I posted here how I was literally swept off my feet by the Republican Presidential hopeful, Fred Thompson but that romance fizzed even before it got started. Now our guest blogger, Connie Wilson, tells us exactly what went wrong...

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Fred on th the campaign trail... 

When Fred Thompson announced on Jay Leno’s “Tonight” show on June 12, 2007, that he was a candidate for the Republican nomination for President, ending months of speculation, his prospects looked rosy. A March 29^th Gallup-USA Today survey showed Thompson running third, just behind John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, among Republicans in the race. Thompson’s poll numbers in September were in the high 20s and low 30s. By the end of the year, his poll numbers had sunk to single digits.

Fred possessed a commanding stage presence, that familiar air of gravitas, and built-in national recognition from his movie and television roles. He also had been Minority Counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, better known as the Watergate Committee, in 1973-74. Thompson was a lawyer and a former Senator from Tennessee, elected on November 8, 1994, to fill the unexpired portion of the term left vacant by Al Gore’s resignation. He was sworn in for his first term on 12/2/94.

Thompson was re-elected the Republican Senator from Tennessee in 1996. Responding to charges of “laziness” leveled against him throughout his career Thompson retorted in an article entitled “The Fred Express” in NewsMax magazine (September 2007 interview with John Fund, columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.com and The American Spectator): “That’s what they said about me before I ran for Senate the first time, and that’s what they said about me two years later, when I ran for re-election. I won the first time by 21 points, and by 25 points the second time. That was in a state that Bill Clinton carried twice. If you can do that while being lazy, I recommend it to everyone.”

What, exactly, happened, then, to the political Second Coming of Fred Thompson? Why didn’t his run for the roses, his political comeback, have a fairy tale ending?

There are several theories that help explain why, in Columbia, South Carolina on election night, Fred Thompson stood before his supporters for the final time, saying, “We will always be bound by a close bond because we have traveled a very special road, bound together for a very special purpose. We’ll always stand strong together, we’ll always stand strong together, and I can’t thank you enough for that.”

And, as the cartoon finale goes, “Th-th-th-that’s, all, Folks.”

Shortly thereafter, Thompson announced he was dropping his bid for the Presidency and, soon after that, he endorsed his old Senate colleague John McCain for the Republican nomination for the Presidency.

What went wrong?

The Jeri Jinx: Some say Thompson’s second wife, Jeri Kehn Thompson, a fortyish former Republican National Committee spokeswoman and political media consultant at Verner, Lipfert, Bernhard and McPherson in Washington, D.C., before their marriage, jinxed Fred’s attempt at a political comeback.

Mrs. Thompson, a native of Naperville, Illinois, worked for the Senior Republican Conference and the Republican National Committee before she and Fred tied the knot in June of 2002. Fred was 59 when they married, Jeri 35. Thompson started campaigning in March of 2007. Before Labor Day, he had fired his manager and a senior staffer.

Political analyst Dick Morris, who wrote in On Politics. “She (Jeri) appears to be running things and approving all hirings in Thompson’s campaign. She is out of her league and is not helping her husband. You can’t have someone running a campaign who can’t be fired. Mrs. Thompson needs to find something else to do all day.”

The Huckabee Hex: Reports say that it was Jeri Thompson who suggested that her husband present himself as “the true Conservative” in the race. Along came Mike Huckabee of Arkansas who doesn’t even believe in evolution; the Huckabee Hex was daunting. Now, the uber-Conservative Republicans had a candidate in the race. The evangelicals and conservatives in the states that Thompson had counted on were divided.

It took Thompson some time to find his debate sea legs (those debates he actually attended, that is). When Fred finally learned his lines, learned to hit his mark, and got his act together, the play was over.

Style Over Substance: Fred just never seemed to have any concrete plans for what he would do if elected President. I heard him give his pitch “live” in Davenport. It was all vague talk about being a Federalist, with equally vague statements about immigration, Iraq (“I think it’s going to be successful”), and truthfulness.

