Was Thompson’s Campaign Torpedoed?

Oh, now it can be told? Great. Thanks Carl Cameron, for sitting on this little nugget until it was too late to to anything about it.

Back in March of 07 at the CPAC convention in DC several former Fred Thompson Congressional staffers told me Fred Thompson was thinking about a run. Some of his Tennessee cronies had been talking him up too.

I reported first that he was eyeing a White House bid. At the time several insiders told me OFF THE RECORD that it was largely a trial ballon to guage his popularity and float his name as a possible vice presidential nominee. I was sworn to silence.

Those insiders have now lifted the conditions on our conversations. From March to August of 07 through postponed announcement days, staff changes, firings, resignations and general disarray the Thompson camp was stunned by the incredibly positive response and didn’t really know how to manage it. The trial balloon soared mighty high and he found himself being dragged into a race that he was not even sure how to run.

Well, considering that it was also reported yesterday that he’s not interested in a Vice President or cabinet position, if he is sniffing around for that position with someone, he’d be a complete liar and his ticket would lose my vote. I wouldn’t have to think about that twice. But I don’t think that’s the case. He’s never seemed like a guy interested in being someone else’s insurance policy.

You can read this story one of two ways. The first way is how Allah Pundit is reading it:

He wanted to be VP, was surprised to find major buzz behind a presidential run, took a stab at it to see if he could convert the buzz into votes, and then predictably flamed out when he half-assed it.

There’s another way of looking at it and I’ll get into that, and how Fox News seemed to sink Fred’s campaign, after the jump.

Here’s how I would sum up the other way of looking at the situation.

He thought he’d make a good VP, floated him name out there, and got major buzz for the president’s job. He took his time to consider his options and get the folks close to him on board. It was a bigger job than he knew completely how to handle, and almost all the raelly good staffers were snapped up months ago, so he began the campaign the only way he really knew. The one place he thought he could get consistently good press was still acting as if this was a lark and never really treated him like a serious candidate. He ran the best race he could run given his situation and his personality and pulled the plug when it was clear that none of the obstacles that were there in the beginning were going away in enough time for him to make up ground on the front-runners.

Okay, so let’s look at Thompson’s situation, pre-anouncement. He’s pretty well-regarded in Republican circles. He was a great pointman for Justice Roberts and could well have been considered a credible nominee for a SCOTUS position himself. He’s been successful both inside politics and out and has a good name and face recognition with the general public. He’d like a fairly important gig with the next administration because, quite honestly, none of the folks who are running are what you’d call principled conservatives. So, he decides to dip his toe in the campaign waters, just to see what sort of interest there is and to remind the candidates that he’s out there and can be had.

Then everything blows up like the Godfather. Folks take his “Yeah…I might run” and they go nuts with it. There’s a Draft Fred movement. The MSM lights up like the Beacons of Gondor and now folks are fairly shoving Fred into the race. He’s taken aback by the unexpected and enthusiastic reaction and has to pull back and consider his options a bit. Except the MSM isn’t ready to give him that sort of room. They want their answers now and, when he doesn’t give them, the narrative starts to build that he’s stringing us along, that he’s dithering, that he’s indecisive.

What’s really happening is that he has some considerations to make. First, he needs to have a long talk with his wife. They have a couple young children and this race will go well over a year. Is this something they, as a family, want to do? Does Jeri want to be the First Lady?

Then he has to look at staff. Since the campaign started so early, most of the good campaign guys have already been snapped up. There are a few left, but not too many. Most of the top-notch people who would rather have worked for him are already committed elsewhere and they aren’t the type of folks who’d break their promises. That’s not who Fred wants working for him anyhow. So he’s going to have to really root around for good staff (and in that respect, he did a terrific job!) but he’ll have to make do with less.

