Fred Thompson: Desperate Republicans Cheer for a Reagan Wannabe

I can say exactly when I first knew that Fred Dalton Thompson is dangerous. It is 12:07 p.m. on Sunday, September 9th, in Manchester, New Hampshire, just outside a restaurant called Chez Vachon. Thompson has just served up another mumbling, noncommittal tour through a packed diner of breakfasting locals, sitting glumly through the requisite this-sure-is-great-coffee shot. Then, once the needed photos are banked, the lumbering B-list character actor -- who plays a video called "The Hunt for Red November" at every campaign stop and sells buttons that, in an unsettlingly McLuhanian twist, pimp him as the "Law and Order candidate" -- tries to make a quick beeline back to his bus. But a cheeky local TV reporter shouts at him before he can reach the door.

"Senator!" the reporter calls out. "What's harder, playing the president or being the president?"

It is a shitty New Hampshire day; as Thompson stands on the street in a blue polo shirt, cold rain splashes visibly off his bald head. There are times when the candidate's eyes go blank and you almost see a big sign in his brain screaming, "Line! Line!" Finally, he glances back at the reporter and grumbles, "Well, neither of 'em are that hard."

I turn to the TV guy, not sure of what I'd just heard.

"Did he just say ... ?"

"Yeah," the guy says, dumbfounded. "He just said being president isn't that hard."

I'm still trying to process this when I spot Carl Cameron, the right-wing hatchet man for Fox News. Cameron is whaling on Thompson, doing a mocking impersonation of the candidate's "Security, Unity, Prosperity" campaign shtick.

"We're, uh, gonna be yoo-nited bah owre yoo-nity!" Cameron cracks.

A crowd of reporters doubles over in laughter. Then they get in their vehicles and chase after Thompson to the next event, so they can feverishly record those same hackneyed lines again and again for posterity. They'll laugh in private, but they'll be repeating that shit on air with a straight face for the next 400 days.

Well, I think as I stand by myself on the curb, so much for Fred Thompson. After all, logic dictates that anyone who's too much of a lightweight for Fox News is probably...

I freeze. Probably what? Probably a shoo-in for the presidency, that's what! I shudder as I realize my mistake, and suddenly the candidacy of Fred Thompson, which seemed impossibly silly just a few minutes ago, makes deadly serious sense. Thompson may act like a blank slate -- a homespun version of Being There hero Chauncey Gardiner running on a platform of "Whatever you say" and "I'll get back to you on that" -- but he represents something else that no one, after seven years of George W. Bush, could possibly have expected: a new low. It was bad enough when the GOP field was led by a grinning Mormon corporatist and a fascist ex-mayor itching to take his prostate pain out on the world, but Thompson is the worst yet -- a human snooze button, campaigning baldly for the head-in-the-sand vote by asking Americans not to think but to change the channel.

And that, after all, is what the campaign trail is all about. Give voters a chance to go lower than they've ever gone before, and you'll get numbers in a heartbeat. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the next Republican front-runner. ***

In person, Fred Thompson reminds you of a lot of good actors who go numb when asked to play themselves. If you've ever listened to interviews with Laurence Olivier or Robert De Niro or any of a hundred other talented performers who can manhandle a script but seem at a loss when it comes to who they themselves really are, you'll recognize the same thing in Thompson.

That makes it all the more painful when you watch him try to sell his oddly thin biography as a great "American story." He has a few items of note on his résumé: minority counsel for the Republicans during the Watergate hearings (where he tipped off the White House that the committee knew about Nixon's secret tapes), lawyer for a Tennessee whistle-blower who exposed a cash-for-clemency scam in the governor's office, and two largely undistinguished terms as a U.S. senator. In between, there are about twenty-eight years of his adult life where he acted in bit parts in a few movies, and lobbied a little. Thompson's campaign video runs out of stuff to talk about after around ninety-eight seconds.