The Plot Against Fred
Bill Quick senses a conspiracy against Fred Thompson, and I am Marcus Junius Brutus.
Case in point: Libertarian mag Reason's Dave Weigel offers up a badly-researched—no, an entirely unresearched and unsupported—slam at "Light Fred" on September 7.
On September 8, Giuliani flack Rick Brookhiser blurts an almost identical rant about "Done-Nothing Fred."
And immediately after Fred declared, the Romney campaign put up a web site chock full of such thoughtful political arguments against Thompson as "dubbing the former TV star and senator Fancy Fred, Five O'clock Fred, Flip-Flop Fred, McCain Fred, Moron Fred, Playboy Fred, Pro-Choice Fred, Son-of-a-Fred and Trial Lawyer Fred."
Now, three instances in a week or so don't make a trend, but they may make a leading indicator. My hunch is that everybody has had their oppo research teams combing over Fred's entire life story since it became obvious that Thompson would eventually enter the race, but they didn't come up with much they could convincingly attack him with.
I may as well confess: I was at the meeting with Everybody. George Soros and Judi Nathan Giuliani served salmon and hummus and gave a splendid Powerpoint presentation about the Fred Threat. We we warned that if we didn't sink Thompson with our blog posts and whisper campaigns, he stood to become the most effective and popular president in history. Rick Brookhiser, however, was not at the meeting, as he's busy doing oppo research on Alexander Hamilton.
Seriously, Quick doesn't understand how this stuff works. I've been following Thompson for a while, reading contemporary and older profiles, listening to speeches, combing his ballyhooed (more so now than it was at release) report "Government at the Brink." After a six month pre-campaign his pitch is pretty free of substance: No tax plans, no health care plans, no vision for Iraq or the war on terror apart from some bromides that could have come from a Michael Ledeen word jumble. I'll engage Fred's ideas as soon as he offers some.
UPDATE: Michael Pack points out that "presidents are not suppose to have tax and health care plans." I agree that presidents shouldn't actually pledge to solve all of our problems as if they have an unbottled genie in the Treasury and Congress is a bunch of bobbleheads with rubber-stamp attachments. That's not an argument against taking positions, though. Thompson used to support Social Security accounts, and now he wants "bipartisan study" of what to do with Social Security. There's a happy medium between Rudy Giuliani's 10-point plans and Ron Paul's "abolish departments we don't need," but Thompson isn't there.