Thompson Redux

Fred Thompson does, of course, have some assets in his quest for the White House -- he's divorced, for example, like all good Republicans. And more to the point, he's a good television performer especially in the context of Senate hearings. He got his start in the public eye as minority counsel on the Watergate committee and his major role in the GOP caucus was to preside over the endless, pointless investigations of the Clinton administration and to show up on cable shows. He's pretty good at it. That said, presidential candidates don't actually spend much time on television in that way. He'll almost certainly have the best Meet The Press performance of everyone in the race, but his setpiece oratory is nothing to write home about.

More to the point, though, the generic conservative Republican the GOP wants to nominate is a generic conservative Republican governor. A 1990s-vintage generic conservative Republican Senator like Thompson is going to have a poisonous voting record, chock full of efforts to take grandma's health care away and dump toxic sewage into your backyard. It is absolutely, vitally crucial to the Republican Party's electoral prospects to obscure its basic slash-and-burn mentality, and that means people with a Gingrich-era voting record are no good. An unconventional Republican like John McCain might be able to wriggle away from his roll call votes and be defined by something else, but Thompson managed to be in the Senate for decent stretch of time without developing any signature issues or anything -- there's nothing to define him but his voting record.

Comments

I think Fred Thompson and Tommy Thompson should make a joint agreement to get in the race, just to confuse the hell out of everyone.

Posted by right | March 27, 2007 10:37 AM

Seriously though, what ever happened to Tom Ridge? Duct tape aside, he's as close to an ideal candidate as the Republicans are likely to come up with. His being pro-choice doesn't seem much of a negative in the current race (given, you know, Giuliani, Romney, and Thompson have all been pro-choice at one time or another).

What's really remarkable is that the ideal potential candidate for the Republicans continues to be Jeb Bush.

Posted by right | March 27, 2007 10:39 AM

I think the Thompson=Reagan equation falters exactly on that governor vs. senator fault line. While they were both mediocre actors, Reagan had years of experience pretending to look important and official, staging photo ops, and managing his image to appear like a real live executive office holder.

Thompson, on the other hand, has no experience to speak of in the crucial field of pretending to look important. His fame got him a seat in the Senate (I think that causation is accurate), but he has never used his "moxie," so to speak, to act like a leader. He's a bit player on TV, was a bit player in the Senate, and won't make it past the brief swooning he's receieving on the Corner.

Posted by Ben | March 27, 2007 10:43 AM

"That said, presidential candidates don't actually spend much time on television in that way. He'll almost certainly have the best Meet The Press performance of everyone in the race, but his setpiece oratory is nothing to write home about."

Ugh. It's not about MTP or the quality of the oratory.

Many, many voters who aren't engaged with politics make their decision based on their read of a candidate's personality and character, as received via TV appearances and soundbites, to which they are exposed almost every day on TV.

If John Kerry had had a better TV personna, he likely would have won the '04 election. If Al Gore had had a better TV personna, he definitely would have won the '00 election outside the margin of error.

In open seat Presidential elections, TV personna matters more than any other single factor.

Posted by Petey | March 27, 2007 10:45 AM

In open seat Presidential elections, TV personna matters more than any other single factor.

For one thing, no. Presidential elections are mostly determined by factors totally outside the control of campaigns -- demographics, macroeconomic trends, events in the world, etc. After that comes television. I dispute that Thompson's TV persona in the context of a presidential campaign will be that great. You need to look good on TV speaking at a rally, or delivering a "big speech" not good on TV sitting behind a desk.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | March 27, 2007 11:03 AM

I bow to no one in my distaste for the Reagan presidency (as opposed to the California governship where he had some redeeming qualities, as depressing as it may be to think of him beating Pat Brown), but "mediocre actor" isn't quite fair. He was in the second rack of Hollywood male stars of his time, but the competition wasn't Brad Pitt and Kevin Federline, it was Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant. A bit limited in range, and limited in the parts he was offered at the end of his career, but all-in-all a fairly good performer with some moving performances to his credit. And I'd love to see the original version of That Hagan Girl before it was censored to deny the world the sizzling on screen sexiness of the embraces of Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple.