Fred told the crowd, on December 7^th (fittingly, Pearl Harbor Day):“I’m trying to establish myself as someone who tells the truth. We don’t want to go into the woods looking for the bear, but sometimes the bear visits you.” Where was the concrete talk of how many troops, how many years, and what exit strategy, if any, Thompson would employ in Iraq? There was none of that. It was all style and little substance, a charge that critics enjoy lobbing at Barack Obama.

In Davenport, Thompson railed against liberal judges, declaring “we must quit spending our children’s birthright” and inspired his supporters with jabs at Hillary Clinton.

During the January 10^th Myrtle Beach, South Carolina debate, Fred scored well with rhetoric like, “This is a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” or, “We need to be a nation of high fences and wide gates. And we get to be the ones who decide when to open the gates and when to close them.” Sound bites.

Ironically, it was Fred Thompson himself, who said in his Wall Street Journal interview, “Politics is now one big 24-hour news cycle, but we seem to spend less time than ever on real substance.”

Unsettled GOP Scores: The January/February, 2008, issue of Mother Jones magazine contains an article by David Corn (pp. 17-19) entitled “Thompson’s Bad GOP History: Drop Dead Fred.” Fred Thompson was the Chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 1997. As such, he managed to ruffle Republican feathers by not sticking to the Republican script, i.e., pointing out only Democratic fundraising misdeeds.

As David Corn writes in Mother Jones, “Given that it was illegal for foreigners to contribute to congressional and presidential campaigns, the question was, had the GOP won power with laundered money from an overseas source?” Thompson grilled Haley Barbour, recent head of the Republican National Committee, asking, “When you are sitting on a boat in the Hong Kong harbor talking to a gentleman who is a citizen of Taiwan, that does raise certain other potential implications in terms of appearance.” Wrote Corn, “Thompson was practically calling the former chief of his own party a liar.”

The Republicans felt that Thompson’s task as Committee Chair was to turn the Democratic fundraising imbroglio into the new version of Watergate. Instead, Fred mismanaged key aspects of the hearings and managed to drag GOP wrongdoers into the mix, even using the occasion to pitch substantive campaign-finance reform.

During the 32 days of the hearings, Thompson exposed such things as Al Gore’s Buddhist-temple fundraiser, but he angered the conservative branch of his party by going so far as to call for the passage of the McCain-Feingold reform bill, a bill hated by most Republicans. When he ran out of hearing time, GOP Senate leaders refused to give Thompson an extension.

Don Goldberg, a Clinton White House strategy team worker on the hearings, said, “We were well aware that Fred Thompson was under huge pressure and criticism from Republican staff and senators. They did not want him to bring up any of the non-Clinton stuff. They were furious.”

The Weekly Standard quoted a Senate Republican aide saying, “This is easily the worst congressional investigation in recent memory. Thompson doesn’t understand how to run a Senate hearing, and he never bothered to learn because Fred Thompson’s agenda has always been Fred Thompson. He’ s trying to look bipartisan because he thinks that will win him the favorable media coverage he needs for his (potential) Presidential campaign.”

Another Senior Republican aide from that time said, “This was the first time he strutted his stuff and it didn’t go down very well. His star began to tarnish.”

The Fire-in-the-Belly Charge: The most common complaint about Thompson’s failed attempt at a political comeback was that he was lazy as a campaigner. Fred’s heart just didn’t seem to be in it. Fred seemed not to be running, but ambling, towards the White House.

While other candidates were making several stops a day in the early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, Thompson didn’t show up at all or scheduled only one stop a day.

Fred’s defense? “I may not do frenetic campaigning well, but I am purposeful and people seem to appreciate someone who follows a plan rather than engage(s) in perpetual motion. I assure you I have a plan on how to win. And the money to support that plan is coming in quite nicely, thank you.” (“The Fred Express”, NewsMax, September, 2007).

Fred’s plan, taken from Rudy Giuliani’s playbook, was like a student trying to turn his term paper in 3 days late, hoping to use excuses to get the teacher to accept it.

