Whence Frank Thompson, and whither?

New York Times

Gaze upon the jowly, saturnine face that is apparently the future of American conservatism. My guess, as an unlettered political animal, is that if Fred Thompson runs for the Republican nomination, he will win. If I turn out to be right, I'll take full credit, and if I'm wrong, I'll pretend I never said it. This is how the internet works.

My reasoning goes like this: the current front runners are piloting poisoned campaigns.

McCain has no pull among the party elite, his fevered toeing of the party line in the past few years has failed to win broad GOP support and has alienated the moderate vote (his only chance all along), and his aversion to torture will probably hurt him as well--the stony silence that greeted his strong stand against torture in the Republican debate was as frightening as it was enlightening.

Giuliani is Catholic, Italian, pro-Choice, an associate of luminaries like Bernie Kerik, and publicly reviled by firefighters. With America's hazy memories of 9/11 all he has going for him, and the FDNY chipping away at even that, he doesn't really have a serious chance. Even if he did get the nod, evangelicals would stay away from the polls in droves and he'd go down to a crushing defeat.

Romney is also pro-choice (his extremely recent Saint Paul-style conversion notwithstanding) and a Mormon. Polling indicates that being a Mormon is nearly as bad as being an atheist, electorally. So far, he's drubbing the other candidates in the money race, being the only Republican keeping anything like even pace with the Democrats, but that's probably because the deep pocket Republican donors think he's the only chance they've got. If a better candidate shows up, they'll leave Romney in the lurch.

Fred Thompson certainly seems to have the momentum. Multiple quotes in this NYT article compares him to Reagan in a favorable light. In conservative vernacular, "strong, almost Reagan-esque communication skills" is exactly equivalent to saying he wears a halo and heals the lame. The nay-sayers in the article talk about how he's too far behind in the money race, or that their candidates are stronger, but this is silly talk. Thompson has great grassroots buzz, the other candidates are very weak, and he has nine months before primary season starts. This is plenty of time to pick up the slack, especially since he'll be taking all of that money out of the other guys' pockets. He's also getting a lot of free publicity from the "is-he-or-isn't-he" game that news outlets like the New York Times are playing.

The quote from the Romney rep amused me most. He's talking about how the Romney charisma outweighs anything that Thompson brings to the table, so Mitt ain't scared. The spectacle of a member of such a shambling campaign praising the Romney magic pleases me, and I hope to see more of this kind of thing as the campaign goes on. The sublime incompetence of Romney's hunting/varminting episode has already made Romney a joke (which McCain cannily exploited for a good stomping), and as I mentioned above, he's a Mormon who was pro-choice until the day before he decided to run for president. Also, from what I understand, while Mitt is photogenic as all get-out, he is not actually very good at working the crowd.

The kicker of this whole thing is that Thompson isn't actually that strong a candidate. He has the right stands on the right issues, but he's still got the Iraq millstone around his neck, and the plain fact is that he's only so strong because people don't know anything much about him except for what he's told them so far. Looking into his senate record and plank, he seems to be a pretty standard old-school conservative. The status of the Republican party these days made even "Nasty Newt" Gingrich look good, so it's not surprising that a fairly average candidate would look like gold.

Of course, whichever Republican candidate wins the nomination, he'll be sailing against gale-force winds and will probably go down in a defeat of Goldwater-esque proportions.