Posted by Gene O'Grady | March 27, 2007 11:04 AM

Jim Gilmore clears his throat. "Hey, Matt, what about me?"

I find it interesting that more Republican governors from the mid-1990s GOP heyday aren't trying to get into the race. I found a list of governors from 1997, and you have such notables as Gilmore, Ridge, T. Thompson, Frank Keating of Oklahoma (who could steal some of Giuliani's terror-target thunder), and Marc Racicot of Montana--any of whom could be construed as strong candidates in 2008 but not in 2012 or later.

On that list are also some other notables--Pete Wilson, John Rowland, Jim Edgar, William Weld, John Engler, Christine Whitman, George Pataki, and Bill Janklow. A veritable demolition derby.

For what it's worth, I think it's likely that the field 10 months from now will look vastly different than it does today. I don't believe the current top three in either party--Clinton, Edwards, Obama, Giuliani, McCain, or Romney--will be competitive and probably not even running by the New Hampshire primary.

Posted by jlw | March 27, 2007 11:21 AM

Since when do voting records matter as long as those records were on the "conservative" side? All he has to do is talk about cutting taxes, bleat some Christian nonsense, and remind us about 9/11 and no one on the right is going to care about the rest of the stuff.

Posted by Ethel-to-Tilly | March 27, 2007 11:25 AM

Seriously though, what ever happened to Tom Ridge? Duct tape aside, he's as close to an ideal candidate as the Republicans are likely to come up with.

Duct tape and color codes and those mysterious terror alerts that stop happening as soon as the votes for Ohio for in. Ridge's political career was ended by his ridiculous, shambolic tenure in the Bush administration. The same thing happened to Tommy Thompson, who in 2000 I would have pegged as the Republican best equipped to be president.

Posted by Dave Weigel | March 27, 2007 11:28 AM

Thompspon was a better actor than Reagan. That counts for something, doesn't it?

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | March 27, 2007 11:39 AM

Ridge's political career was ended by his ridiculous, shambolic tenure in the Bush administration.

I'm not sure I buy that. He can always fall back on the defense that, as ridiculous as all that may have seemed, there were no terrorist attacks on the US during his tenure. And he can subtly blame the Bush administration for the goofiness. We still have color codes, after all.

Posted by right | March 27, 2007 11:49 AM

"For one thing, no. Presidential elections are mostly determined by factors totally outside the control of campaigns"

I'm not saying TV persona is responsible for 90% of a Presidential election's results. Other factors are certainly important.

But especially in open seat Presidential races, TV persona really is the most important single factor. I don't think it's all that much of a coincidence that since the dawning of TV, 13 of 14 elections have been won by the candidate with the better TV persona. (1968 being the exception.)

Re-election races are a bit different, of course. The Democrats could have nominated John Wayne in 1984, and Reagan still would have won, since the economy was booming and we were at peace. But even though Reagan still would have won against someone with a superior TV persona, the race would have been much, much tighter than it was.

Swing voters mainly make their decisions based on what they think the candidates are like as people, as judged through the idiot box.

Posted by Petey | March 27, 2007 11:52 AM

Woo! Janklow for President!

Posted by JP | March 27, 2007 12:42 PM

For what it's worth, I think it's likely that the field 10 months from now will look vastly different than it does today. I don't believe the current top three in either party--Clinton, Edwards, Obama, Giuliani, McCain, or Romney--will be competitive and probably not even running by the New Hampshire primary.

I can maybe buy that for the GOP, but what is your rationale for the Democrats? The problem with the GOP candidates is that the base would have clear and obvious problems with all of them. I don't see that at all with the leading Democrats - Clinton may be disliked by the pointy-headed internet base, but actual working-class Democrat types (especially African Americans) tend to like her, which is rather different from McCain, who is disliked by rank and file Republicans. And neither Obama nor Edwards has anything that would disqualify them from the nomination in the way that Romney and Giuliani's unorthodox positions might.

