Paul is doing... he forgot that you needed a pure message too.

Now, imagine what Paul could do with Thompson's MSM presence and his own internet support.

Matt Collins
12-16-2007, 10:21 PM
Now, imagine what Paul could do with Thompson's MSM presence and his own internet support.
The election would be over already :cool:

Matt Collins
12-17-2007, 12:19 PM
its called a nap....he needs one

I had a news reporter tell me that he thinks Fred should gain a bit more weight to him because he looks better carrying a bit more weight.

Ridiculous
12-17-2007, 12:23 PM
Thompson on my TV screen as District Attorney Arthur Branch in a particularly frustrating moment during an episode of Law & Order. “What the hell,” Thompson growled, throwing his spectacles on his desk. “At my age, I ought to be fishing anyway.” That’s funny, I thought, the real-life Thompson has got to be thinking the same thing.



We need a Youtube of that STAT. It would be funny to spread that around. We need a Law and Order fan to find out which episode that was. It would be funny to show that Paul has overtaken Fred in the polls (in whatever state when it happens) and then play that clip.

Matt Collins
12-17-2007, 02:00 PM
We need a Youtube of that STAT. It would be funny to spread that around. We need a Law and Order fan to find out which episode that was. It would be funny to show that Paul has overtaken Fred in the polls (in whatever state when it happens) and then play that clip.
Anyone find this yet?