Some people from the Right think the Republicans are missing “the tall man”: Fred Thompson
It may be so that he would loom over the other candidates, making debates look like a production of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. If Hillary and a couple other candidates stood on boxes so all the Democratic candidates would seem more or less the same height on the dais, then the rest of the Republican candidates are going to need variable height forklifts to stand even with Thompson’s pow.*
Unlike some of the minor players in the candidacy race to become the Republican nominee, who scrambled and clawed to climb onto the dais and be counted equally… Fred Thompson’s strategy appears to be fashionably late, and thereby, receive an overage of coverage.
Smart strategy. Perhaps. He’s a pop culture figure. An actor, who can realistically portray just about anything.
Some try to make a Reagan – Thompson connection. But, Reagan left acting, and wasn’t all that versatile at it, in order to fiercely pursue politics. Reagan never went back to acting. Thompson has done a much more ‘on-again off-again Finnegan’ in politics and character acting, going back and forth and both at once.
It is interesting to hear many newscasters calling him “Fred” instead of by his title.
It is also interesting to hear one person on the street today, calling Thompson, “Big Daddy”
And at “Say Anything” blog, one commenter calls him, “Mr. Hollywood.”
sayanythingblog.com/entry/fred_thompson_is_in/
Bill Bennett says, “Fred fills a gap in the imagination…”
And Robert Novak saying Thompson is “for real.’
This article by Mr. Novak is worth reading to get the flavor of those who hope for Thompson…
realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/04/fred_thompson_is_for_real.html
We’ll have to wait and see. Some people are ‘the real thing,’ one relatively well-integrated person. Some people can fill the multiple projections laid on them by others, without being any of them.
*clarification by request: pow means ‘top of head;’ see Robert Burns poem, “John Anderson, my Jo, John.”