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 Much of what is written is quickly outdated and the old conventional wisdom is quickly tossed out and sometimes not acknowledged as having existed as a new one is quickly put into place.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.
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.