Why should Rudy, who sat in Florida basking in the sun while the other candidates braved Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s wintry blasts, be “gifted” with Florida’s delegates? Why should a Freddie-come-lately be given the South’s votes? One of the most embarrassing Thompson appearances during his short-lived campaign was at Florida’s GOP Convention in October in front of 4,000 conservative party faithful. As the Miami Herald put it the following day, “Dozens of people asked, ‘Is that it?’” Fred winged it, appeared ill-prepared, ill-at-ease and unfriendly.

Candidates addressing the gathering had paid $100,000 to speak. They appeared in alphabetical order. Fred appeared following Rudy Giuliani, who spoke for 35 minutes; John McCain, who spoke for 25 minutes; and Mitt Romney, who also spoke for 25 minutes.

Thompson emerged and made a remark about “wanting the crowd to get to know my wife, Jeri.” He waved at his wife, who had already disappeared from the stage. Fred spoke for five minutes, made no substantial policy statements, and then tried to exit both stage left and stage right, so that he wouldn’t have to “press the flesh” and exit through the crowd. Fred’s unwillingness to mingle became the subject of a Jon Stewart “Daily Show” joke, when Stewart suggested that perhaps Fred could hire a stand-in to do that part of campaigning for him.

The money train derailed along with the campaign. It took 4 months for Thompson’s campaign to raise its first $13 million, largely contributions from “retired” and “lawyers,” first and second among donors to Thompson’s campaign. (“Thompson’s Bad GOP History: Drop Dead Fred,” David Corn, January/February 2008 Mother Jones).

Fred Thompson’s Agenda Has Always Been Fred Thompson: When a candidate campaigns with a television ad that ends with the words: “Strength, Conviction, Honesty,” it strikes you as the definition of hypocrisy to learn that he supported Scooter Libby, helped cause the savings and loan crisis by lobbying for the St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 that deregulated the savings and loan industry, and once was employed by ousted Haitian dictator Jean Bertrand Aristide.

For a guy who claimed to be the Arch-Conservative in the race for the nomination and maintained he was staunchly pro-life, it was interesting to learn that he worked as an attorney for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association in 1991 and 1992.

When campaigning in Tennessee in 1994, Thompson duded up as a regular guy, in blue jeans and boots and drove a 1990 red Chevy pick-up truck to rallies. As Kevin Dragon wrote in “Political Animal” (May 7, 2007), Thompson just rented the truck in 1994. “Basically, he just drove the thing the final few hundred feet before each campaign event, and then ditched it for something nicer as soon as he was out of sight of the yokels. Quite a man of the people, no?”

Thompson pretended to be an outspoken advocate of tighter ethics and campaign finance rules, while both he and his two adult sons (Tony and Daniel), as well as Thompson, made millions lobbying for various groups. Said Paul C. Light, New York University Professor of Government, “Lobbying by a family member is an ugly practice, no matter who the Senator is, because it creates the appearance that his family is exploiting his stature and position.”

Fred Thompson’s first lobbying client was Westinghouse, which hired him to seek federal money for an experimental nuclear reactor on the Clinch River in Tennessee, a $1.7 billion project, which was killed by Congress in 1983. When Thompson said (on December 7^th, in Davenport, Iowa during a campaign stop at the Thunder Bay Grille), “Do it often. Do it truthfully. Do it with some credibility,” he must have meant lobbying, because that seems to be the primary family business. Son Tony never worked as a lawyer other than for his dad. Son Daniel was paid $176,600 over four years as a “management consultant” to Thompson’s PAC, although the PAC had no office, phone or employees and raised no money. (“The Fred Express,” NewsMax magazine, September, 2007).

Political analyst Dick Morris (NewsMax, Sept., 2007) summed up Fred Thompson’s Presidential campaign bust best this way, “Fred Thompson is the ultimate insider, a friend of the rich and powerful, and a former corporate lobbyist who worked for whoever was willing to pay the tab…He’s definitely one of the boys. And his blatant nepotism is an abuse of the system and the clearest example of a business-as-usual attitude…Thompson is not at all a candidate of change…Thompson is a charismatic one-of-a-kind politician, but the reality is that Thompson is the ultimate insider, and unless he makes some changes, it won’t be long before voters understand that.”