Thompson Is Ready for a New Ride

Thompson didn't hesitate: He would get a pickup truck in his home town of Lawrenceburg and drive it around the state. Thompson said the staff had told him it was a bad idea.

Lacy, in a July column he wrote about Thompson for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, acknowledges he vetoed the truck idea. "Too clever, I said," Lacy wrote. "Too much of a gimmick."

Ingram told Thompson that the idea could work "if you do it right." The campaign took some time to find the right truck. Red was important for visibility, but they didn't want it overly flashy or "macho," Ingram said, so they insisted that it be used and have single wheels in the back rather than double.

In television spots, many of which he ad-libbed, Thompson leaned against the truck and said: "Congress is more the problem than the solution; they're out of touch and we're out of patience."

Said Alexander: "The thing to watch is: Does he have the same effect on national television as he did in the Tennessee race? In the Tennessee race, people saw him and they liked him and he was better than everybody else on television."

Cooper called him on the homespun approach. At one point his campaign dubbed Thompson a "Gucci-wearing, Lincoln-driving, Perrier-drinking, Grey Poupon-spreading millionaire Washington special interest lobbyist."

It didn't matter. Thompson, for all his wealth, was able to sell himself as an outsider country boy. His win was resounding: In a great year for the GOP, he outpolled all of the party's statewide candidates, won 19 of the 22 counties in Cooper's district and collected 61 percent of the vote.

In his op-ed, written before being tapped to run Thompson's campaign, Lacy detailed some of the challenges. "Fred isn't Superman," he wrote. "He has some similarities to President Reagan, but he hasn't been around long and proven himself as much. . . . He has no national campaign experience and hasn't been through that large-scale rough and tumble." But he added that Thompson has some experience that may help.

"In the darkest hours of his political career, when the wheels were about to come off his first campaign, he figured out how to scoop them up, put them on a red truck and drive off into the sunset."