Posted on 08/21/2007 7:13:21 AM PDT by hardback
When Fred Thompson finally announces his candidacy next month, it will be the closest thing to a successful draft of a presidential candidate in more than a half-century.
It isn’t that the actor-turned-U.S. senator-turned-actor had to have his arm twisted to run. But Thompson did need to be convinced it would be more than a fool’s errand, and he clearly was not planning on running for president until others sought him out.
The rest of the current White House aspirants, all of whom have been planning to run since at least the end of 2004, have been thinking about becoming president since they were in high school, if not kindergarten.
Whether Thompson turns out to be anything other than a historical footnote will be determined by what happens after he announces his candidacy, now expected Labor Day week.
But, by actually doing so, he will be the first White House hopeful to actually run because others persuaded him to since Dwight Eisenhower returned to the United States in the spring of 1952 and won the presidency later that year.
Eisenhower, the architect of the D-Day invasion and the supreme commander of NATO, was serving in Europe in 1951 and early 1952. He had actually turned down the efforts of some Democrats to draft him as their presidential candidate in 1948.
Eisenhower agreed to run on the GOP banner in 1952 after he won the New Hampshire primary when supporters placed his name on the ballot without his permission.
The effort to convince Thompson to run was nothing as elaborate as the one that drafted Eisenhower, but these are far different times and the process is far more complex, expensive and time-consuming.
Friends, including former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, R-Tenn., who has been Thompson’s mentor over the years, began urging him to run early this year when none of the GOP candidates seemed to light a fire with grass-roots Republicans.
In fact, polls still show that many more Republicans than Democrats are unhappy with the current field of party candidates. Among those who express a preference, Thompson now consistently runs second behind former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in both national polls and those in most states, although not the two early key tests — Iowa and New Hampshire.
Actually, the attempt to draft Thompson was probably more like the one undertaken by the friends of Colin Powell to convince the then-former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to seek the 1996 GOP nomination.
But Powell, who would subsequently serve as President George W. Bush’s secretary of state, had never run for political office. Despite the hype, he never seemed to be seriously considering running.
The other major unsuccessful attempt to draft a presidential candidate came in 1964, when then-former Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, who at the time was serving as the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, won the New Hampshire Republican primary after friends ran a write-in campaign for him. But he, too, never became a full-blown candidate.
Although the surface similarities between Thompson and Eisenhower seem few — Ike was a certified war hero, and Fred just played similar roles in the movies — both have the benefit of being nonpolitical celebrities.
Moreover, just as many in the GOP have turned to Thompson this year out of disappointment with the current field, there was a similar sense among many Republicans in 1952 about the poor prospects in November for their candidates.
And — as the specter of a Korean War that had dragged on too long hung over the country in 1952 — today there is deep disenchantment about the continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq.
Yet that analogy is inexact. The Korean War was directed by a Democratic president, Harry Truman, who would eventually choose not to seek reelection in the face of polls that would have made his campaign difficult. Republican Eisenhower was able to capitalize on that public frustration with a war run by a Democratic president.
Today, the frustration is with a Republican president who will not be on the ballot. And Bush’s GOP affiliation will make it more difficult for someone such as Thompson to benefit politically from the widespread unhappiness in the country.
Only time will tell whether Thompson ultimately follows Eisenhower into the Oval Office, but already he has come further than anyone could have predicted just nine months ago.
— Peter A. Brown is the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
he hasn’t announced yet? I’ve heard people tel me he has.
His announcement will be around Labor Day. This is not like the rumors that were out earlier which were just internet rumblings, but this is from his campaign.
And, he is the only candidate with the name recognition and character to beat Hitlery and Obama. Of course, I do not count Guliani in that, because he is a liberal.
“Republican Eisenhower was able to capitalize on that public frustration with a war run by a Democratic president.”
:::::
Now should say:
Republican Thompson was able to capitalize on that public frustration with a country run by a Socialist Democrat Congress.
Not exactly a draft. Fred first announced he might be interested, then it took off from there.
So if Thompson is Ike, hand-picked by insiders and CFR members, then who is Robert Taft?
There were many of us trying to encourage Fred Thompson and Haley Barbour to run back in 2006 after the congressional race debacle.
As it now stands, Rudy and Hillary have been crowned as their party nominees.
I want to see Fred start to take on both.
It is a draft. There are a bunch of websites out to draft Thompson, there was a draft Thompson petition, people who knew him were talking to him about running long before he said a word. This comment from a blog about the draft sites:
“In addition, Draft Fred Thompson websites have started popping up on the web and most were created by college students! Both http://www.AnotherRonaldReagan.com and http://www.Fred08.com are excellent examples of this. If he is catching on amoung the young even before he has announced, then this race for the republican nomination is about to change quickly.”
The blog comment found here:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2007/03/fred_thompson_more_than_flirti.html
This is one of the websites for the draft:
http://www.fred08.com/
And another:
http://www.anotherronaldreagan.com/
I think Fred already did in his ‘New York State of Mind’ ABC Editorial today :)
Yea, hee hee hee, I kinda liked that.
..he’s just warming up:)
And he has a hot wife.
This guy is a moron. We had one just 4 years ago-- Wesley Clark. "Draft Clark" was very successful at turning a guy who wasn't thinking of joining the race and who didn't have a real national profile into a legitimate contender for the Dem nomination.
Once he announces, I think there is a good chance FredT can gain conservative support and unite Republicans behind a winning strategy. If Thompson doen't survive and another scenario plays out, in all likeihood enough conservatives would bolt from the GOP to vote third party. That would doom the Republican Party, mainly because of who would probably be sitting at the top of the ticket. A weak liberal candidate named, Rudy Giuliani.
So if Thompson is Ike, hand-picked by insiders and CFR members, then who is Robert Taft?
In what sense was Wes Clark a “successful draft”?
Yes, there is that. First ladies must be hot.
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