A Night of Touch Football

For Roger Simon, it was a total panderfest:

"If you were wondering if there is ever going to be a "Sister Souljah" moment in this presidential race, in which a Democrat actually stands up to a major special interest group, I think you can forget it.

"At what was the third organized labor forum since February, all the major Democratic candidates gathered in the withering heat of Soldier Field and . . . withered.

"They promised everything and demanded nothing. Except votes, of course.

"With an estimated 17,000 union members in attendance here Tuesday, the moment was tailor-made for a candidate who wanted to stand up and stand out, by saying: 'Union demands for their members, while understandable, can make American goods more expensive and can drive American jobs overseas. Are you, as union members, willing to give up anything to keep American jobs at home?'

"That never happened."

On the family front, Fred Thompson is responding to all the media chatter about Jeri in an interview with National Review's Byron York:

"The former senator said his wife's actions, however they have been interpreted in the press, have been at his behest . . . 'Now, some people don't like that, especially some people who have their own issue with regard to the campaign, shall we say, and they take advantage of putting out anonymous comments and so forth.'

"A few moments later, Thompson addressed reports, like the one in the Washington Post and another in Newsweek, that looked into his wife's life before meeting Thompson. 'I think the problem is that Jeri refuses to go out in public and behave like a candidate's wife before I'm a candidate,' Thompson said. 'The fact that she's not out there promoting herself seems to greatly concern some people in the media, so they have gone back to old boyfriends, the families of old boyfriends, high-school classmates, basically anything that can be dredged up to fill this void that they perceive has been created.' "

That's a shrewd observation. But Thompson's been around long enough to know that he's the one who created the void by keeping his wife offstage while she's playing a significant role in his campaign.

"Some of the reports, Thompson said, have contained substantial factual errors. 'Things that you would think could have been checked fairly readily,' he told me, 'but things that are clearly erroneous -- like she's not a lawyer and she's never been married before. I listened to a news show with an expert commentator about a week ago talking about Jeri, and in a short segment he had four totally erroneous factual errors about her.' Thompson did not suggest that stories about his wife should be off limits. He understands the ways of politics. But he believes that now is not the right time for Jeri Thompson or the Thompson pre-campaign to address them in detail. 'She's not going to become a public commentator and personality as a candidate's wife until there's a candidate,' he said."

Fair enough. And the lawyer mistake, which appeared in The Post and other outlets, should not have been made.