Actor and former Senator Fred Thompson had a warning for his party yesterday:
Ignore the independent voter at your peril.
Thompson, a Republican 2008 Presidential nomination candidate whose candidacy started amid great hope but some experts think has fizzled versus sizzled, made comments that deserve to be looked at a bit more closely. They’re not comments Republicans like to hear, but they are underscored by the reality of the 2006 election results plus several books that have come out since then:
Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson said Sunday “the political pendulum is swinging” against his party, and Republicans needs to work harder to win over independent voters.
“Everybody knows what’s at stake next year, but I wonder if we’ve come to terms with the difficulty we’ve got as Republicans, and the fact that we’re going to have to do a lot of things very well to prevail,” the former Tennessee senator said.
What the Republican Party needs, Thompson said, is to nominate a candidate like himself who can “go before the American people and ask for the vote of a cross-section of Americans.”
He warned that there are a growing number of independents who are in danger of being swept up by the Democratic Party, and urged his party to “take our commonsense conservative principles and make them applicable to today’s circumstances.”
Polls have traditionally shown a split among independents. But now more than ever, polls show independent voters breaking towards the Democratic Party. Karl Rove’s past strategy was to conduct “mobilization elections” where the goal was to mobilize your supporters and get every single one of them out to the polls, and not worry about independent or centrist voters. That strategy proved as successful in 2006 as the new Tom Cruise movie Lions For Lambs.
“For a lot of reasons, (independents) don’t like the ways things are going … but they also don’t particularly like the other side, but they are willing to give us a chance, willing to listen to us,” he said.
Thompson noted that only once in the past 50 years has a party been able to elect a president of its party three terms in a row.
And he is correct: independent voters are sometimes dismissed as wusses, intellectual wimps, and people who don’t have any strong beliefs or political backbone by partisans — when partisans don’t feel they really need them. But, in the end, they are needed. And independent voters DO read and talk and develop strong, even passionate principles as THIS BOOK fully documents.
Thompson is also correct about the pendulum of political history.
It is swinging back to where Democrats should control the White House. What can stop the pendulum swing? Political negligence. Political bungling. Democratic Party divisions. Democrats HAVE snatched defeat from the jaws of victory before so, if history is any indication, they can indeed do it again.
“The political pendulum is swinging against us. Everybody knows that the president’s numbers are down,” he said. He also pointed to the greater number of Republican seats up in Congress as opposed to Democratic seats, and said experts are predicting Republicans will lose even more control.
“And what they’re predicting essentially is Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will be running this country, with larger numbers,” he said. If Republicans lose more power in Washington, he warned, “we are going to go down the road of a welfare state, which is weaker on national defense.
“They are going to be selecting judges who will change the social policy in this country for the worse for a generation to come,” he said.
The first part of what Thompson said is now a “given.” You can’t write off independent voters. The second part is an assumption — that in making this pitch to Republicans (you need someone like me who can attract independent voters) and independents (you’d vote for me more than for many other Republican candidates) everyone now believes that Democrats will automatically usher in an era of being weaker on defense.
But assumptions aren’t always shared by everyone — and may not be by some independent voters. And in these times of growing dissatisfaction with the Bush White House, it’s wise to remember the old saying:
An assumption makes an “ass’ out of “u” and “me.”
UPDATE: Thompson’s difficulty in himself appealing to independent voters can be seen in his mixed-message stand on abortion which — even with an endorsement from a powerful anti-abortion group — is likely to displease voters on both sides of the issue:
Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson today defended his opposition to a federal constitutional amendment to ban abortion and contended it was more realistic to appoint conservative judges to outlaw abortion or let the states decide whether the procedure should be legal.
Thompson’s comments, made during a swing through Iowa, where his campaign has languished in its early stages, also came on the eve of his candidacy’s expected endorsement by the National Right to Life Committee.
“What I have concentrated on is a way to get to the same goal (to ban abortion) that’s achievable. We could not get to first base on an amendment when we controlled both houses and the presidency,” Thompson told reporters after a coffeehouse meet-and-greet.
“Now the question is, what do you do about that? Well I think the answer is to get better judges and to appoint people to the Supreme Court and hopefully someday Roe vs. Wade will be overturned. That’s my goal. That’s my priority,” he said.
Thompson acknowledged that prior to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision that allowed women to seek an abortion, the individual states had rights to outlaw or legalize the procedure.
“And as I like to say, sometimes states have a right to do things that even Fred Thompson disagrees with,” the former Tennessee senator said.
Once more, Thompson is articulating reality: it would be very hard, if not impossible, to pass a constitutional amendment banning abortion. The more realistic approach would be do it through the court house door — via Supreme Court appointments. But saying so won’t help him with voters who want the amendment and he now risks losing voters now who don’t want Roe VS Wade overturned now that his long-range intentions are crystal clear.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.