COLUMBIA, S.C. –“I’m sad for my Dad,” Tony Thompson was
saying after plopping down in a booth at the bar of the downtown Hilton.
I had been sitting there with Howie Morgan, a sometime
campaign hand in Tennessee Republican campaigns and a supporter this time around
of Mike Huckabee, who had just finished second to the now fully resurgent John
McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary. Having spotted Thompson earlier
on a cell phone outside the hotel, I had asked him to join us.
It was only about 10 o’clock on Saturday night, but Tony’s
party was clearly over. The amiable Nashville-based lobbyist was just then
waiting for a cab to take him back to the Marriott, where his father, Republican
presidential candidate Fred Thompson, and various staffers and supporters of the
former Tennessee senator were gathered.
Holding a wake, as one of them, longtime political hand
Steve Allbrooks, had confessed before bailing out and heading back to Tennessee.
Ex-SenatorThompson, who had been billed as the GOP’s savior when various party
pros had beseeched him to run in early 2007, had just climaxed – and probably
concluded — his disappointing run with a distant third, well behind both
McCain, the probable GOP favorite now, and Huckabee.
“I don’t think he’s made any plans to go on,” the younger
Thompson said carefully when asked about his father’s future course. He sighed.
“You know, he was drafted for this. He’s always been drafted.”
AS I THOUGHT BACK, that was a fair description of Fred
Thompson’s career. Drafted in 1972 by his political mentor, then Senator Howard
Baker, to serve as Republican counsel on the Senate Watergate committee, where
Thompson ended up popping the fateful question, Did President Nixon tape any of
his conversations in the White House?
Drafted again in the late ’80s for what turned out to be
regular strong-man roles by Hollywood after playing himself in a movie about his
law client Marie Ragghianti, who was the whistle blower in disgraced governor
Ray Blanton’s pay-for-pardons scandal.
Drafted once more in 1994 by Tennessee Republicans to try
to win back the Baker Senate seat, which had meanwhile become Al Gore’s, then
was vacated as Gore ascended to the vice presidency. Thompson did win it back,
though he had to do a late turnaround on his campaign’s tentative beginning in
order to finally beat Democrat Jim Cooper handily.
Thompson had spoken to that moment earlier this month in
Iowa – the first of two states (South Carolina was the second) that had been
considered must-wins if he was to overcome yet another feckless start. “You
know, there were some who said, ‘Old Fred doesn’t seem suited for this. He
doesn’t seem to have the fire in the belly,” he confided to a Holiday Inn crowd
in West Des Moines.
He recalled an early political obituary that had appeared
during that 1994 Senate race in The Tennessee Journal, the influential
political weekly that was then published by Nashville’s M. Lee Smith, who had
been a significant player himself in statewide Republican affairs.
“What they said was regarded as gospel, and he[Smith]
was my old law school buddy. He didn’t mean any harm,” Thompson recalled. “But
he said, ‘Fred just can’t do this.'” Thompson had let that sink in before
continuing.
“Well, I did. I not only won. I turned a 20-point
deficit into a 20-point victory margin.” And, as he pointed out, he had gone on
to win reelection to a full term in 2006 with the largest vote total for a
statewide candidate in Tennessee history. “I’ve won some races in my
time,” Thompson said, as he urged that Iowa crowd to go out into the next day’s
caucuses and help him “shock the world.”
It was an effective appeal, but, as things turned out, the
best the folks in Iowa could do was reward Thompson with a third place finish,
behind Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. It was less a shock than it was a
defibrillator moment that barely kept his presidential hopes alive.
HE HAD, AS SON TONY WAS SAYING, been drafted for this
current effort, too – only to see that ‘no-fire-in-the-belly’ talk get started
all over again amongst the Beltway media. That was something of a canard. The
fact is that Thompson had just got tired of politics in general and the
Washington brand in particular and had opted out of both a reelection effort in
2002 and another would-be draft the same year, for governor.
The unexpected death of Thompson’s grown daughter, Tony’s
sister, had further capped his declining appetite for service in the Senate.
“I don’t
want to spend the rest of my life up here,” he had said then. “I don’t like
spending 14- and 16-hour days voting on ‘sense of the Senate’ resolutions on
irrelevant matters.”
What Thompson did was go back to acting – to portraying
hard-bitten, ultra-authoritative District Attorney Arthur Branch on the
long-running NBC show Law and Order. I had long suspected that Thompson’s
now-notorious delay in beginning his presidential campaign – it was late summer
before he got going, a tardiness that many considered ultimately fatal to his
chances — owed something to contractual obligations, and Tony now corroborated
this.
Yes, there had been a Law and Order rerun season to
wait out (an earlier campaign from Thompson, who appeared in every episode,
would have compelled its suspension), and there had been a contract to complete
as fill-in reader for Paul Harvey as well.
There was also a fundamental flaw in the
Thompson-for-President campaign – one that, earlier that day, I had seen a late
flash of. The candidate had been booked for an election-day appearance at the
South Carolina Arms Collector Association Gun Show, held at the sprawling Jamil
Shrine Center, a big flea-market-style barn in Northwest Columbia, and I decided
to check it out.
IT WAS A COLD, RAINY DAY, and I was surprised to see the
large parking lot area – part asphalt, part dirt – overflowing. Once having
found a spot on the puddled periphery of all that and having quick-stepped
through the drizzle to get inside, though, I was quickly disabused of any notion
that candidate Thompson was the big draw.
