Thompson Off the Sidelines

Fred Thompson sat at the end of a long table in The Monocle restaurant on Capitol Hill on Tuesday for dinner with some 20 fellow conservatives, mostly journalists. He sent two signals. First, he sounded like a man who has decided to run for president, as his advisers indicated yesterday. Second, his candidacy will be different from other Republicans, in both substance and style.

This was one of the irregular sessions of the Saturday Evening Club, which is not a club and never meets on Saturday. The name was purloined from H.L. Mencken's Baltimore discussion club by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor in chief of the American Spectator. These events always feature a guest newsmaker -- over the past two years usually a Republican presidential hopeful. Former senator Thompson has been the most intriguing of these because he has become a leading prospect for president even though he has not announced his candidacy and has no real campaign.

Thompson's performance Tuesday night, with his remarks off the record, helped show why many Republican insiders are ready to support him. Thompson is winning straw polls at Republican conferences and running well in opinion polls mainly because of dissatisfaction, for varying reasons, with the three leading GOP candidates -- Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Thompson at the dinner confirmed the perception inside the party of his potential to be an extraordinary candidate.

Thompson disappointed in his first appearance as a prospective candidate, addressing the Lincoln Club of Orange County, Calif., on May 4. Discarding a speech he had written himself, Thompson ad-libbed from handwritten notes. It was not the second coming of Ronald Reagan that the Californians envisioned. Was all the excitement about Thompson engendered merely by his television role as a formidable Manhattan district attorney on "Law and Order"?

He stuck to his prepared cards for his second speech, at a state Republican Party function in Stamford, Conn., last week, and it was a considerable improvement. It sounded more like an off-the-record conversation he had with me in Orange County before his speech there and his Saturday Evening Club conversation.

The Connecticut Republicans, down to one congressional seat after 2006 losses, cheered when Thompson said: "I think the biggest problem we have today is what I believe is the disconnect between Washington, D.C., and the people of the United States. People are looking around at the pork-barrel spending and the petty politics, the backbiting. The fighting over all things, large or small, is creating a cynicism among our people." That cynicism, Thompson contends, mandates a different kind of campaign for 2008.

Thompson implied at Stamford that Republicans, along with Democrats, are responsible for making Americans cynical. While so far not spelling this out publicly, he deplores ethical abuses, profligate spending and incompetent management of the Iraq war. He becomes incandescent when considering abysmal CIA and Justice Department performance under the Bush administration. He is enraged by Justice's actions in decisions leading to Scooter Libby's prison sentence.

In his Senate voting record and his public utterances, Thompson is more conservative than Giuliani, McCain or Romney. He takes a hard line on the war against terrorism and worries about immigration policy creating a permanent underclass. His one deviation from the conservative line has been support for the McCain-Feingold campaign reform, much of which he believes has been overtaken by current fundraising practices and has perhaps become irrelevant. Overall, his tone, in a soft Tennessee drawl, is less harsh than that of other Republican candidates -- a real-life version of the avuncular character he plays on TV.

Beyond ideology, Thompson envisions a 21st-century campaign, using the Internet more and spending less than his opponents. When speaking to a friendly audience or ruminating off the record, the 6-foot-6 actor-politician does not look or sound like the GOP's announced candidates for president. His challenge will be to convey that impression when he appears with opponents on the same stage in the immediate future.

© 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.