Some years ago I ran into Fred Thompson at Washington's Reagan National Airport and had a chat with him as we waited for a (very) delayed flight. I found him to be affable and nice -- good company, if you want to know -- but I cannot remember a single thing he said. Alas, it is about the same with his Senate career.It's ironic that when people compare Fred Thompson to Ronald Reagan, the one thing they have in common is their acting careers. They both made a decent living playing secondary roles. Mr. Reagan was never considered a leading man; with few exceptions he played supporting roles, even in "Bedtime for Bonzo" he played second banana to a monkey. Mr. Thompson likewise has never had his name above the title. But the presidency is no place to audition for a leading role.
If Thompson's name came up in some sort of free-association game, he would be a genuine stumper: Thompson and what? There is no Thompson Act, Thompson Compromise, Thompson Hearing, Thompson Speech or Thompson Anything that comes to mind. No living man can call himself a Thompsonite. Instead, Thompson came and went from the Senate as if he were never there, leaving only the faint scent of ennui. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life up here," he once said. "I don't like spending 14- and 16-hour days voting on 'sense of the Senate' resolutions on irrelevant matters." As a call to action, this lacks a certain something.
Such a sentiment may be the telltale tick of a normal man. But the presidency that Thompson now seeks is won not by the normal, the average, the ordinary, but by people fueled by an explosive combination of overriding ambition and charming megalomania. The world needs them, they are convinced. God wants them, they have been told. The country calls; they answer and march smartly into history. This is the stuff of parody (and I exaggerate a bit), but you don't get to be president by waiting for others to ask -- unless you are the son of one. Let us not repeat that mistake.
[...]
The presidency is where a person can make the most difference. But the emergence of Thompson shows that a fatigued Republican Party is not interested in making any difference at all -- just in hanging on. What commends Thompson to the presidency -- the only thing anyone ever mentions -- is his TV fame. If that's all it takes, Thompson can look forward to being more than a president. He'll be an American Idol.
What's even scarier is that one of the reasons Mr. Thompson is showing up in the middle of the GOP polling without having spent a dime to campaign is that people recognize him. Perhaps not by name, but they know the face, whether it's from Law & Order or any of the myriad roles he's played on TV and in film for the last twenty years or so. So, they reason, he's played a president or an admiral on TV; how much of a stretch can it be for him to actually do the job?
Frankly, I don't want to see somone run for president who has to be drafted for the job. I want someone who really does want the job because they believe they can actually do something and make a difference, not someone who has to be coaxed. That means they will have ideas and goals, not obligations to their party or the influential. (And we've got solid evidence of how that turns out.) Sure, I know that brings out the egomaniacs and nutballs, but the nature of politics is that the hard slog through the campaign and the primaries weeds out most of the truly crazy like Tom Tancredo and Sam Brownback, leaving us with the ambitious but not necessarily dangerous.
The danger in persuading someone like Fred Thompson or any other candidate that has heretofore generated a yawning indifference towards working up a sweat to join the field is that we run the risk of having yet another president who instead of being Ronald Reagan is more like that wonderful icon of blandness, Dwight Eisenhower.