It looked like an armed camp inside. Table after table
loaded with formidable-looking weapons of all sorts. Not just every species of
rifle and nozzled gun imaginable, automatic and otherwise, all of them being
swarmed over and sighted through and sometimes hoisted on the shoulders of a
crowd that may have numbered in the thousands. But brass knucks, spiked
wristbands, and anything else that looked like it could be used for assault
purposes.
The candidate himself finally arrived, in an entourage that
included both son Tony and Bob Davis, the former Tennessee GOP chairman whose
considerable accomplishments include the lifelong retention of a Skeezix-style
shelf of lacquered hair that juts out at right angles to his forehead and has
survived not only middle age but assorted weathers like this election-day
downpour.
To be sure, Thompson attracted attention as he and the
others moved through the vast building, aisle by crowded aisle. He is, after
all, a familiar image from his movie and TV roles, and he was frequently asked
to provide an autograph or pose for a picture. But he left little curiosity in
his wake, as each parted wave of shoppers went right back to ogling and handling
the shiny and menacing-looking table goodies.
Once at least, toward the end of his last circuit, on his
way out of the arena, the talk got expressly political. One of the vendors
congratulated Thompson on his stout rhetoric defending the Second Amendment
rights of gun-bearers and compared him favorably in that regard to rival
Huckabee, who was generally conceded to have grabbed off much of the
conservative hinterland vote that Thompson’s campaign was aiming for.
“You don’t see him here, do you?” the man said, in
something of a non-sequitur.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been doing this for a long time, a long
time before I was in politics,” Thompson said. And, after a few more thank-you,
thank-you-very-much responses to such remarks, a few more autographs and
pictures, he and his retinue were gone, and the huge crowd kept on swarming over firearms as
before.
I REMEMBERED TAKING MY GIRLS to a production of Swan
Lake at the Cannon Center a few years back and how, when the cast came out
for curtain calls after the show, the dancer who had played the evil Black Swan
and had performed superbly got noticeably subdued applause from the young
audience and was visibly hurt by the fact.
That was Fred Thompson in 2008. A gifted and natural actor,
as he had many times demonstrated, he had answered an audition call and been
handed a role this year – champion of desperate last-ditch conservatives —
that, in a year of patent voter unrest and desire for change, was bound to have
a limited audience and fan base.
In South Carolina, as in Iowa, Thompson had fulminated
against left-wing Democrats, upheld gun rights, deplored abortion and gay
marriage, inveighed against the burden of taxation, and denounced illegal
immigration and Islamo-fascism and Iran, all of which his chosen part called
for. Sometimes he did it well, sometimes not so well, as with any touring road
show.
But meanwhile, another player in the drama, former governor
Huckabee of Arkansas, whose campaign had gotten a head start over Thompson’s,
was saying all these things and more, but more easily and elegantly and
subordinating them to a sunnier outlook that had some progressive populist
overtones. Put simply, the former preacher, a winner in Iowa and a contender
elsewhere, had managed to upstage the ex-actor.
In the last few days before the GOP primary in South
Carolina, the Thompson and Huckabee camps had been having at each other pretty
vigorously – one reason why Howie Morgan had not exactly been advertising his
allegiance as the three of us sat making polite conversation, Howie and I with
cocktails, the teetotaling Tony Thompson without.
Finally, I made bold to say, as an aside, “Tony, I didn’t
tell you that Howie here is with the Huckabee campaign. I was sure you’d think
that was okay.”
Tony’s face changed a little, only a little. And he said,
“I’m not sure I do.” He went on to talk about a barrage of “push polls”
aimed at his father and clearly, to his mind, emanating from the Huckabee
campaign.
The conversation might have taken a difficult direction,
but just then someone from the hotel came to tell Tony his cab had arrived, and,
after handshakes and a pleasant enough leavetaking, he was gone, presumably
headed to commiserate with his father.
TONY THOMPSON’S PLACE IN THE BOOTH was shortly taken by Jim
Gilchrist, head of the Minuteman Project, perhaps the most zealous of the
organizations opposed to illegal immigration and demanding both a fence and
total repatriation of illegals, Mexican or otherwise, back to their homelands.
Gilchrist, whose endorsement of Huckabee (arranged, Morgan
had said, by himself) had become controversial in the anti-immigration movement,
was a friendly man with a surprisingly soft, even kindly face, and I had already
talked with him at some length during the long ballroom wait for results at
Huckabee’s election-night headquarters at the nearby Convention Center.
At one point, he leaned over and asked me, “Jackson, why is
that the media are so intent on sacrificing the sovereignty of the United States
and undermining the economic viability of America?”
I considered my options and answered, “That’s one
semantics, Jim. Another goes this way: ‘Give me your tired, your poor,/Your
huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ Those are Emma Lazarus’ words on the
Statue of Liberty.” Yep, I really did.
Let’s just say that the conversation went on and failed to
reach a consensus. In that respect, it bore a resemblance to the ongoing
election scramble in both parties. The Democratic version of the South Carolina
primary occurrs this weekend, and the Tennessee primary and the rest of Super
Tuesday are just around the bend on September 5th, and, with no
resolution in sight, things are still:
To Be Continued.
