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Reagan Appeal
In many ways, it makes sense that Fred Thompson would appeal to Republican activists looking for a new Ronald Reagan. After all, the former Tennessee Senator, like Reagan, is an ideological conservative with folksy charm who worked as an actor before entering elective politics. But an incident early in Thompson's Presidential campaign showed that being compared with an iconic figure like Reagan has its downsides.During a September swing through Florida, Thompson fielded a question about Terry Schiavo. She was the brain-damaged woman who died in 2005 after a lengthy legal battle between her husband, who wanted to disconnect the feeding tube keeping her alive, and her parents, who held out hope that their daughter might recover. The Schiavo case became a flash point in Washington's partisan battles, with most politicians forced to choose sides.
When asked about his position, Thompson said, "I can't pass judgment on it. I know that good people were doing what they thought was best." And then: "I don't remember the details of it."
That the former Senator would duck a controversial question jolted those who want him to claim the Reagan mantle. Thompson got the message. By October, he was back in Florida to tackle the issue again. He hadn't addressed it directly the first time, he said, because of the circumstances under which his own daughter, Betsy, died in 2002. She'd fallen into a coma caused by an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.
"I had to make those decisions with the rest of my family," he said. "No matter which decision you make, you will never know whether you made the right decision. Making this into a political football is something I don't welcome, and this will probably be the last time I ever address it. It should be decided by the family. The federal government and the state government, too, except for the court system, should stay out of these matters."
With its antigovernment rhetoric, the answer was Reaganesque. Would it win over those on the right, for whom keeping Schiavo alive was a bedrock issue? The question was answered, in part, when the National Right-to-Life Committee gave Thompson its endorsement, bolstering his conservative credentials. Still, some observers wondered whether Thompson was ready for political prime time.
Fred Dalton Thompson is comfortable assuming the role of authority figure -- on-screen and off. He's done it all his adult life. Some will recall how, as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973, Thompson helped expose the existence of a White House taping system, a turning point in the unraveling of Richard Nixon's Presidency. Others no doubt remember Thompson as the character actor who fairly oozed gravitas in such movies as The Hunt for Red October and Die Hard 2. Then came Thompson's eight-year Senate career, notable for such turns as his chairmanship of hearings into alleged attempts by China's government to influence Bill Clinton's reelection campaign. Most recently, Thompson has made his mark playing Manhattan District Attorney Arthur Branch on NBC's popular Law and Order. But who is the real Fred Thompson? And can a man who may be best known for playing other people convince the public he's ready to be the ultimate real-life authority figure?
I sat down with Thompson in his McLean, Virginia, home in September, just as his late-starting candidacy was getting rolling. At the time, most national polls put him a strong second in the GOP primary field behind former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. (A fund-raising report filed at the end of that month showed him with some $7 million on hand; Giuliani had $16.6 million; and ex-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, $9 million.)
He expressed frustration with the customs he says have been concocted for Presidential contenders -- the endless fund-raising, the nonstop campaigning, the expectation that you give an audience just what it wants to hear.
"I think people are ready for something different," says the 65-year-old Tennessean, the grandson of a sharecropper and son of a used-car salesman. His own experience, he says, shows that conventional campaign tactics don't always work: In his first Senate run, in 1994, he trailed his opponent by 20 points in the polls. Then he ditched his suit for jeans and a plaid shirt and began touring the state in a red pickup truck, using the bed to speak to voters in blunt terms and down-home language. He won handily and so impressed GOP leaders that only weeks after he was sworn in, they tapped him to give the party's response to a radio address by President Clinton. To critics, that's all history. They say that, after an early surge, Thompson's slide in the polls as the Iowa caucus neared (and ex-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee made inroads among conservative voters) suggests he's wrong about what the public wants -- or that he's not the right leading man.
Dick Morris, a Fox News analyst and ex-Bill Clinton advisor, acknowledged the potential of a candidate with the same quick wit and country wisdom as the prosecutor Thompson plays on TV. Instead, Morris says, voters "get this sort of shambling, rambling wreck kind of candidate that kind of shambles his way onto the stage."
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