So I'm not buying this at all.

Posted by John | March 27, 2007 12:54 PM

and Bill Janklow. A veritable demolition derby.

Tasteless metaphor alert: Bill Janklow's political career ended when he killed a motorcyclist in a car crash. I know there's not much you can do to disqualify yourself from being a Republican officeholder, but involuntary manslaughter has to be up there.

Posted by Seth D. | March 27, 2007 12:59 PM

"An unconventional Republican like John McCain..."

Good grief, Matt, do we really have to go over this again? Even with McCain-Feingold and a very, very few other "heterodox" positions, John McCain is one of the most consistently party-line Republicans in the Senate. Full stop. In terms of voting records, it doesn't get a whole lot more conventional than McCain. The media, because they like him, pretend that it isn't so, but that doesn't make it any less true. The difference between McCain's Gingrich-era votes and Thompson's Gingrich-era votes (or, for that matter, Chuck Hagel's, etc.) is very, very small.

Posted by jkd | March 27, 2007 1:18 PM

There are at least three generic conservative former governors running, with no traction whatsoever. I think it's pretty clear that the GOP doesn't want them.

(Then again, who could they possibly want this cycle? Anyone who's really good for the base on paper has been woefully discredited by the Republican brand's collapse over the past two years, e.g. George Allen. Could Ashcroft unite the base?)

Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra | March 27, 2007 1:24 PM

John:

All I have is a gut feeling (and a gut filled with a Jamaican jerk chicken burrito, no less) but I think that while Sen. Clinton doesn't have a problem with the base right now, the more they learn about her the less they will like her. Her hawkish position on the war and her tepid reply on the question of whether homosexualaity is immoral are just two of the places where her positions are running counter to the base. I think most of her support is from the folks who aren't ready to focus on the race yet and on the candidates, and when they do, look out.

As for Edwards and Obama, there's nothing I can point to and say--that!--but there's ten months to go before the first votes, which is plenty of time for a war, a personal tragedy, a minor gaffe blown up into a made-for-cable-tv-news frenzy, a natural disaster or a self-fulfilling prophesy. Or all of these and more. I hope I'm wrong, as I think Edwards and Obama (and Richardson, just to round out the top four) would make excellent presidents. I just feel the target is moving and the arrows that are in the air are aimed at where the target is now, not where it will be when they fall to Earth.

Posted by jlw | March 27, 2007 2:51 PM

I think the Republican front runners are perfect. The Republicans know one thing for sure about 2008 - they are going to lose big. They want a candidate that they can disavow. They want someone who is safe to be labled a loser. They want the decades of jokes about their next candidate to be of as little consequence as possible to the Republicans who run in 2012, 2016, 2020, 2024 etc. They want to be able to say, "Well, he wasn't a REAL Republican."

Posted by Njorl | March 27, 2007 3:30 PM

"There are at least three generic conservative former governors running, with no traction whatsoever. I think it's pretty clear that the GOP doesn't want them."

Depends on whether by "the GOP", you mean the members, or the people running it. The latter group are getting pretty hostile these days to candidates who actually believe in anything besides sucking up to big business.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | March 27, 2007 5:40 PM

As I remember Thompson's career, he was in charge of some phony investigation about Gore and campaign finance which turned up Haily Barbour in the Hong Kong harbor on (http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/1997-4/1997-04-26-CNN-15.html) and then Thompson stopped because it got so egregious that he wouldn't continue and lost a lot of support among the Rethugs
So his is just a minor thug not corrupt enough to be a Rethug President.

Posted by marc sobel | March 27, 2007 5:47 PM

13 of 14 elections have been won by the candidate with the better TV persona.

The nice thing about tautologies is that they tend to be highly accurate, especially if they can be defined in retrospect.

Posted by Scott Lemieux | March 27, 2007 5:52 PM

"The nice thing about tautologies is that they tend to be highly accurate, especially if they can be defined in retrospect."

I understand the criticism, but I still think the criteria is reasonably valid.

