Meet Fred Thompson: The New McCain

Bob Somerby has been trying to warn people, but his considerable insight into the predilections of our fickle press corps has largely fallen on deaf ears. All the signs are out there: the fawning profiles, the willingness to repeat obviously phony anecdotes and airbrush away true ones, the persistent implication that "authenticity" and the "who would I rather drink a beer with" test are the most important criteria for choosing presidents.

All the ingredients are there. Just like they were in 2000. A Democratic front runner who is disliked by the press and portrayed as being too ambitious and calculating. A GOP dark horse candidate who charms the press with this straight-talk.

Yes, ex-Tennessee Senator and Law & Order star Fred Thompson is poised to become the new John McCain. Journalists will swoon and gush about his plain-spokenness and down-home charm. All of the senior members of the Washington press corps will trip over each other to get assigned to his campaign, and will spend the next however many months churning out charming anecdote after charming anecdote, while doing their best to ignore any signs that Thompson is in any way a typical politician or is less than fully informed about the issues of the day.

How do I know this will happen? I don't, but call it a strong hunch. Bob Somerby's been doing a good job chronicling the early stages of the press corps' developing infatuation with Thompson. Here are Chris Matthews and Margaret Carlson on Hardball a couple months ago:

MATTHEWS (3/29/07): You know what I like about him? I interviewed him when he was running for the Senate. He was the underdog out in Tennessee, in Nashville. I said, “What hotel are you staying at?” He said, “What hotel are you staying at?” We were both at three-star hotels. He comes over, meets me for breakfast, no entourage, not another single person with him. This is when you fall in love with politicians. Maybe it`s rehearsed, but—and I said, “Well”—I’m doing a column in those days. I said, “What about your divorce? You want me to write about that?” He said, “I prefer you wouldn’t.” I mean, I just like the fact that he has a little unhappiness in his past, maybe some misbehavior problems, but he just says, you know, “I`d rather you didn’t.”

MARGARET CARLSON: For the press, he would be The New McCain, because he does seem honest and open.

And again last month:

MATTHEWS (4/2/07) Lynn [Sweet], let`s talk for a minute—because I want to talk when we come back about Fred Thompson. It looks to me—and this is my seat-of-the-pants judgment—he looks like the daddy figure the Republican Party has been looking around for. He looks classic wise man. He has gravitas. He’s no Dan Quayle, a guy—when he says something he’s got that Colin Powell feature, where you just sort of trust him. Is he going to jump in this race and take over?

The other day, in a piece loaded with cheap jabs at the top candidates on both sides (but particularly the Dems) "liberal" Lawrence O'Donnell observed:

The media look for dream candidates because they're fun. (If Thompson gets into the race, his press bus is going to be the place to be.)

Somerby also highlights this embarrassingly stupid profile of Thompson that appeared in the Washington Post recently. The author gushes about Thompson's charm:

Thompson also tends to catch some slack because, at 6 feet 6 inches and with a charm and sense of humor that can crack even the most tightly clenched among us, he's someone men want to be and women want to be with. He's the John Wayne to Gore's professor.

And just today, the standard bearer of DC conventional wisdom, Mark Halperin, wrote his own glowing profile of Thompson for TIME Magazine:

The single most compelling feature of a Thompson candidacy would be his magnetism. A natural storyteller, he speaks with a relaxed cadence and unhurried confidence, peppering his remarks with language such as "fella" and "bad guys," pausing expertly to make a point, relish an applause line, set up a joke. He is most effective when he makes fun of the superficial glamour of Los Angeles and the tangled hypocrisy of D.C. In a recent appearance, he supplied a cheeky anecdote about a fellow Senator coming up to him after he gave his first speech on the Senate floor, which was on the topic of "having Congress abide by the laws that everybody else had to abide by — a novel concept at the time." His colleague, however, merely wanted to ask him about the submarine from the film The Hunt for Red October.

Thompson is most often compared to Ronald Reagan, and the comparison is apt. Neither would be mistaken for an intellectual, but both got plenty of mileage out of regularly concealing their smarts. Both placed an emphasis on grand, classic American themes, and both offered a folksy way of describing the holy trinity of conservative dogma (lower taxes, less government and a strong national defense).

Halperin knows all the right anecdotes to cite too. He points out that "[w]hen Al Gore vacated his Senate seat, Thompson entered the race for it and won handily, after driving his trademark red pickup truck all over Tennessee."

Ah yes, the trademark red pickup truck, the one that Thompson--a suit-wearing DC lobbyist--rented in order to completely reinvent himself and fool the rubes. As Noam Scheiber of TNR has documented, the red pickup truck was one of the phoniest stunts in modern political history:

By the time Fred Thompson decides whether or not to join the presidential fray, you will have heard the story of his red pickup truck at least a dozen times. The truck in question is a 1990 Chevy, which the famed statesman-thespian rented during his maiden Senate campaign in 1994. The idea was that Thompson would dress up in blue jeans and shabby boots and drive himself to campaign events around the state. Upon arriving, he'd mount the bed of the truck and launch into a homespun riff on the virtues of citizen-legislators and the perils of Washington insider-ism. For good measure, he'd refer to himself in the third person as "Ol' Fred" and the Chevy as "this ol' baby."

And as Kevin Drum points out:

Not only was the truck rented, but Thompson didn't even deign to drive the thing himself. . . . Basically, he just drove the thing the final few hundred feet before each campaign event, and then ditched it for something nicer as soon as he was out of sight of the yokels. Quite a man of the people, no?

Of course, none of these facts made their way into Halperin's profile. They're not part of the approved script.

I know that this entire post may sound trivial to some of you, especially since Thompson has not yet even announced his candidacy, but my gut tells me that Thompson is going to run and that the stage is set for him to become the GOP nominee. If I'm right about that, and if the press continues to be smitten with this man, then it's going to be a real problem. In 2000, the press corps savaged Al Gore and routinely covered for George Bush, who was in way over his head. If McCain had managed to win the nomination, the general election coverage would have been even more lopsided.

We may well witness this dynamic again if Thompson manages to win the nomination, particularly if he's pitted against Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, who are both routinely subjected to unfair and mocking coverage by Washington journalists.

If Democrats and liberals don't start pushing back against these inane press corps scripts early and often, we may again find ourselves in a situation where the fickleness of elite journalists ends up deciding the outcome of a crucial election.