Opinion: Fred hits the heartland highway--Day One
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With the national TV appearance on Jay Leno out of the way and the 15-minute candidacy announcement webcast open to the world, Fred Thompson hopped aboard a campaign bus in Des Moines today for his very first day of formally asking for Republican votes. He’s months behind his GOP competitors.
No more coy testing of the waters. Thompson is in up to his neck. So far, no big mistakes. Unless you count eschewing the traditional red-white-and-blue campaign bus for a mustard-colored one.
The former Tennessee senator followed a light schedule under warm, overcast skies: two campaign rallies, a handful of TV interviews and a pep talk to supporters at house parties around the country. With discipline, Thompson stuck to a tightly scripted message stressing traditional conservative themes on national defense and fiscal discipline.
‘I am determined that we make the decisions that will leave us a stronger nation,’ he told a kickoff rally of about 200 supporters in the Iowa capital, ‘a more prosperous nation, and a more united nation, and that’s why I’m running for president of the United States.’
The part-time actor and former prosecutor summed up his biography as a typical ‘American story.’ That means, said the 65-year-old Thompson, ‘a kid of modest means in a small town without a lot of resources or even a whole lot of ambition, when he was a kid.’
He recalled working the graveyard shift at a bicycle factory in his early days, and eventually dining with foreign leaders in more recent years as a politician and television star.
He was accompanied by his wife Jeri, daughter Hayden, 3, and son Sammy, 10 months, as he walked on stage in Des Moines, and they joined him too on the bus for the long Interstate drive to Council Bluffs for the next event in Iowa’s real Republican country. He was followed by a modest media throng.
Notably absent from the Alabama native’s sketch of his life story was his three-decade history as a Washington lobbyist, a frequent topic of needling from adversaries.
Thompson preferred to play up the outsider’s image that served him well in his two Senate campaigns in Tennessee, attacking unnamed ‘politicians’ in the nation’s capital, saying they had been ‘busy spending the next generation’s money.’
The retirement of baby boomers amid that overspending, he said, threatens ‘ruination’ of the nation’s economy if politicians continue to ‘kick the can down the road until, presumably, their own retirement.’
‘My friends,’ he said in his deep voice, ‘we need to deliver a message to Washington that we’re better than that. And you can start delivering that message by electing a president who will blow the whistle on this lack of responsibility. And I’m the guy who will do that.’
‘Go, Fred, go!’ the crowd hollered.
Finally, he is going. And The Times’ Michael Finnegan has the full story on Thompson’s first day now available on this website and in Friday’s print editions.
--Andrew Malcolm