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Republican Fred Thompson Rises In Two Polls
After weeks of getting tepid “reviews” from national political correspondents, bloggers, columnists such as Robert Novak and anonymous sources quoted in political news stories, former actor Fred Thompson is now getting some good news: his numbers have gone up in two key polls.
The latest AP/Ipsos poll shows him within three points of front former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. That poll now shows among Republicans it’s 27% Rudy Giuliani, 23% Fred Thompson, 13% John McCain, 11% Mitt Romney, 7% Mike Huckabee.
Meanwhile the Des Moines Register reports:
Mitt Romney still leads in Iowa but Fred Thompson, a relative newcomer to the presidential race, has emerged as his nearest competitor in a new Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus participants.
Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani are in a close fight for third place in the Iowa Poll taken over three days last week.
What’s going on? It’s a sign that the Republican race (more so than the race for the Democratic nomination) remains fluid.
Writes columnist Walter Shapiro:
The smartest assessment this week of the presidential campaign was not typed on deadline by a world-weary pundit nor whispered into a cellphone by a shadowy political operative nor even concocted by the wild-and-crazy writers for a late-night TV comic. Instead it sprang from the unlikely lips of Mitt Romney who uttered a sentence that should be enshrined in Bartlett’s and pasted on the BlackBerrys of every campaign reporter in the land. In the midst of a self-serving, but nonetheless spot-on riff Thursday about the unreliability of polls, Romney said, ‘The fun thing about this stage in politics is that almost everything that’s being written will be proven wrong.
Romney is correct, of course. During political races political pundits (and bloggers) write a slew of thing with absolute certainty, seemingly morphing into Dick Morrises (don’t go to Vegas and bet your house on Morris’ predictions). Much of what is written is quickly outdated and the old conventional wisdom is quickly tossed out and sometimes not acknowledged as having existed as a new one is quickly put into place.
What’s clear is that Giuliani more than any other Republican candidate is going to have to woo, win over and maintain the support of some Republicans who will not support a ticket that has him at the top. A lot of Republicans are now frantically shopping around for other options.
4 Responses to “Republican Fred Thompson Rises In Two Polls”
This seems like its due more to dissatisfaction with Giuliani than to a groundswell of support for Fred. He’ll need pretty intensive coaching before he enters any of the debates, however, as he’s been making a lot of public gaffes recently and seems generally out of touch with the issues those inside the Beltway care about most.
The GOP is in a serious bind. The only Republican that can put the Dems (Hillary in particular) on the defensive is Giuliani. Fred Thompson will win electoral votes in my home state (Tennessee) but he won’t in many other states. His whole schtick just doesn’t work politically. He runs as a “real conservative” when his political heritage in this state is the moderate Howard Baker wing of the party. He touts his gravitas when it’s largely a construction of Hollywood. He speaks of integrity when he’s spent his whole life as a lobbyist. He claims to have support among Christian conservatives when, unlike Bush, Thompson refuses to “testify” to his faith on the campaign trail (a BIG issue to evangelicals, by the way). He acts as if he’s a down-home Lawrenceburg, Tennessee country lawyer, when he’s been a DC-committee lawyer and lobbyist his entire career (when he wasn’t in Hollywood). He claims to want to move the nation in a more unified direction a la Obama but then accuses war opponents of treason. He has no energy to run a campaign and makes a series of embarrassing gaffes every week – and his personality (unlike Bush) does not jibe well with gaffes (somehow “serious” people don’t make tons of gaffes). Thompson’s support is, as krit says, entirely a product of dissatisfaction with Giuliani. The GOP is almost entirely the Party of Dixie now. And with Giuliani’s core social positions untenable to many white right-wing Southern Christians, the Republican base is just looking for someone who SOUNDS like them.
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I think what Elrod’s trying to say is that Fred Thompson isn’t giving voters an overiding reason to jump in their cars and vote for him. He’s pleasant enough in a folksy way, but sort of fades into the background instead of standing out. He seems to lack passion of purpose and clarity of leadership.
He’s supposed to be the heir to Ronald Reagan- but were he here, wouldn’t Lloyd Bentsen say “I knew Ronald Reagan, and you sir are no Ronald Reagan”?? (of course we’d have to leave out the ‘Ronald Reagan was a friend of mine- since Lloyd was a Democrat!)