Good Ole Fred

How do you think the righties would react if the news got out that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama lobbied for an abortion rights group or gave legal advice to an another lawyer who was representing the defendants in the Pan Am 103 bombing? I'm pretty sure you could hear the screams of Michelle Malkin, John Gibson, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh from the middle of Kansas.

But if it's a Republican, not a peep.

Fred Thompson works hard to come across as a good ole boy and Washington outsider, but the truth is that he's just as much an insider as anyone else in the race, and he's got the lobbying record to prove it. He just doesn't like to talk about it.

For more than 20 years before and after he was a senator, the Republican presidential candidate has lobbied or consulted for a range of clients, some of whom were controversial: two Libyan airline-bombing suspects; an abortion rights group; toppled Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide; an insurance firm; a chemical company and some members of the savings and loan industry.

Asked why he omits public mention of his long and lucrative career, Thompson chuckled Tuesday: "Nobody asked me the question." Pressed for an answer as he walked out of a meeting with [Florida] Gov. Charlie Crist, Thompson declined to comment, saying, "Good to see you."

[...]

During a three-day, eight-city trip, Florida voters flocked and gushed over Thompson's folksy swagger and up-from-the-bootstraps biography. Even the music he closed his speeches with -- Johnny Cash's I've Been Everywhere -- hit the right note with the crowds.

"A man who plays Johnny Cash can't be bad," Fredrica Speir, a Republican retiree from Celebration, said, laughing, after a Thompson speech near her home that peeled her somewhat away from supporting Giuliani. "I liked his commanding presence, laid-back yet forceful.... I saw shades in him of Ronald Reagan."

Speir said she liked that Thompson, as he said, "put term limits on myself" by leaving office after 2002, and said she didn't mind that he lobbied.

None of Thompson's Republican opponents have publicly questioned his role as a lobbyist, a paid advocate position that's a must for virtually anyone doing business with state or federal government.

There is a certain segment of the electorate that doesn't seem to mind being bamboozled by appearances and campaign songs, and they fall for it every time. The term for them is "sucker," and to the GOP they're known as "the base."