Posted on 09/08/2007 2:51:30 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
The question: When Fred Thompson opted to announce his presidential candidacy from the comfort of Jay Leno’s arm chair Wednesday night — instead of participating in the Republican debate in New Hampshire that same evening — did that hurt his campaign in New Hampshire?
The answer: What campaign in New Hampshire?
“I think we’ll be getting staff within a week,” Thompson adviser Dan Hughes, a former Republican state representative from New Castle, told me Friday. “I think there’ll be an announcement within the next few days.”
Thompson not only has no paid staff in New Hampshire, he has no organization. He has two advisers, Hughes and former Reagan administration official Gerry Carmen of Manchester. But Carmen is known to spend a lot of his time in Washington, and Hughes has been the one carrying Thompson’s water in New Hampshire this summer.
It was Hughes who organized Thompson’s first visit to the state in June.
“I told everybody he was running and they didn’t believe me,” he said. “But now they do.”
Thompson’s no-show at Wednesday night’s debate unquestionably hurt him with a lot of New Hampshire Republicans. The debate was co-sponsored by FOX News and the state GOP. A lot of Republicans felt that by skipping an official party-sponsored debate Thompson was rudely dismissing the entire state party. So in addition to disappointing Granite Staters in general, he offended Republican insiders in particular.
(Carmen and Hughes got tickets to the debate, but they did not get passes to the spin room afterwards.)
But hurting the pride of top Republicans is the least of Thompson’s worries in New Hampshire. If he commits to campaigning here and impresses Republican and independent voters (New Hampshire’s primaries are open) in the next five months, he certainly could overcome this offense. But to do that he has to have a ground game. New Hampshire is all about the ground game. Thompson has nothing. Nor does he seem too concerned about getting one.
This late in the game, an impressively organized campaign would have had staff in place, or at least announced, the day after the official declaration of candidacy. Thompson’s staff might take a week to get here.
I asked Hughes if he had signs ready to put up and bumper stickers ready to hand out.
“I have some bumper stickers from the committee that was before Friends of Fred, whatever the hell that was,” he said. “We haven’t been actually even trying to get them out. You really can’t be running a campaign if you’re testing the waters, and we haven’t.”
Hughes does have a database of supporters. But it cannot be a big list. At the debate, there were exactly two “Fredheads” holding signs outside the arena. They told me there were a lot of Thompson backers in New Hampshire — “100 of us.”
How is Thompson going to drum up more support in New Hampshire, where he consistently ranks third in the polls, a good 15 to 20 points behind Mitt Romney? Apparently not by campaigning here. Thompson is doing exactly three events in New Hampshire this weekend. When will he return?
“He’ll be back I know in October, but I don’t know the schedule,” Hughes said.
It is an axiom of political campaigning that candidates improve with experience. As Hughes acknowledged, “The more you’re out there, the better you get.” In New Hampshire, Rudy Giuliani has spent the past six months becoming a much better campaigner. John McCain is hitting his stride again and Mitt Romney, Wednesday night’s debate performance aside, is an outstanding campaigner. Thompson, on the other hand, is rusty and almost entirely untested in New Hampshire. Nationally, most of his early performance reviews have been abysmal. So although he enters the race at the traditional starting point — around Labor Day weekend — he is way behind in fundraising, organization and practice.
He also has the distinct disadvantage that most of New Hampshire’s top-flight Republican operatives are committed to other campaigns. Even the big-name endorsements are being snatched up, though there are plenty left to be had.
If Thompson plans to win New Hampshire, he enters the contest at a serious disadvantage. It is not an insurmountable one. He has five months, and Granite Staters are famous for not making up their minds until days before, if not the day of, the primary. But it will take time for him to build an organization here and get to the point where his campaign is really competitive. The other candidates have a big head start, and Thompson does not seem to have a natural base of support in New Hampshire. He polls worse here than he does nationally. Most NH Republicans I’ve talked with say Thompson needs to essentially camp out in New Hampshire for the next five months if he wants to win it.
