What Voters Know About Thompson
by Ryan Sager
Tue, 27 Mar 2007 at 1:01 PM
updated Tue, 27 Mar 2007 at 1:09 PM
I fear I've enraged a lot of the folks who have come here today from Drudge by declaring that voters "know precisely zero about Fred Thompson past what they know of him from 'Law & Order.'" So much for hyperbole.
But, ultimately, I stand by this characterization 99%. Mr. Thompson's political experience is limited to a short, uneventful stint in the Senate — reminiscent, perhaps, of one Barack Obama (OK, Mr. Obama hasn't even served one term, but he was in the state legislature for a while).
This doesn't mean he couldn't be a great candidate or a great president...
But it does mean that people answering polls two weeks out from a TV appearance where the former Tennessee senator declared he might think about running for president don't know much about his record or his policy positions. He's had a presence on talk radio, and he guided John Roberts through the Senate, but this is still a relatively low-key public profile — most people are just getting to know him.
Now, what they do have already is a sense of the man — a sense of his bearing, how he talks, how he explains things, how he approaches the issues. And a lot of conservatives like what they have seen.
But there is also clearly some conflation of his persona as Arthur Branch on "Law & Order" and his other tough-talking TV and movie roles with real life. There's also hunger for a "real" conservative, someone other than Rudy Giuliani or John McCain, and someone without the flip-flopping problem of a Mitt Romney.
Whether Mr. Thompson really fits this bill, and ultimately seems like someone capable of being president, remains to be seen. But the idea that somebody who's been off the national radar for years — and wasn't all that prominent when he was in Congress — is suddenly someone with whom conservatives are intimately familiar is just not true.
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