Thompson Comes In With a Whimper

DES MOINES AND COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — "The preseason is over," Fred Thompson declared in his first stump speech of the 2008 campaign, delivered to a plenty-of-elbow-room crowd of about 250 in Des Moines, Iowa, yesterday. "Let's get on with it."

"Let's get on with it," of course, is what frustrated Thompson supporters have been saying for months, as they've waited for him to join the race. The question hanging over the newly suited-up presidential candidate's campaign is whether too many folks who'd been willing to play on the former Tennessee senator's team have already gotten on without him.

Judging by the crowd (or lack thereof) at the Polk County Convention Complex yesterday, it seems clear that the once fever pitch excitement about a Thompson candidacy has cooled significantly. The small conference room the campaign chose for the kickoff was not particularly full, and the energy level of the crowd was as subdued as that of the famously languid candidate. (One woman fainted, but it was quite certainly not from excitement.)

Mr. Thompson's speech itself was rather dour. While Thompson supporters have often compared their man to Ronald Reagan, known for his optimism, the candidate can come off more like Eeyore than the Gipper.

"We're living in the era now of the suitcase bomb," Mr. Thompson said. We're facing an entitlement crisis that could mean "the ruination of our economy," he said. Mr. Thompson even hit a point that's become something of a mantra for his campaign (it was included in the campaign's Internet launch video), that America cannot allow itself to become "a weaker, less prosperous, and more divided nation."

(As it happens, Mr. Thompson's Republican rivals — not to mention the Democrats — have been proposing just the opposite: that America **should** become all of those things.)

It isn't, of course, that Mr. Thompson doesn't have a point about all of the troubling national challenges listed above. It's that he's pointing out problems we all know exist without offering anything in the way of solutions.

While Mr. Thompson didn't necessarily need to roll out a 10-point plan the second he stepped off the campaign bus for the first time, he does have to catch up with candidates like Mayor Giuliani and Mitt Romney, who have already outlined substantial agendas. Nonetheless, his campaign manager, Bill Lacy, who ran his successful 1994 Senate campaign with the legendary red pickup truck, told reporters after Mr. Thompson's speech not to expect any policy proposals in September. and maybe not for a while after that.

What's more, for all the talk of crises like the impeding insolvency of Social Security, Mr. Thompson doesn't seem terribly conversant on that particular issue. Asked recently how his plan to reform the system would differ from what President Bush proposed after his re-election, Mr. Thompson said, "I don't even remember the details of his plan."

Now none of this is to say that the folks who came out to hear Mr. Thompson didn't generally like what they heard.

One 72-year-old Republican who said she has worked on every Republican campaign since Dwight Eisenhower's, Jeannine Malett, told me she thought Mr. Thompson's speech was "wonderful."

"I like the way he talked about the importance of the next president," she said. "I like that he is supportive of life."

But getting a decent reaction from crowds is different than running a sound campaign.

One other compliment Ms. Malett had for Mr. Thompson was more than a bit of a double-edged sword: "I like that he came here and didn't raise a bunch of money."

A popular but penniless candidate, perhaps, is charming to some voters — but it's hardly any way to win the White House.

Yet that's the way the Thompson folks are being forced to make their run. "We're going to run this campaign lean and mean," Mr. Lacy said. He told me flat out: "We're not going to raise as much money as Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney."

So far, that's certainly been the case. The campaign spokesman announced on the press bus around 5 p.m. local time that the campaign had raised roughly $300,000 from its Web site, Fred08.com, since it went live at midnight. But the campaign raised only $3 million in June, short of internal predictions of $5 million, and it's done everything in its power to lower expectations about what were most likely a disastrous July and August, in terms of fund raising.

Can a campaign survive just on a charismatic candidate with celebrity appeal? To be sure, the Thompson campaign is still taking shape. Mr. Lacy has been busy consolidating power and letting former consultants and advisers go by the barrelful. One of the first people to sign on to the Thompson effort, Mark Corallo, left just in the last couple days. The current team is making up for lost time, winging it, and trying to convert national popularity into decent numbers in early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, where Mr. Thompson runs in fourth place, behind long-shot candidate Mike Huckabee.

For now, it's fighting to gain back ground it lost by not entering earlier in the summer.

"I wish he'd gotten in a bit sooner," a longtime Council Bluffs resident, Dick Baber, who watched Mr. Thompson's speech at an evening campaign stop in the town square, said. "I went with Mitt Romney first because he was in the race." Mr. Baber, 75, who said he's volunteered for Republican campaigns for decades, told me he'd seen lots of local activists go with other campaigns because of Mr. Thompson's delay.

"He could overcome that," Mr. Baber said.

But to do that, Mr. Thompson will have to be ready to play hard.