However, if Thompson does not plan to win New Hampshire, none of this really matters. If he plans, say, to let the eight other candidates duke it out in Iowa and New Hampshire, leaving one winner to take him on in South Carolina and Florida — southern states where he would have a natural advantage over a Northeastern Republican like Giuliani or Romney — then he doesn’t need to pay more than token attention to New Hampshire.
So far, token attention is all New Hampshire has received from Fred Thompson.
NR has been very anti-Fred for some reason. The man declared two days ago and he gets berated for not having a ‘ground game’ yet.
“We’re going back to the tick-tock to get the boo-boo!”
Fred Thompson
“Baby’s Day Out”
Fred ping!
I think Fred is in excellent shape now that Rudy has basically come out in favor of open borders to absorb many of those who will jump that sinking ship.
More people watch Leno than live in New Hampshire. Fred chose where he wanted to go. I respect that.
Maybe they know something the rest of us don't...yet.
NO.... New Hamshire is merely a Dog and Pony Show..
Seems like he is running a right of center General Election campaign and NOT a Republican Primary. Has he ever ran in a Primary before ?? Maybe that’s his problem.
I think they are just being biased in favor of thier candidate
THE answer to THE question is: why does anyone even give a shiite.
It really tweaks some people’s sensitivities when you don’t buy into their game plan. I don’t have anything against the fine people of New Hampshire, but we are talking about a very small state’s primary as if it really meant anything at all. It really doesn’t.
We live in a new age. Everyone realizes this, but if a candidate tries to maximize his impact based on that fact, he is taken to task for it.
If Fred wasn’t forward leaning, he’d be trashed for it. And if he is and wants to shake things up a little, he’s trashed for it.
On Leno the other night he had a great comment along these lines. It went something like this. “You know, that Fred Thompson is exactly what this nation needs right now. It sure is too bad he didn’t start his campaign earlier.”
When it gets down to it, I don’t think too many people are going to cast their vote for someone else, just because Fred didn’t opt to play pick up sticks in New Hampshire.
I’m not from NH...but how many people would vote for Rudy vs Fred based on Rudy spending more time in NH? If so, they are stupid enough to deserve anything they get.
I find the fact that Romney spends so much time & $$ in two small states trying to get name recognition a sign of weakness. This isn’t 1960. You don’t have the option of doing well in NH and building up momentum. The front loaded primaries we have now mean you need name recognition and strength across the board right away. You can’t build it month by month.
NH helps knock out the bottom tier. Beyond that, I doubt it means squat.
And that matters because....
Good grief, the man is going to be in NH this weekend, and folks will get to see him in person in several different places. Sounds like he’s gonna connect with voters, to me. Maybe the PUNDITS are getting their knickers in a twist, but I doubt if regular voters will.
The only way he didn’t have boots on the ground is that he really hadn’t made up his mind until a few days before Leno... and that just doesn’t pass the laff test.
Hillary set the bar with her “Listening Tour".She'd go to an area where she already had advance scouts on the ground, then she'd leave people behind to work the area as she moved on to the next place the state.
It was absolutley brilliant.
> When Fred Thompson opted to announce his presidential
> candidacy from the comfort of Jay Leno’s arm chair
> Wednesday night — instead of participating in the
> Republican debate in New Hampshire that same evening ...
FT would have had to effectively announce before the
debate in order to be in the debate.
The rest of the article complains that FT didn’t give
the DNC any ammo to use against him in their bogus FEC
complaints of BCFR violations.
JFK didn’t even announce until Jan 1960 for the 1960 election.
Agenda-based “reporting” and “analysis” is not the
exclusive province of the left.
It’s about money. It is always about money. The delay in announcement was about delaying financial disclosures of the “campaign”, but there is no more avoiding that.
As for not competing in states, the nomination is not won by popular vote. It is won by securing delegates. If you do not compete, you do not win delegates.
*YAWN*
Exactly!
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