Where Was Thompson?

It was quite a moment for the still-young presidential campaign of the former senator from Tennessee, Fred Thompson. Before a crowd of television cameras at the National Press Club in Washington, the president of the National Right to Life Committee, Wanda Franz, announced that her organization and its 3,000 local chapters were "proud to endorse" Mr. Thompson for president. She called it testament to their belief in his "longstanding pro-life record" and to his ability to win the Republican nomination and the presidency. The political director of National Right To Life, Karen Cross, also spoke at the event, invoking the memory of the more than "48 million babies" she said had been aborted in America since 1973. The only person missing at the endorsement event this week was the candidate himself, Mr. Thompson, whose absence is explained by the absurdity that is federal election law in America.

The "First Read" column produced by the NBC News political unit reported that a Thompson campaign spokesman, Darrell Ng, had told NBC that, as "First Read" put it, "the NRLC has been criticized in the past for appearing to coordinate their political efforts with campaigns by inviting candidates to their endorsement press conferences. Under FEC laws, independent political action groups are forbidden from coordinating their organizational efforts with a particular political campaign, and although personal appearances by a candidate at a press conference are not illegal, both the NRLC and the Thompson campaign wanted to avoid any possible appearance of coordination."

The FEC is the Federal Election Commission, whose rules now apparently take precedence over the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of petition. It would be a good campaign issue for Mr. Thompson against one of his top rivals for the Republican nomination, Senator McCain, who has done so much to craft the arcane system of election law that one of the key laws, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, is popularly known as McCain-Feingold Act. It would be a good issue, that is, but for the fact that, as a senator, Mr. Thompson, a lawyer by training, was as wrongheaded and pro-regulation on the issue as Mr. McCain has been. What a pickle the senators have gotten themselves into, rewriting the election laws to the point where they are afraid even to show up at a press conference and receive an endorsement.