There are a number of criteria which work pretty well for post-WWII Presidential elections.

- Which candidate is taller?
- Which candidate is running from a location further South?
- Which candidate has a better TV persona?

Any of these could just be examples of finding a series of coincidences that fit the limited set of data points. But I'd suggest that the TV persona criteria makes an immense amount of sense, given the way our elections happen.

Posted by Petey | March 27, 2007 6:16 PM

Depends on whether by "the GOP", you mean the members, or the people running it. The latter group are getting pretty hostile these days to candidates who actually believe in anything besides sucking up to big business.

Indeed, Mr. Bellmore, and I'm curious to see if this is the electoral cycle that finally brings the crack-up. Unfortunately, I want the social conservatives and the Money Power to be discredited. Hmm, perhaps we can take them sequentially. The social conservatives flex their muscles during the primaries, this time without being led around by the nose by the candidate anointed by Big Business. We then get someone like Brownback for the general, and use him to discredit the social conservatives. The non-schmibertarian libertarians take over what's left of the Republican Party, and all is well.

Posted by mds | March 27, 2007 6:31 PM

Don't expect the "crackup" to be all that spectacular, or permanent. Two party systems are going to have two parties, after all, and nothing is quite so effective at focusing the mind on the need to work together than a good defeat. And all that's needed to paste the coalition back together is for the social conservatives to find somebody who isn't hostile to business interests, which isn't much of a challenge.

Just as there's nothing quite like victory to make one start wondering if you really need to deliver for that pesky interest group that helped put you in power. The Democratic party has it's fracture lines, too, you know. And they're already starting to show.

Anyway, expecting major factions of public opinion to remain unrepresented by a major party for any significant amount of time is foolish. Social conservatives aren't just going to disappear, as much as you'd like them to.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | March 27, 2007 7:14 PM

"Anyway, expecting major factions of public opinion to remain unrepresented by a major party for any significant amount of time is foolish. Social conservatives aren't just going to disappear, as much as you'd like them to."

Gun control advocates have disappeared from mainstream political culture, as neither party thought it could find a place for them inside the tent.

It happens.

Posted by Petey | March 27, 2007 7:30 PM

Yeah, that's why the Democrats weren't willing to give D.C. a Rep. in the House if they had to restore their right to own guns, too. Because gun control advocates have disappeared from the mainstream political culture. Get real, if that had really happened, that amendment wouldn't have been regarded as a "poison pill". If that had really happened, the DNC wouldn't have had it's PR firm create the AHSA front organization.

Kerry, the last Democratic nominee, was a gun controller who posed with dead geese to pretend otherwise, but who couldn't bring himself to miss a gun control vote on Super Tuesday. And none of the leading Democratic prospects can plausibly claim to be any different. You can't get the Democratic nomination without being a gun controller. Even if it's now understood that you need to lie about it to win the general election.

Anybody care to claim that Guliani is really a social conservative in sheep's clothing?

Posted by Brett Bellmore | March 27, 2007 8:08 PM

Anyway, expecting major factions of public opinion to remain unrepresented by a major party for any significant amount of time is foolish.

And yet, as a concerted political force, the Religious Right is only a few decades old. In fact, the doctrine of the Southern Baptist Convention for a century has stated that church and state should be separate, and that the church should not rely upon secular government to achieve its ends. So it's not completely ridiculous to believe that they could once again become much less monolithic.

Social conservatives aren't just going to disappear, as much as you'd like them to.

You mean, "like we'd like them to," right, Mr. Bellmore? Since a libertarian would naturally despise having his life micromanaged by the Religious Right at least as much as by the Left. Or will it be okay to stone the whores, as long as you can play with your firearms and pretend that makes you libertarian?

And none of the leading Democratic prospects can plausibly claim to be any different.

True. No wonder former Senator Clinton took such a beating Upstate in her failed bid for reelection: it was her desire to confiscate everyone's 30-06.

Anybody care to claim that Guliani is really a social conservative in sheep's clothing?

