Opinion: That was Fred then. Is he different now?
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When a candidate shows a maniacal drive to become president, spanning too many years of boring Lincoln or Jefferson Day dinners, demeaning pleas for money from rich people, darkened motels in distant cities, long nights of conspiratorial strategy meetings over stained boxes of cold pizza and lonely airplane flights across this vast land, plus compiling many millions of dollars, the American media tends to question such drive.
On the other hand, when a candidate shows a curious indifference, thinks longer than others about launching a campaign, moves and talks slowly and doesn’t act like they’ve just finished their sixth cup of coffee in an hour, the American media tends to question such drive. Or lack of it.
The Times’ Joe Mathews has come upon an old quote from a 2003 interview in the Nashville Bar Journal about running for the presidency. ‘I was never really willing to pay the price that I knew had to be paid,’ said the newly-retired politician. ‘I would really have to strain hard to come up with something I wanted to say ten times a day for the next year of my life when I knew that talking about the really important stuff would not get me anywhere. You have to have a great desire to be President, and I never had the desire to do that.’
That was, of course, Fred Thompson more than four years ago. Note the past tense in that last sentence of the quote. This is today and Thompson says things have changed. For one thing he’s got two young children, and in his unofficial candidacy announcement on ‘The Tonight Show with Jay Leno’ he said he worried about the future for those children in a time of terrorism.
In his website announcement speech a few hours later and on the road in Iowa, Thompson elaborated: ‘Earlier this year when I thought about whether I should enter this race, I kept coming back to 2 questions. First, what kind of country are our children and grandchildren going to grow up in and second, how many people have the opportunity to do something about it?’
His laconic, slow-talking style seems unlikely to change. Indeed, standing there in the middle of the debate stage the other night in between Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani pecking at each other over the line-item veto, and towering over them both, the lugubrious Thompson seemed downright refreshing in his silence.
The fire-in-the-belly questions will likely continue for some time, until professional observers see the kind of long days and long nights of work that characterize traditional campaigns. People seem to forget similar kinds of questions were asked about George W. Bush in 1999-2000 and Ronald Reagan before that when they would take days off from the trail.
But who knows? Maybe there’s a niche audience of voters for someone who at least up until four years ago doesn’t seem to have been conniving and plotting a presidential run for the White House since first sighting it from his baby-stroller on a tourist trip?
--Andrew Malcolm