Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard penned a piece on the Senator and his exploration of a candidacy. It is a MUST read for a Thompson supporter.
Here are some excerpts of Hayes’ piece…
From the Courthouse to the White House
Fred Thompson auditions for the leading role.
A strange thing happened a few weeks back when I went to the Café Promenade at the Mayflower Hotel for an off-the-record interview with an unpaid adviser to the non-campaign of unannounced presidential candidate Fred Thompson.
Fred Thompson showed up.
Thompson was there to have lunch with Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a powerhouse consultant with ties to the White House. The two men worked together in the fall of 2005 on the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. Thompson had invited Gillespie to lunch to discuss a potential presidential bid.
…And by the end of the conversation, two unexpected realities had emerged. If he joins the race for the Republican nomination, and if he campaigns the same way he spoke to me last week, Fred Thompson, a mild-mannered, slow-talking southern gentleman, will run as the politically aggressive conservative that George W. Bush hasn’t been for four years. And the actor in the race could well be the most authentic personality in the field.
Thompson seems to recognize that he wins the guy-I’d-want-to-get-a-beer-with primary the moment he announces. He comes across as a regular guy–“folksy” will be the political cliché that attaches to his candidacy–and punctuates explanations of his positions with the kind of off-the-cuff homespun witticisms that Dan Rather spent a career trying to come up with.
…Then he goes on to give a better defense of the White House than anything that has come out of the White House communications shop in four years.
The irony here is that intelligence services had consistently over the years understated the capabilities of enemies and potential enemies. Now, here there was unanimity among the intelligence services, some of whom are supposed to be better than ours. . . . People don’t understand intelligence. They don’t understand. It’s seldom clear. It’s often caveated. It’s sometimes flat-out wrong. Different people often have different ideas. That’s what a president is faced with. And some today would say that politically a president has got to have unanimity before he can make a choice. And then they say that if he has that unanimity, the president has to make that choice–at the same time talking about how deficient our capabilities are. But if those deficient capabilities produced a recommendation, the president of the United States and leader of the free world has to take that recommendation. That has been so faulty in the past. It’s absurd. Presidents in the future, as always, have to make a determination based on a lot of things, and intelligence is one of them. And the president not only has the right to evaluate the intelligence that he’s receiving, he has a duty to do that. He listens to the British. I mean, if history was any judge, I don’t know about now, but if the Brits tell me that there’s an [Iraqi] deal with Niger and our guys don’t know whether there was or not, I tend to rely on the Brits. I mean, those are the calls the president’s got to make, and the question is really: Which way do you want the president to lean? Caution–that it’s probably not so? When bad news is delivered, he gets mixed messages, he gets various intelligence reports of various kinds. Did you want him all balled up in all of that, you know, trying to apply some kind of a scientific equation to it for fear that somebody in an intelligence committee is going to wave it around at a hearing later on or something like that? Is that what it’s come to? If so, the world is going to be a lot more dangerous than it otherwise already is. You’ve got to exercise the authority and the responsibilities that you’ve been given. I mean, in this debate over intelligence and what it is and what it ought to be and how it’s used and all of that, you know, [it] needs to be dealt with and laid out in a way that people can understand it. . . . The next report says somebody’s got weapons of mass destruction, you know what’re we going to do with that? You know, just because history–a cat won’t sit on a hot stove twice, but he won’t sit on a cold stove either.
…If Frist’s acknowledgment that Thompson was going to run may have been a slip, Thompson’s own words also suggest he’s running. He says he understands “how hard it is, how difficult it is, how embarrassing it is, how intrusive it is.” And he knows that as a candidate he could be subject to harsh attacks.
“That’s the least of it anymore,” he says. “It’s not pleasant, but it’s not that important anymore because you’re straight with your family, you have a level of understanding and knowledge about your family, and they with you, and with the man upstairs, and that’s that. You know, ain’t really much past that. And it kind of frees you up in a way.”
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Go read the whole thing. It is a GREAT piece on Thompson. It makes you want him to run even more.