The General's Moment

"Thompson has excellent reasons for his studied vagueness. Thompson is positioning himself as the most generic Republican in the race, the candidate acceptable to all factions of the party. Rudy Giuliani has defied party orthodoxy on abortion, guns and other social issues. Mitt Romney's healthcare reforms in Massachusetts have been sharply condemned by the Wall Street Journal editorial page and employer organizations. John McCain has more enemies inside the GOP than he does outside. Thompson by contrast has alienated no important party constituency -- and as often as not, avoiding enemies is the safest and surest route to the top. But if Thompson is the candidate best able to unite the Republican party, he is also the candidate least able to reach beyond it. If no Republican has any strong reason to vote against him, no non-Republican has any strong reason to vote for him."

Is Thompson soporific? Andrew Sullivan brands him "Valium Fred":

"People like Fred Thompson. So far as I can tell, that is currently the prime rationale for his candidacy for president of the United States . . .

"Thompson is accused of being lazy. So was Ronald Reagan, of course. But there is a key difference between the Reagan of 1979 and the Thompson of 2007. Reagan had spent a lifetime honing arguments, finessing policy, articulating a broad philosophical view, while proposing concrete and radical policy options.

Thompson has a legislative record as a senator from Tennessee that is all but invisible. Yes, he has a solid conservative record on taxes and other people's spending. But he was a hog for his home-state pork barrel projects. He was, in other words, a popular backbencher -- but no more . . .

"A thinker he isn't. He's rather a conveyor of mood. In a period of less moment, when less is at stake, this might be an aesthetic preference: a calm presence in a storm. But on the substance of war, and foreign policy, the Thompson shtick can seem somewhat detached from the needs of the moment."

Rudy is hardly a hero to the right, either, as we see in this Power Line post by Paul Mirengoff:

"Giuliani, of course, has a right to be proud of his record as mayor of New York. And it makes sense that this record would be the centerpiece of his campaign for president. But there are several problems with constantly bragging in the first person about his tenure as mayor.

"First, when a candidate keeps hitting the same note over and over, people quickly tire of hearing it. Moreover, it makes the candidate an easy target for ridicule.

"Second, by talking so much about New York, Rudy is playing into the stereotype of New Yorkers as people who think that the rest of the country is basically a suburb of that city. That's not a stereotype that's likely to enhance Giuliani's popularity in places like New Hampshire, where voters like to hear about themselves and their state . . .

"Third, voters don't like non-stop bragging."

The Democrats faced off in a (translated) Spanish-language debate on Univision Sunday night, drawing ridicule from Betsy's Page:

"Clinton touts her campaign manager's ethnic origin as if what Hispanics in this country are truly concerned about is token members of a person's campaign rather than real action. Praising Cesar Chavez [as Obama did] does nothing about Hispanic issues today just as praising Martin Luther King says nothing about what a candidate would do today about issues facing blacks. But, as usual, John Edwards goes the lowest. He somehow thinks that it reflects positively on him that his former hometown is now half Latino.

"Hmmm, I wonder how non-Latinos feel about his pride in an American town becoming now half Latino. Is Edwards touting this as a desired goal? I wonder how that message plays in the Other America in the Appalachian towns Edwards was visiting this summer. None of these three statements really have anything to do with the real issues facing Hispanic Americans, issues that the Univision reporters also asked them about. They're just throwaway lines in the panderfest that such debates invite."