Did Fred Thompson Spend His Time “Saying Nothing”? Not If You Read the Transcript.

I’d like to follow up on Roger “Event? What Event?” Simon’s Politico story with some details about Fred Thompson’s visit to the Waverly, Iowa newspaper. You know, the newspaper where Thompson’s staff made Simon and Mark Halperin wait outside. It seems that Simon appeared a bit miffed by the exclusion and that, in my opinion, colored his entire story.

According to the Waverly Democrat (via an e-mail commenter) , here’s what happened.

Two national journalists who had covered the Bill Clinton and Magic Johnson appearance in Waterloo earlier in the afternoon showed up for Thompson’s sit-down session, but were asked by the campaign to wait outside.

“[The exclusive interview with Waverly Newspapers] was the campaign’s idea,” Brunkhorst [the county chair for Fred Thompson's campaign] said. “The campaign just wants to make sure they give local newspapers an exclusive, because they don’t want a ‘big media’ campaign. They want to make sure they’re focusing on the grassroots.”

In other words, Thompson is running a state campaign for a state election. He wanted to give this local newspaper something special, something no other publication would have. That’s not a bad thing to do and it’s very much in keeping with the kind of campaign Thompson has been running. He’s making personal and unique contact with the folks in Iowa and that can go a long way.

Notice that at no point in his story did Simon say he even tried to get an explanation about why he was excluded. That, again, is pretty shoddy journalism. I suppose it would have been tough for Simon to ask with the weapons-grade pouty lip he must have been sporting the rest of the day.

But enough of Simon. We’ve already seen that his story was inaccurate and heavily biased. Oh, and for the record, he hasn’t answered my comment to him that I sent yesterday. Why should he? I’m just a little blogger and he’s Roger “How Dare You Diss Me!” Simon of The Politico.

I am a little confused about why the editor didn’t report the meeting to Simon the way it was reported in her own newspaper. More on that after the jump.

Here’s what the editor had to say to Simon about Thompson’s visit:

She e-mailed me back that Thompson “was so vague that I would be hard-pressed to write a story. Simply put, there is no news peg other than he came to the newsroom with his model wife and a beehive of staffers. When I asked him specifically what he would do as prez for farmers in Bremer County, he resorted to glittering generalities.”

So the sum total of Thompson’s day in Waverly was meeting with a newspaper editor and saying nothing and then meeting about 15 people in a warm firehouse and saying nothing.

Don’t you love the editorializing in that last paragraph? It’s like Thompson beat him up and stole his lunch money or something. Let’s move on, though, and look at the transcript in the Waverly paper. Here’s how Thompson answered the question about helping farmers in Iowa.

I would continue to enjoy the fruits of their labor. I’ve been looking all over Iowa for a bad steak and I can’t find it. Been trying my best. It’s not a matter of what I would do for the farmers. Farmers are not looking for a president to hand them something. Farmers want fair treatment and a chance to prosper in a free economy and that’s what I would help ensure. There’s a lot of programs we’ve got out there, some of which are good programs, some of which are not. And I think that we need to work our way through that and make sure we’re doing what’s good for the country, not just the farmers, not just the people of Iowa, not just the people of Tennessee. But good for the country. A sound policy that makes sense. I think there’s a lot more that we could do for the working farmer in terms of ecological programs and environmental programs – land conservation, soil conservation – that would be fair and it would be beneficial to the nation and to Iowa and to our country. We’re going to have to phase out the corporate welfare system we’ve got, however. There are extremely rich people living in skyscrapers in Manhattan that are receiving subsidy payments. I think that’s wrong. I’d put a stop to that if it was within my power. That still continues in this latest Farm Bill and it’s not right. There ought to be a cutoff at some level and it’s not right ot have millionaires receiving farm subsidies.

I’m not seeing any “…glittering generalities…” here. In fact, it looks to me like Thompson said something that I’ll bet not many candidates are saying this month. In fact, it looks like he got into a few specifics. Here are the ones I picked out.

1) He wouldn’t do anything to help the farmers in Iowa as such but would do everything he could to make sure they had a fair chance to compete.
2) He would examine the farm programs and cull the ones that aren’t working.
3) He’d end the farm subsidies that went to corporations if he has the authority to do so.
4) He’d work for common-sense, fair conservation rules.

Admittedly, he didn’t do bullet points and he didn’t lay out a white paper for the news staff, but he gave a good number of specifics, enough to give the editor a very good idea where he stands on the issue.

Now, I’ve been paying attention and I’m not seeing where any other candidate has said that they’d cut so much as one farm subsidy program. I’m not seeing where they’d take the farmers into account when it comes to conservation laws. I’m not seeing where any candidate, even among the Republicans, are telling people that it’s not the President’s job to do for anyone but that it’s the President’s job to make sure everyone gets a fair shot to compete.

You can call that answer “glittering generalities” if you want and you can say, as Simon did, that he didn’t say anything, but it looks to me like he said quite a lot. In fact, it looks to me like Fred Thompson is running in exactly the opposite direction from every other candidate that I’ve seen thus far. It’s a direction that ought to please conservatives quite a bit.

There’s quite a lot of good stuff in that transcript. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds noticed pretty much the same thing, thanks to another reader (and not, incidentally, the tip I sent him).

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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media., The 2008 Horse Race