PrintJune 15, 2007
The friends and enemies of Fred Thompson
The not-yet-candidacy of Fred Thompson, soaring in polls of Republican primary voters, has engendered plenty of excitement, and not a small amount of fear on the part of his rivals, Democrats, and the MSM. My trusted political friends are divided on Fred, with some highly enthusiastic, most intrigued and wanting more, and some waiting to be convinced Fred has the vision and depth.
Melanie Morgan, KSFO talk show host in San Francisco (morning drive time) and Force of Nature (full time), analyzes media reactions to Fred, which she accurately reads as fear. She, like most conservatives including me, perceives that rare ability of Fred to reach out through the mass media fog, and connect directly to the American people. The comparison to Reagan is obvious, and Melanie sees that ability of Fred's sparking the gravest fears among MSM apparatchiks.
I have to doff my hat to Melanie for cementing that connection with the following comparison:
She cites the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, writing about Fred:
If Thompson's name came up in some sort of free association game, he would be a genuine stumper: Thompson and what? There is no Thompson Act, Thompson Compromise, Thompson Hearing, Thompson Speech or Thompson Anything that comes to mind. No living man can call himself a Thompsonite. ... Instead, Thompson came and went from the Senate as if he was never there, leaving only the faint scent of ennui.
Then Melanie asks readers to guess who wrote this about Reagan:
But in a somewhat larger sense, the president seems to cast no shadow. It is true that he has an economic program and some startling congressional victories to prove it, but Wall Street, not to mention Main Street, has not seemed to notice. There is next to no confidence in the program, no sense, say, that things would be worse if there was no Reagan program. It just does not seem to matter.