And less doesn’t just mean staff. It means money, too. He hasn’t been preparing for this run for a couple of years like Romney, McCain, and Giuliani have. So he has no war chest, no committed base of donors, and no personal fortune on which to fall back (and the notion of spending a lot of his own money to become President is just not his way). He’s underfunded and undermanned. But he’ll give it a shot because he’s getting a lot of great response from folks like you and me. The MSM is getting restless, though. They aren’t willing to understand why it’s taking him so long to come to a decision. Obviously, they’re not terribly interested in cutting him a little slack either and taking a look at the likely staffing and funding problems. But that’s the media. What can you do?

He raises a little cash while trying not to raise expectations terribly high and gets a skeleton team up and running. He’s fairly new at the political game and his choices are not always inspired nor are they always correct. But they’re always his and he figures that, with voters, he’s the one who matters.

Unfortunately, what the voters generally see is what the MSM shows them. That’s what ultimately kills his campaign.

When he jumps in, he has a choice. He can do it the conventional way, even though he doesn’t have the conventional team nor the conventional amount of cash, or he can try to make a bigger splash. He opts for the splash and decides to make the big announcment on Jay Leno’s show, which will be watched by millions of folks. As it happens, the day he can get on is the day of a Republican Debate in which he could have participated. Well, the political greyheads and the MSM don’t like being dissed and the negative stories start running. As it goes, his turn on the Tonight Show was actually pretty good. He was himself: smart and engaging and warm. The main story that came from it, though, was how behind the campaign curve he was.

The talk starts almost immediately, based mostly on his laconic style and the amount of time it took him to get fully in the race. He’s not exciting enough. He’s not animated enough. Listen to how slow he talks. Fred’s lazy.

Even though that’s obviously not true (since how on Earth do you become a successful actor and politician without having some drive and energy?) all that stuck with him, mostly because that’s what kept being reported week after week.

It remained the story even after he demonstated that he could raise money and campaign at least as hard as another other candidate in the race, if not harder. His sprint in the final month before the Iowa Caususes put the fear of Fred into his competitors. He made up a ton of ground in not much time at all. And he was gaining traction and getting a head of steam. The last thing any of them wanted was another debate with him. Luckily for them, the MSM wouldn’t treat him very seriously at all. Rudy Giuliani, who hasn’t so much as competed in any other state has gotten a more evenhanded shake from most places than Fred did when he was in the thick of it in South Carolina. Fox News was one of the worst offenders here.

And why? Well, would you give a guy serious consideration if you had heard that his campaign was basically just a lark and that he really wanted the Veep job? I think that story so permeated Fox’s coverage of Thompson that, even well after it was clear that he was seriously pursuing the White House and circumstances had shown that his interest seemed pretty clearly to have changed, the folks at Fox could never quite shake it out of their heads. Folks like Fred Barnes and Morton Kondrake let the story seal their minds off from any other possibility. Not a single roundtable discussion I ever saw on Fox took Thompson seriously, even after he had a strong debate in New Hampshire and easily lapped the field at the last debate.

There’s no way Fred could have made up the ground he needed while pulling Fox’s blase or even outright snarky coverage behind him. The only air time Thompson really got was when he came on to deflect some cockamamie story or another. It’s not like he ever got a “Wow, you’re having a good campaign for a guy who got in late” interview that I ever saw. Mostly it was stuff about the fake “silly hat” story and the “Fred’s dropping out!” stories and the “Why are you so lazy?” questions. I can’t recall a single time when Fred was interviewed on Fox where he was asked a single question about his stand on an important issue. He had easily the most extensive policy proporals of any candidate in the race on either side. One would think that might get a little notice. It didn’t.

No one could do well getting that kind of coverage.

The shame of it is, the coverage Fred got wasn’t particularly accurate nor was it very fair. It was, it seems, a reaction to the initial story that Cameron heard and no doubt mentioned to an associate or two. It became conventional wisdom and Fox News never really bothered to try to report any differently because, for whatever reason, it never occurred to him that he might actually be serious. That lack of consideration, more than anything else I’ve seen, doomed Thompson’s campaign.

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Category: The 2008 Horse Race