Next week, Arthur Branch, the District Attorney of New York County, will be forming a short-term “testing-the-waters” committee to assess his potential as a candidate for GOP nomination. Wait a minute…did I say Arthur Branch? Must’ve gotten celebrity television and real life politics confused. I meant Fred Thompson, former senator from Tennessee and an actor on the TV show Law and Order. According to The New York Times, this temporary committee will conduct some preliminary fundraising in a more relaxed way than the more traditional exploratory committee.
Already, Thompson has garnered a substantial amount of name recognition and popularity in the Republican Party. Mike Allen of the Politico says that Thompson’s advisers confirm his intention to run and that his formal announcement will take place during the Fourth of July weekend. An anonymous insider indicated “the former senator will offer himself as a consistent conservative who can unite all elements of the Republican Party.”
Melissa McEwan of the Shakesville blog calls the current GOP possibilities a “sad sausage-fest.” “While some might say,” she writes, “that the GOP’s palpable desperation for an heir to Reagan’s throne became completely pathetic once they fixed their sights on another actor, I would argue that it’s always been completely pathetic, but now has simply just been taken to a riotous level of literalism.”
Michael P.F. van der Galien, writing about “politics from a modern conservative liberal perspective,” is excited by this new development: “If Thompson joins the race, the Republican race / primaries will get even more exciting. It is fairly close as it is, with Mitt Romney rising in the polls, McCain losing a bit of support, same goes for Giuliani. At the moment Thompson enters the race, everything changes. Suddenly, social conservatives will feel like they do not have to support Giuliani: as far as I can tell, Thompson is most certainly electable.”
While many blogs are speculating about Thompson’s super-stardom as a unifier of the various republican ideologies, MSNBC is skeptical: “On the issues, how is he any different than the front-runners? (A recent Washington Post story said his record was virtually identical to McCain’s.) And is he attracting GOPers’ attention because who he isn’t–rather than who he is? What, in short, makes him any different than Wes Clark was in 2003-4, sans the military medals?”
Well, for one, Clark was no actor. A poll before the 2004 presidential election found that more people would have a beer with Bush than with Kerry. Bush was able to connect to Americans on a personal level: “‘Snob’ is a word often used by people when asked how Kerry strikes them. ‘Nice guy’ is the way many express their response to Bush.”
Captain’s Quarters sees profound wisdom in Fred Thompson and is excited for his entry into the race. “He has managed to make himself very relevant by delivering much-anticipated speeches to various Republican groups. Thompson has also written a series of essays, erudite and sensational, on various hot issues as well as explaining and expanding on his federalist beliefs. It’s almost a philosopher’s campaign for the White House, an approach that may not have a parallel since Woodrow Wilson.”
Will our next president be a Philosopher-King? I doubt it. But he could be a dark horse whose emergence onto the main political stage from the world of popular culture has yet to happen. Thompson’s pretty much in…are you ready Al Gore?
Eric Hirsch is a Columbia Journalism Review intern.