Visitors to the website of former Tennessee Republican senator Fred Thompson—www.imwithfred.com—learn that, earlier this year, Thompson "embarked on what he calls a 'dialogue' with the American people." The purpose of this dialogue, the website continues, was to "determine whether there was a desire among American voters for him to enter [the] Republican presidential race."
It is clear Thompson found what he was looking for: many Republican primary voters have voiced their support in polls for his still non-official candidacy (he plans to announce in September). In national Republican primary polls this summer, Thompson has consistently come second behind Rudy Giuliani. He is running second in southern primary states like South Carolina and Florida. And while Giuliani, and particularly John McCain, have seen recent declines in support, Thompson's popularity has only increased since March, when he first announced he was considering a presidential bid.
The 66-year-old Thompson has achieved something remarkable. He has vaulted into the top tier of presidential contenders without raising much money (around $3.5m in June), without making frequent trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, and without any executive experience.
Thompson was born in Alabama in 1942, and raised in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, by his mother Ruth and his father Fletcher, a used-car salesman. Thompson was a young supporter of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater's disastrous 1964 presidential campaign against Lyndon Johnson. He says that Goldwater's book, The Conscience of a Conservative, convinced him to join the conservative movement. He received his law degree from Vanderbilt University in 1967. Briefly an assistant US attorney, Thompson's big break came in 1972, when he managed Republican senator Howard Baker's re-election campaign. After victory, Baker, an influential Beltway insider, invited Thompson to work for him in Washington. Thompson agreed, and was quickly thrust into the spotlight as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate committee investigating the Nixon administration.
In 1994, Thompson won a special election to fill Al Gore's old Senate seat in Tennessee. During the campaign he perfected his "good ol' boy" persona, speaking to voters in a straightforward, laid-back manner. His Democratic opponent, Jim Cooper, attacked Thompson as a Washington insider who flacked for special interests. But Thompson won by 20 percentage points. Two years later, Thompson won election to a full term, improving his already considerable margin of victory over his opponent.
Senate Republicans understood what a coup it was to have the recognisable Thompson on their side. So they gave him the chairmanship of the Senate governmental affairs committee, responsible for oversight of the Clinton administration. Thompson led a series of high-profile hearings into Chinese influence over the 1996 presidential election, but the investigation did not go far. His other pet issue was government waste, which he highlighted at every turn.
It is not a condemnation of Thompson to say that his senatorial career was undistinguished. He seems to have grown bored with the Senate, and decided not to run for re-election in 2002. Out of office, he remained involved in Washington politics, joining the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, shepherding US chief justice nominee John Roberts through his judicial confirmation hearings in 2005, and serving on the advisory committee for the Libby Legal Defence Trust, a group that raised money for the defence of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former aide to Dick Cheney who was convicted earlier this year on perjury and obstruction of justice charges relating to the leak of a CIA officer's identity.
Shortly before he left the Senate in 2002, Thompson married for the second time. He had divorced his first wife, Sarah Lindsey, with whom he had three children, in 1985. In the intervening years, Thompson became a well-known bachelor, dating several prominent Washington women, including pollsters and journalists. His second wife, Jeri Kehn Thompson, a committed Republican some 25 years younger than her husband, is said to play a major role in Thompson's prospective campaign. The couple have two young children.
Thompson's announcement of interest in the presidency last spring caught most of Washington by surprise. In retrospect, however, the move makes political sense, for several reasons. The first is that there is no incumbent or incumbent vice-president running, creating a wide open field. The second is that no candidate unifies the party establishment and broader conservative movement. McCain attempted to run as the establishment's choice, but his battles with conservatives during Bush's first term prevented the party from rallying behind him, and his support for liberal immigration reform seriously corrodes his chances of becoming the nominee.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has attempted to become the candidate of the conservative movement as well as the religious right, and my guess is a little more than half the Republican establishment supports him. But Romney's conversion to the pro-life side of the abortion debate leaves him open to charges of flip-flopping. In addition, his Mormonism is a matter of controversy, and while he polls well in Iowa and New Hampshire, he is way behind in states like South Carolina and Florida, where voters seem reluctant to vote for a Mormon.
The third reason a Thompson bid makes political sense is that no top-tier Republican candidate hails from the south. This is especially odd considering that the 2006 midterms more or less destroyed the GOP presence in the northeast and rust belt, leaving the party's base of support in the south. Former Virginia senator George Allen was expected to represent the party's southern wing in the 2008 primary, but he was knocked out of the contest after losing a close Senate race to antiwar Democrat Jim Webb last autumn. Former Tennessee senator Bill Frist was also expected to run as Bush's southern heir, but he decided against it and is now advising Thompson.
This odd confluence of events—no incumbent, no conservative consensus and no southerner—has left the GOP contest to Giuliani, who despite a relatively late entry into the race continues to raise millions and to build support in the early primary states. Giuliani is running as the candidate who will continue vigorously to prosecute the war on terror. Conventional wisdom holds that his pro-choice stance on abortion, and his liberal record on gun control and immigration, will prevent him from becoming the Republican nominee. This argument is plausible, but it discounts the importance the GOP electorate attaches to the war against Islamic terrorism.
Thompson would like to run against Giuliani and Romney as a consistent pro-lifer, but that is proving hard. It was recently revealed that in the early 1990s he lobbied the White House on behalf of an abortion rights group, and during his 1994 campaign he voiced opinions differing from pro-life orthodoxy. So far Thompson has not provided a compelling explanation of such deviations. Nor has he admitted that he has become more pro-life over time, or changed his mind about abortion like Romney has. In an odd way, Giuliani's pro-choice position may turn out to be a political strength, in that he has remained consistent in his views since 1989 and does not shy away from them despite running for the nomination of a pro-life party. Consistency and straightforwardness are often prized over pandering and spin.
The dynamic in the Republican presidential contest remains more or less what it has been for most of 2007: a variety of candidates competing to become the pro-life alternative to Giuliani. So far none has been able to unify the party around him, despite Giuliani's relative decline in national polls. When Thompson enters the race, this dynamic will not change. Thompson will find himself in a cut-throat fight not with Giuliani, but with Romney and McCain for the right to take on Giuliani. What Thompson brings to this first fight—not to mention what he may bring to the second—will most likely shape Republican politics for some time to come.
