If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. - Mario Andretti

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

When it comes to GOP candidates in 2008, there’s been one name floating around the blogosphere which has gotten a fair bit of traction, even though the man behind the name has not expressed any interest in running.  That man is Fred Thompson, and today in the NY Sun Ryan Sager lays out what’s on the line.

But there’s one candidate whose campaign he could end almost instantaneously, should he choose to run: that of Mr. Romney. Mr. Thompson is pro-life, pro-gun, anti-gay marriage, and anti-tax — like Mr. Romney. But he has one advantage over the former governor: He didn’t just come to these positions over the last year or so, in a “Road to Des Moines” conversion.

On virtually every issue, Mr. Thompson is as far right, or further, than Mr. Romney, and he has been for some time. Mr. Romney’s claim to fame so far in the campaign has been that he’s the “true conservative” in the race — in contrast to Mayor Giuliani and Senator McCain. If Mr. Thompson jumps in, however, the rationale behind Mr. Romney’s candidacy drops out.

“Romney would want [Mr. Thompson] in the race the least,” the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, Peter Brown, told me yesterday. According to Mr. Brown, Mr. Thompson “potentially has the profile that no other candidate in the race has yet demonstrated, to appeal to the mainstream conservative.”

And I think it’s fair to say that most of us are less than enthused with the group of guys we have running right now.

A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that 57% of Republicans nationwide want “more choices” for president. And given that Mr. Romney has failed to catch on, dogged as he is by an image as a flip-flopper, social conservatives are the primary Republican constituency casting about for a fresh face.

“There is this yearning for somebody else,” other than Messrs. Giuliani, McCain, and Romney, a former presidential candidate, Gary Bauer, now president of the nonprofit American Values, told me yesterday.

And where would he fit in the ideological spectrum?

“Generally speaking, he had a pretty fiscally conservative record,” the head of the Club for Growth, Pat Toomey, told me yesterday. “There’s still something approaching a void in the center of the Republican ideological spectrum. … The guy who could be dominating the center, but isn’t, is Mitt Romney.”

That’s because Romney mysteriously morphed from a pro-gay pro-abortion candidate into a fundamentalist moralizing prick.  Let me put it this way, if Romney wasn’t out pushing the same authoritarian puritanical social line as James Dobson I’d probably be solidly in his camp.  But I’m damn sure not going to vote for some rabid fundie ever again.

Third, while Mr. Thompson has an actor’s flair for talking plain and talking tough, it’s not entirely clear what qualifies him to lead a nation at war with worldwide Islamic fundamentalism.

This is absolutely true.  But it also gets back to a point I’ve made here a number of times, and detailed in this post.  Bush has a lot of good ideas, but he is so monumentally inept at communicating them he makes it virtually impossible to win anyone over to his side.  Reagan was successful in large part because of his actor’s ability to communicate, and I think Thompson is extremely Reaganesque in this sense.  Besides, in a society as vapid and celebrity-driven as ours, having someone on a hit TV show as your candidate will do nothing but help.