Late to the Party

I'm sure I'm not the first to say it, and a year from now I may have to eat these words, but I don't think that Fred Thompson's entry into the GOP race is going to be that big a deal.

Given the fact that there are ten other candidates who are already sucking the oxygen out of the room, Mr. Thompson's late arrival will create a buzz that may just last until he officially announces on the Fourth of July, but once he's in and starts to take on Giuliani, McCain, and Romney, all who have been in the race for the better part of a year and who have lined up enough financial backers to stay in, it's hard to imagine that all those moneybags are suddenly going to bolt and go for Fred.

Granted, the Republicans are desperate enough to keep their grip on power that they're currently ranking liberal New Yorker Giuliani at the top of the heap and also willing to overlook the weathervane contortions of Mr. Romney. Mr. Thompson's backers claim he's the real deal; the true heir of Ronald Reagan, and the one man that can unite the party. Yeah, we heard that about George W. Bush, too.

As odd as it is to say that Mr. Thompson is a late arrival since the conventions are more than a year away, he's going to have to explain why he thinks he's really worth backing, and the sniping has already begun from the other candidates; if he was truly passionate about this, he would not have given up his Senate seat in 2002 and gone back to his acting career. And there's something that smacks of overinflated ego that makes someone think he can barge in and say, "Hey, you lucky people, here I am!" That's Newt Gingrich's shtick.

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Sridhar Pappu reminds us of all the Hollywood actors who have made politics their second career, including George Murphy, Fred Grandy, Sonny Bono, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and, of course, Ronald Reagan. It's interesting to note that for all the talk about "liberal Hollywood," most of these politicians were Republicans.