No, I'm willing to claim that he's a vicious, racist authoritarian, which I'll grant could be sufficient for the Religious Right, since he won't really care if they beat stinking homos to death, as long as he has more political power.

Posted by mds | March 27, 2007 9:18 PM

Anybody care to claim that Guliani is really a social conservative in sheep's clothing?

I dunno. He wasted a lot of political capital trying to ban a dung-speckled painting of the Virgin Mary. (And though it was always the "elephant dung" part that was repeated, ad nauseum, as the offending part, the piece was also decorated with labia cut out of wack mags.)

Doesn't sound like Bernie Sanders to me.

Posted by jlw | March 27, 2007 9:26 PM

"And yet, as a concerted political force, the Religious Right is only a few decades old."

Well, duh; The religous right is a force of reaction. Until a few decades ago the government wasn't doing much that would have prompted that reaction.

"You mean, "like we'd like them to," right, Mr. Bellmore?"

Well, no, I'd like them to change a bit, become a bit less determined to dictate how other people live, but I don't particularly care to wipe them out. I mean, I don't go around trying to force the Amish to drive cars, do I?

"Or will it be okay to stone the whores, as long as you can play with your firearms and pretend that makes you libertarian?"

You know, I think it's one of the tragedies of American history, that opponents of gun control wound up among "social conservatives", when the honest truth is that a lot of us are quite liberal. If the ACLU had just decided to be principled, they'd be the 800 lb lobbying gorilla, not the NRA, and we wouldn't have this idiotic assumption that if somebody likes the 2nd amendment, and doesn't like judicial usurpations, they must be James Dobson in camo.

"No, I'm willing to claim that he's a vicious, racist authoritarian"

Cool, then we're in agreement about him. ;)

Posted by Brett Bellmore | March 27, 2007 10:05 PM

Yeah, that's why the Democrats weren't willing to give D.C. a Rep. in the House if they had to restore their right to own guns, too. Because gun control advocates have disappeared from the mainstream political culture. Get real, if that had really happened, that amendment wouldn't have been regarded as a "poison pill".

Actually, the reason it was considered such a point pill was because the local government of DC didn't want it in there. Part of leaving gun control issues "up to the states" is not forcing states to have looser gun control laws than they would prefer. Gun control advocates aren't mainstream in national elections, but in DC, the gun ban is a majority-held mainstream political belief, as surely as pro-gun sentiments in Texas are the mainstream. No Democrat is going to support forcing laws on a majority-African-American polity that they don't want.

Posted by Constantine | March 28, 2007 12:47 AM

Until a few decades ago the government wasn't doing much that would have prompted that reaction.

Well, except for the Bryan crowd, but they weren't worshiping Mammon back then. And they still weren't enough of a force to consistently swing elections.

The latest wave had its roots in reaction to the enforcement of racial equality and a woman's right to make her own reproductive decisions. They weren't out as a unified political force over the New Deal, and not even all that much over the Great Society, and I think attempting to roll back the rights they have picked is reprehensible. I mean, really, big government magically appeared right before Reagan? No, I don't think they need to be eliminated; I think they need to go back to their own stated principles and stop trying to corrupt church and state by combining them. Heck, I'll stop going on so much about "a well-regulated militia" if it means we can stiffen the First Amendment back up.

You know, I think it's one of the tragedies of American history, that opponents of gun control wound up among "social conservatives", when the honest truth is that a lot of us are quite liberal.

Yeah, I know. Webb, Tester, and Schweitzer all support a woman's reproductive autonomy, along with firearm rights. In this they handily beat out Representative Paul, nominal Libertarian. And perhaps if a bunch of the gun rights crowd that sat it out on the Chet Edwards amendment to the Real ID bill, the way the NRA did, actually cared about genuine creeping authoritarianism, we wouldn't be in this fix. Oh, but I forgot, it's the ACLU's fault, because they don't interpret one amendment the way you do, so never mind the rest. I call this the "Reynolds" school of Schmibertarianism.

Posted by mds | March 28, 2007 2:01 AM