Wanna buy a TV ad for Fred? $70 will do it.
Thousands of Americans got a personal e-mail today from Fred Thompson. With his photo and signature and everything.
Yes, yes, of course, it asked for money. Is there any other kind of political e-mail in the barely six weeks left before the Iowa caucuses and a front-loaded flood of primary elections?
Most of the polls you read about on the Democratic and Republican races focus on the candidates' standing. But look behind the numbers and those polls also show that many voters on both sides remain undecided (60% among GOP voters in one New Hampshire survey), even after nearly 11 months of campaigning and news coverage.
So, there's not much time to help a lot of minds get made up. Mitt Romney probably leads everybody in TV ads, except maybe Cialis, having spent more than $10 million on nearly 15,000 TV broadcasts. So Fred's got considerable ground to make up with his look-straight-in-the-camera-like-you-really-mean-it message of consistent conservatism.
Trouble is, TV ads cost money. So instead of just asking for money, this time Fred's asking you to buy a 30-second ad in Sioux City with a $70 donation. Or you could get him on the air in Greenville, S.C., for $250. "If you and your friends and family can combine to give $850 to my campaign," the former Tennessee senator writes, "I can buy a prime-time advertisement in Charleston, S.C." Why not make Charleston watch more political ads? What have they ever done besides pick the losing side in the Civil War?
Interestingly, the Thompson ad appeal only mentions Iowa and South Carolina among the early states. New Hampshire, where he's not been much and not gained traction either, is omitted.
The six-paragraph e-mail contains no less than six links to the same Fred08 donation page. It also contains links to his two ads that are already airing, "Consistent Conservative" and "No Amnesty." Maybe you can guess what they're about.
--Andrew Malcolm
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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Anyone interested in some telling Thompson video from his first week on the trail in SC and an accompanying column should try:
http://goupstate.us/index.php/lanefiller/2007/11/05/fred_thompson_for_president_of_what_the_
Posted by: lane filler | November 20, 2007 at 06:53 AM
Fred was dead before he ever started. He's nothing more than a marionette for his right-wing buddies.
Posted by: Bruce Weik | November 20, 2007 at 10:50 AM