Thompson’s Waterloo (Iowa)

After the candidate and his wife, Jeri, arrived and were introduced, Thompson took the stage. He warmed up his audience with a joke about the weather. It’s freezing back in Washington, too, he assured them.

“It was cold–it got so cold that the politicians had their hands in their own pockets,” he said. People laughed out loud. Over the next 25 minutes, Thompson portrayed himself as a limited-government conservative whose values are in line with Iowa Republicans. He boasted about his endorsement the day before by Steve King, the conservative Republican who represents Iowa’s Fifth District. He pointed to a column by the Des Moines Register‘s David Yepsen, the state’s most influential columnist, saying Thompson could still excite conservatives. And he delivered the kind of conservative message many in the crowd said they’d been waiting for since the campaign began.

Much of the speech was the political equivalent of chum. On national security: “The best way out of the fight is to be stronger than your adversary.” On the Democrats: “the left-wing, big government, high taxing, weak-on-national security Democratic party.” On his Republican opponents: “You’re not electing a set of plans, you’re electing a leader.”

Thompson made much of his strong showing at the last Republican debate, when he refused the moderator’s request for a show of hands on global warming. The other candidates, he reminded the crowd, followed his lead. “I don’t know how you’re going to stand up to leaders of Iran and North Korea if you can’t stand up to an overbearing moderator.” More applause.

After taking several questions from the audience, Thompson asks the crowd for its support on caucus night, then makes his way into the crowd to shake hands. As he chats with voters, Dierks Bentley’s “Free and Easy Down the Road I Go” comes blaring from the sound system.

If the Republican nomination were decided only by performances like this, Fred Thompson–whose policy views make him the most mainstream conservative in the race–would be on a glide-path to the Republican nomination. It’s not. And it is Thompson’s lackluster effort in all of those other areas of a campaign that has him running a distant third in most polls less than two weeks from the Iowa caucuses. But a strange set of circumstances–the two current Iowa frontrunners cutting each other apart and two former national frontrunners essentially skipping the caucuses–means that despite his late start Thompson may still have a chance to emerge from Iowa as one of three or four candidates with a real shot at the nomination.

“Iowa is critical to our campaign, and it may in fact be everything to our campaign,” says a Thompson official. “If we don’t do what we need to do in Iowa, it will be tough to compete effectively down the road.”

From the beginning, Thompson said he would run a different kind of campaign. He shared his philosophy about the process in an interview at his McLean home shortly after he first acknowledged publicly that he was considering a bid.

“The world changes so rapidly and politics do too,” he said. “And not only has technology changed, but now a lot of the primaries have changed, and the question is whether the old way of looking at things still applies to these new sets of circumstances in all cases. I don’t think they do.”

You mean in terms of timing?

“Well, in terms of everything. In terms of timing, in terms of the role of money, in terms of the timing of the money, in terms of all the steps that you traditionally need to make and when you need to make them. The conventional wisdom, from all I can tell, is that you need years of preparation. And if that’s the case, I’m already out.”

He continued by offering an analogy.

Before his speech in Waterloo, Thompson spent part of his afternoon in Waverly, Iowa, population 9,000. He rolled into town on a rock ‘n’ roll style tour bus with an oversized picture of him on the side. It read: “The Clear Conservative Choice: Hands Down.” His driver pulled up in front of the modest one-story building that houses the Waverly Democrat. Across the street, several stores sit empty. The “Sub-City” sandwich shop, located in an old gas station, is closed. The Pepsi sign in front looks like it has been there since the 1950s. A small group of Waverly citizens have waited in the cold for twenty minutes to meet the former senator.

When the door to the bus swings open, Thompson’s wife, Jeri, emerges first. She skips down the stairs and thrusts her hand toward the first person she sees. “Hi, I’m Jeri Thompson,” she says cheerfully, offering a warm smile. Fred follows her lead. As he lumbers toward the door of the newspaper’s headquarters, he makes small talk with those who have come to see him. He is cordial, even friendly, but his wife outshines him.

After a quick meeting with the staff of the newspaper, Thompson climbs aboard the bus for the four-block drive to the gleaming new building that houses the fire department. He and Jeri walk down the line of firemen assembled to greet him. When someone presents him with a fireman’s helmet to wear for a photo-op, Thompson holds the helmet away from him to get a good look at it and laughs. “I’ve got a silly-hat rule that I’m about to violate,” he says, raising it toward his head before thinking better of it. “I ain’t gonna do it,” he says, laughing.

“I’ll put it on,” Jeri says with a wide grin. “I’ll be the good sport. I get lots of points for this, guys.” And indeed she did; the firemen laughed along with her as they posed for pictures.

Thompson paused for a few more pictures on his way back to the bus. Brad Gade, an insurance representative from nearby Cedar Falls, asked Thompson to autograph a “Days of Thunder” DVD box, and “Big John” obliges. Gade says he is a conservative Republican who recently decided to caucus for Thompson on January 3. He says Thompson seems “down to earth and easy to relate to.” That’s something he hasn’t found in other candidates. “I looked a lot at Huckabee–but that recent stuff that’s come out. . . ” What stuff? “He’s so heavily into religion,” says Gade, wrinkling his nose. “Not my cup of tea.”

Later, I spoke to Scott and Chelle Adkins, a young couple from Waterloo. Chelle is the secretary of the Blackhawk County Republican party, and Scott has had a leadership position with the party, too. Like Brad Gade, they have considered other candidates. “Mitt Romney came close for me,” says Scott. “But there was just something missing. Huckabee appeals because of social issues, but I’m not so sure about fiscal issues.”

Chelle jumps in. “A month ago, Huckabee looked like he might be a great candidate. But the more I research his positions, the less comfortable I become.” I asked her for specifics. “Two things–illegal immigration and the taxes. I’d seen lots of advertising on how he raised taxes, how he was for a cigarette tax. I was really turned off on illegal immigration, too.”

“You can’t trust what you get from the media,” Scott said, as I furiously took notes. “So we researched it.”

The ads they’re talking about are Mitt Romney contrast ads, designed to paint Huckabee as soft on crime and illegal immigration and liberal on taxes. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence–now backed by some polling–that suggests they’re accomplishing that much. But is Romney peeling voters away from Huckabee and sending them toward Fred Thompson?

Thompson advisers are counting on it. They believe a slice-and-dice fight on the ground here creates an opening for their candidate, though Thompson has very little money to spend on paid media. Instead, he is running around the state talking to every talk radio host who will have him on and dropping by small-town newspapers with the hope that they will run stories about the visit.

The priority, these advisers say, is getting Iowans to connect Thompson’s well-known face with his name. This worked in Tennessee when Thompson first ran for Senate, and they think it could help them again in a much smaller state. Even his bumper stickers have a picture of the candidate.

So in the end, it could mostly come down to Fred, which is how he envisioned it even before he decided to run.

“Most of these campaigns are still the candidates,” he said. “The money, the organization, the preparation–all that’s very important, but it’s less than 50 percent. The most of it puts on one pair of shoes every morning and goes out. And it’s important that that person knows exactly what they’re doing.”

Free and easy down the road he goes.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.