Opinion: Tommy’s troubles

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For a few minutes Wednesday, Tommy Thompson achieved something that has been sorely lacking during his Republican presidential campaign: the attention of the political media. A fair number of reporters joined in a conference call his campaign set up for what it billed as a ‘major announcement.’

The big news? He will go ahead and compete in the August straw poll in Ames, Iowa --- just as planned.

Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, as was widely reported, each dropped out of the nonbinding contest last week, deciding it would be a waste of resources. But last time we checked, the question of what Thompson (Tommy, not Fred) would do was not a pressing concern.

The former Wisconsin governor was savvy enough to acknowledge that, ‘I know most of you have tuned in to see if I was dropping out of the race.’ Then he insisted the Ames contest offered ‘a tremendous opportunity for our campaign to show’ organizational strength.

Thompson’s campaign, in fact, desperately needs to demonstrate that it has a pulse. At the moment, he’s struggling to restore even a whiff of credibility to a candidacy that began as a longshot and now seems to fall short even of that label.

Thompson, as careful viewers of the first GOP debate in early May might recall, briefly grabbed the spotlight when he said that an employer should be allowed to fire someone for being gay. But within minutes after the kleig lights had been turned off and the stage emptied, Thompson retracted his comment, saying he had misunderstood the question.

He then proceeded to keep the story alive by producing more excuses for the faux pas. He blamed a dead hearing aid, as well as the flu.

‘I was very sick the day of the debate,’ he told reporters at Wisconsin GOP convention a few days later. ‘I was just hanging on. I could not wait until the debate got off so I could go to the bathroom.’

Thompson, 65, was a well-respected governor; reforms he instituted in Wisconsin helped pave the way for the national overhaul of the welfare system in the mid-1990s. He served as Health and Human Services secretary during President Bush’s first term. But his presidential quest -- quixotic from the start -- has been gaffe-ridden and become the subject of ridicule from the folks who know him best, his homestate press.

The Capital Times in Madison editorialized not so long ago that his campaign ‘continues to be set back by a candidate who is suffering from severe foot-in-mouth disease. ... Maybe it’s just a case of a candidate competing for a position that is above his pay grade.’

One of the paper’s columinsts was more pointed. Joel McNally opined that when Thompson announced his candidacy, ‘the overwhelming reaction around his home state was an enormous outpouring of indifference. We didn’t really think Tommy’s post-midlife ego trip would have any effect whatsoever on our own lives or those of anyone else. We were wrong.

‘It’s true that Tommy’s candidacy is such a tiny pebble in the political ocean that it seldom stirs a ripple nationally. But when it does, it’s invariably the result of yet another public embarrassment that has the other 49 states asking: This is the man Wisconsin voters elected to be their governor for four terms?!’

Ouch.

The departure of Giuliani and McCain from the Ames straw poll stripped the event of much of its importance; the anticipated win by Mitt Romney likely won’t mean much. But it’s still a good bet the results will serve to narrow the GOP field, with Thompson an obvious prospect for the casualty list.

-- Don Frederick