Thompson's Politics Much Like McCain's

Like the Arizona senator, Thompson is passionate about national security issues. In 2000, he infuriated business groups, a rock-solid GOP constituency, by insisting that a trade bill with China include provisions that would allow sanctions on Chinese companies that sent weapons to rogue nations. He was unsuccessful.

In 2005, a year before Al Gore took to the big screen, Thompson played a fictional president in a little-seen movie called "Last Best Chance," which depicts a group of terrorists getting access to nuclear weapons. (He will play another president, Ulysses S. Grant, in the upcoming television version of Dee Brown's native American history "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.")

Although in the Senate Thompson voted for bills to ban late-term abortions and garnered high ratings from abortion opponents, he was not a leader on social issues. Operatives aligned with some of Thompson's would-be opponents are circulating a clip from a Senate debate in which Thompson said he did not support banning abortions.

"Should the government come in and criminalize, let's say, a young girl and her parents and her doctors as aiders and abettors? . . . I think not," Thompson said.

And in 1996, he said the GOP should not make limiting abortion a major issue at the party's nominating convention, arguing that Republicans should focus on less divisive issues.

Thompson, while he was in Congress, earned a reputation as a maverick. "He's not predictable," said Tom Ingram, who was a top adviser in Thompson's 1994 campaign and now serves as chief of staff for Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). Conservatives may be drawn to Thompson's lonely effort in the Senate to reduce the role of the federal government. He opposed bills providing funding for local police departments to buy bulletproof vests and was the only vote in the Senate against a 1997 bill that would have shielded volunteers from liability suits; he argued that both were instances of the federal government reaching into areas that should be restricted to states.

In a recent column on the National Review's Web site, he bragged about occasionally losing 99 to 1 on votes because of his federalist views.

Thompson's small-government stances sometimes went even further. In his first Senate race in 1994, when he ran for the last two years of Gore's term after the Democrat was elected vice president in 1992, Thompson rode around Tennessee in a leased red Chevy pickup truck and campaigned on a "cut their pay and send them home" platform: advocating term limits in the House and the Senate and lower congressional pay, and even suggesting that Congress meet only half the year.

Democrats slammed Thompson for hypocrisy, noting he had worked for almost two decades as a lobbyist, spending much of his time in Washington. His clients included, according to published reports, General Electric, the pension fund for the Teamsters and Westinghouse. He lobbied for laws that critics say helped lead to the savings-and-loan crises of the 1980s.

In 1997, GOP leaders fumed after they put Thompson in a plum spot as the head of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, which was investigating fundraising practices of the 1996 Clinton campaign, and he expanded the probe to cover allegations against both parties. Thompson voted against one of the two impeachment articles against President Bill Clinton in 1999, arguing that the perjury charge was not grounds for impeachment.

But Thompson was generally a reliable vote for his party, and unlike McCain, did not seem to revel in challenging his party's leaders. "McCain was more gruff, and the perception was he was doing these things for his presidential ambitions," said Alex Vogel, formerly a top aide to Frist. "Fred wasn't running for anything."

Since leaving the Senate, Thompson has remained a GOP activist, advising then-Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. when he met with senators during the confirmation process and serving on an advisory panel of the legal defense fund for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former top aide to Vice President Cheney who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. Thompson said if he were president he would pardon Libby immediately, telling FOX News that the conviction was a "miscarriage of justice."