Mr. Thompson, a Republican, has been able to set up what looks like a stealth campaign on the Internet because federal election laws and enforcement have failed to catch up with the surge in campaigning in cyberspace. As a result, he has been able to promote his positions and raise money through his Web site, all while technically remaining a noncandidate.Whether or not Mr. Thompson actually gets into the race is one thing. But after having looked at his site and listened to his talking points, I'm not sure I know what his appeal is to the average voter, Republican or not, other than the fact that he's not Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, or John McCain. His resume as an actor is decent; he probably made more of an impression on the voters by doing Law & Order than he did in the Senate, but that gets you lunch at Spago, not into the White House. And speaking of his Senate career, so far no one has come up with anything extraordinary that he accomplished in the his years there; even he seemed to think that it was a boring job.
And that status enables him to remain on television on “Law and Order” reruns without NBC facing demands from other candidates for equal time. It exempts him from the more rigorous rules on reporting donors that declared candidates must adhere to.
Officially, Mr. Thompson is just “testing the waters” for a presidential campaign, although in many ways he is behaving like a candidate. He is making his first precaucus trip to Iowa this week, and he sends out regular e-mail messages to supporters detailing his positions. He also recently sent out a video responding to the director Michael Moore’s challenge to a debate over health care issues raised in his latest movie, “Sicko,” and the video got more than 200,000 hits on YouTube.
“The question is, at what point do your activities in fact become a candidate’s activities?” said Meredith McGeehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, which advocates tighter campaign finance rules. “This experience will probably cause some folks, us included, to go back and say: ‘Is there something that needs to be updated? Are the rules clear enough? Are these really up to date with modern campaigns?’
So I'm mystified as to what there is to him that makes him attractive, other than the fact that by being a non-candidate he is, for the time being, not "none of the above." But in an election campaign where everybody is calling for "change" and this is an election that desperately calls for it, Mr. Thompson doesn't seem to be a whole heck of a lot different than the other candidates in the GOP field. Once he becomes one, he's going to have to convince more just the party faithful that he's not just more of the same.
