Wednesday, 05/30/07
Thompson says he plans to run, wants to be 2008's outsider
By Susan Page
USA TODAY
STAMFORD, Conn. — Politician-turned-actor Fred Thompson plans an unconventional campaign for president using blogs, video posts and other Internet innovations to reach voters repelled by politics-as-usual in both parties, he told USA Today.
Thompson, a former U.S. Senator from Tennessee, has been coy about his intentions with audiences, but made clear in an interview that he plans to run.
"I can't remember exactly the point that I said, 'I'm going to do this,' " Thompson says, his 6-foot, 6-inch frame sprawled comfortably across a couch in a hotel suite. "But when I did, the thing that occurred to me: 'I'm going to tell people that I am thinking about it and see what kind of reaction I get to it.' "
His late start carries some problems but also "certain advantages," he says. "Nobody has maxed out to me" in contributions, he notes, and using the Internet already "has allowed me to be in the hunt, so to speak, without spending a dime."
Thompson could reshape a GOP contest in which each of the three leaders has significant vulnerabilities and none of the seven second-tier contenders has broken through. Without formally joining the race — he's preparing to do that as early as the first week of July — Thompson already is placing third and better among Republican candidates in some national polls.
Dissatisfaction among one-third of Republicans with the 2008 field has opened the door for the candidate whose folksy tone, actor's ease before an audience and conservative credentials drew comparisons to Ronald Reagan at the annual Connecticut GOP dinner here. Thompson addressed the dinner last week to a sold-out audience.
"People listen to him and see someone who's very comfortable with who he is and confident about what he believes in," state Republican chairman Chris Healy says. "That's a skill that, obviously, Ronald Reagan took to great heights."
Thompson, who's left a five-season stint playing Manhattan District Attorney Arthur Branch on NBC's Law & Order, says his model will be the untraditional campaign he ran for the Senate in 1994.
After a lackluster start, Thompson swapped his suit for a plaid shirt and began driving a pickup across the state in a bid to fill the final two years of Al Gore's term. Despite his background as a Washington lawyer and lobbyist, Thompson derided Congress as larded with legislators who had lost touch with their constituents and principles.
He swamped his Democratic opponent by 21 percentage points in a year Republicans capitalized on anti-pathy to President Clinton to win control of the House and Senate.
"I feel some of the same feelings that I felt in the latter part of that '94 campaign about what is going on in the country today -- only greater," says Thompson, citing public cynicism toward the Republican president and the new Democrat-controlled Congress. "You can't drive the truck all the way across the country, but since '94 other opportunities have opened up in terms of ways to communicate."
A candidate could use the Internet "to cut through the clutter and go right to the people," he says.
And the truck, now parked at his mother's home in Franklin, Tenn.? "You might drive it a few places."
It's rare: The Republican presidential nomination is as up-for-grabs as the Democratic one.
Even in Connecticut — the backyard of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and a state whose primary Arizona Sen. John McCain carried in 2000 — many Republican activists are still trying to decide whom to support.
"We're looking for someone who can be dynamic, who can bring together the troops," Stephen Bessette, 44, a Stonington selectman, says as he waits for Thompson to speak. "There are still people with their hands in their pockets, waiting for the right candidate."
'A disconnect out there'
None of the current contenders seems to have the stuff to win an "uphill battle" in the general election, says John Nazzaro, 49, a member of the GOP state central committee. He wonders if Thompson's persona might fare better.
Despite what seems to have been a charmed life as politician and actor, Thompson can project an outsider's demeanor — as much the working-class kid from Lawrenceburg, Tenn., as the celebrity who now lives in the tony Washington suburb of McLean, Va. He has a Southern drawl, a loping gait, a lined face and a balding pate.
Although he's never spotlighted the social issues that energize much of the Republican base, Thompson consistently voted against abortion and in favor of gun rights in the Senate. Giuliani's support of abortion rights and Romney's conversion to oppose them have raised qualms among some social conservatives toward them.
On Iraq, Thompson voted to authorize the invasion in 2002 and now opposes setting a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops. Still, his fortunes aren't as inextricably tied to the war as those of McCain, one of the war's leading defenders.
In any case, Thompson argues that Republicans lost control of the House and Senate in November not because of the war but because of out-of-control spending and unrestrained partisanship. What's surprising is that Democrats didn't gain more ground, he says.
"It's been kind of a pox on both your houses," he says. "There's a disconnect out there between the people and Washington. -- It seems lately whoever has power, whoever has control makes the same predictable mistakes." His campaign themes: tighter borders, smaller government, lower taxes.
