I advanced the theory, several times, here on LST over the last few months that Fred Thompson was entirely too normal to run for the presidency of the United States. I also believe Jeri, his wife, was the one who convinced him to run while it was his stipulation a campaign would be on his own terms. Thompson ended his campaign with a three sentence e-mail to the press.
I do not have any illusions about returning to a more genteel past. I am not nostalgic for some imaginary golden era of civility, but I do appreciate the fact we have created a system of presidential selection to which no normal, totally rational and emotionally healthy person would subject their self.
Thompson didn’t give off the usual political vibe: the gnawing need to please, the craving for the public’s love. A few voters and journalists found this refreshing, many more found it insulting. Some just found it fascinating, in a clinical sort of way: What kind of politician isn’t consumed by politics–and what kind of campaign would such a politician run? Well, now we know. If Thompson could plausibly avoid an overnight campaign trip, he did, preferring to return home to his wife and children in suburban Virginia. He spent an inordinate amount of time with his briefing books. And his response to the chore of raising money–the chief occupation of every office-seeker in this era of campaign finance reform, which was intended to reduce the role of money in politics–seemed nearly pathological. Fundraising events scheduled to last two or three hours often guttered out when the candidate departed after twenty minutes. High-end donors complained of being uncourted, unpampered, unloved–even unphoned. At one party in a private home last year, Thompson made the rounds of money-shakers, delivered brief remarks, and then slipped into a bedroom to watch a basketball game on TV by himself.
Slipped into a bedroom to watch a basketball game by himself ? How could a man like that assume he had what it takes to be President ? The very nerve of such a poseur should shake every citizen’s faith in the system to the bone.
“Should government step in and help Chrysler and the other auto makers?” Thompson: “No.”
Asked about education reform, he said: “It would be easy enough for someone running for president to say: I have a several-point plan to fix our education problem. It’s not going to happen. And it shouldn’t happen from the Oval Office.”
When journalists and candidates, with their typically childlike enthusiasm, suddenly began gumming the word “change” after the Iowa caucuses, Thompson pointed out the obvious: “Change has been part of every election since the dawn of elections, if you weren’t an incumbent.”
He noted how easy it was “to demagogue” the issue of federal spending by dwelling on relatively insignificant earmarks: “All these programs that we talk about in the news every day are a thimbleful in the ocean compared to the entitlement tsunami that’s coming to hit us.”
There was a certain allegiance to dignity and restraint, nods to humility and modesty, among presidential candidates throughout most of our history. Washington mounted up and rode out of the Capitol to return home to his beloved Mount Vernon in the Virginia hills along the Potomac River after two terms. He could have been King. Potential presidents of the past thought it unseemly and of ill-bred appearance to actually impose themselves on the public.
Candidates stayed home, receiving visitors and maintaining a quiet dignity while occasionally uncorking a speech in the neighborhood so the newspapers had something to report. Meanwhile surrogates scattered around the country, leading parades, holding rallies, and telling lies for which the candidates themselves couldn’t be held responsible. Even the appalling Theodore Roosevelt, who would smooch babies at a train wreck if he thought it would get him votes, managed to contain himself and keep off the hustings when he ran for reelection in 1904. Eventually barnstorming became marginally acceptable, but only as the last recourse of candidates who, like Harry Truman in 1948, were so far behind they could risk looking desperate and undignified.
Andrew Ferguson, Senior Editor of The Weekly Standard, is the man I quote here and he wrote as well in this column the following:
My guess is we’ll be missing him dreadfully by spring.
I already do. Read the whole thing.