He says he knows a primary campaign won't be easy. Most of the top GOP strategists have signed up with other campaigns. The current contenders have a head-start on fundraising.
And some skeptics question whether Thompson has the drive for a national campaign. "He didn't have a particularly distinguished Senate career, though that has never been a bar to anybody else being president," says David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union. "The book on him is he's lazy. I don't know whether that's true or not."
Thompson bristles at the suggestion he's lazy or running on a lark — dismissing them as "shots by concerned future competitors." He acknowledges a campaign involves "working your fanny off" and predicts his late start means he'll need less money than the others. He made his first appeal to 100 fundraisers in a conference call Tuesday.
He hopes to make a splash by amassing an impressive fundraising total on Monday, when he forms a testing-the-waters committee. The formal campaign is to be launched around the Fourth of July.
Volunteer State volunteers
The Tennessee Republican running for president in 2008 was supposed to be senator Bill Frist.
Then Frist announced in November he was retiring from politics. That weekend, Tennessee Rep. Zach Wamp met with former senator Howard Baker as part of an effort to persuade Toyota to locate an assembly plant in Chattanooga.
That campaign failed — Toyota announced in February the plant would go to Tupelo, Miss. — but a presidential draft was launched.
Wamp asked Baker, Thompson's mentor, to call Thompson and urge him to jump in the presidential race. "You've known him a long time," Baker replied, according to Wamp. "Call him yourself."
Thompson had been re-elected to the Senate in 1996 and briefly considered a presidential bid before the 2000 race. In 2002, however, devastated when his 38-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Panici, died of an accidental prescription-drug overdose, he decided not to run for another Senate term.
He signed on for the Law & Order role — he has been a character actor since playing himself as a whistelin a 1987 movie about a Tennessee political scandal — and went on the speaking circuit. He began blogging and regularly appearing on ABC Radio, sometimes filling in for idiosyncratic commentator Paul Harvey. Divorced for nearly 20 years, he married Jeri Kehn, a Washington lawyer, in 2002. They have a 4-year-old daughter and a 6-month-old son.
When Wamp first called, Thompson demurred. When none of the GOP candidates seemed to catch fire, he reconsidered. In February, Thompson told Wamp he was "very open-minded."
In March, Thompson announced on Fox News Sunday that he was "going to leave the door open" to a bid. Two weeks later, he finished in third place among Republicans in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, beating Romney out of the box and trailing only Giuliani and McCain.
In April, he disclosed that he had been diagnosed in 2004 with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, though he says the slow-growing cancer hasn't caused him any problems and his doctors tell him he may well live a normal lifespan.
A video offensive
Last week, he won an unofficial straw poll of GOP activists in Georgia, besting by 2-1 the No. 2 finisher — former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who's from Georgia and isn't formally in the race yet, either.
His biggest challenge, Thompson says, will be to avoid getting cautious — that is, to forget the lessons he learned in his 1994 plaid-shirt-and-red-truck campaign.
Consider how he responded two weeks ago when liberal filmmaker Michael Moore challenged him to a debate on health care and called him a hypocrite for favoring embargoed Havana cigars. Thompson had chided Moore's new documentary, Sicko, which unfavorably compares the U.S. health care system with the one in Cuba.
" 'Jeri said, 'You know, we could have some fun,' " Thompson recalls. " 'Why don't you do something on the Internet?' So I got to thinking about it."
"And Mark Corallo and Ed McFadden had that camera there in 40 minutes," Jeri, who is sitting in on the interview, breaks in. Corallo and McFadden, aides to John Ashcroft when he was U.S. attorney general, have been helping Thompson behind the scenes.
In the video, sitting in at the desk in his study, Thompson seems to be studying his calendar, an unlit Montecristo in his mouth.
"You know, I've been looking at my schedule, Michael, and I don't think I have time for you," Thompson begins. "But I may be the least of your problems. You know, the next time you're down in Cuba visiting your buddy Castro, you might ask him about another documentary filmmaker. His name is Nicolas Guillen. He did something Castro didn't like, and they put him in a mental institution for several years, giving him devastating electroshock treatment.
"A mental institution, Michael," he says. "Might be something you ought to think about."
By 11:30 a.m., two hours after his first chat about the furor, the 38-second video was done. Soon it was posted on Breitbart.tv.
The challenge of his campaign will be to keep taking risks, Thompson says. "I've got to fight to have the guts enough to follow my own instincts," he says. "You're going to have good days and bad. You might as well do it your way."
