A Second Helping of Fred

Those familiar with his speech, which Thompson wrote himself, characterize it as optimistic but tough-minded about the serious challenges facing the country. He will touch on several of the big issues that will be at the center of any Thompson for president campaign, if he decides to run. (The Wall Street Journal‘s John Fund reports that both CNN and C-SPAN will broadcast Thompson’s remarks live.)

“I think what you’re seeing is the process Senator Thompson has been talking about,” says one Thompson adviser. “He’s talking to people, meeting people around the country, letting people hear from him and hear some of his ideas. The fact that you’re going to be seeing and hearing him in more and more political and Republican settings should tell you where his head is at right now.”

One indication that his effort is growing increasingly serious is that Thompson–who often shows up for interviews and speeches alone–will have with him three top advisers, including Mark Corallo, an experienced Washington hand, and Bob Davis, a longtime friend of Thompson who currently runs the Tennessee Republican Party.

A couple of weeks ago, I profiled Thompson for THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Although the piece ran at a meaty 6,000 words, there was much from my interview with Thompson that I wasn’t able to include. So consider this a second helping of Fred.

Among many other things, we discussed the surge (he’s for it, but thinks it was late and should have been bigger); cutting spending (he faults both the Bush administration and congressional Republicans for their failures); the Democrats’ attempt to cut funding for the Iraq War (“tragic”); why he chose not to run for president in 2000 (he didn’t want to be a “caretaker president”); his reading habits in college (Russel Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, National Review and, to understand the other side, the New Republic,); his frustrations in the Scooter Libby prosecution with the CIA (“they set this whole thing up”) and the Justice Department (the case was brought because of “a breakdown” at DOJ); and which longtime Democrat he contributed to in 2006.

The Surge

On January 11, the day after President Bush announced his plans for a troop surge in Iraq, Thompson praised the changes in a commentary for ABC Radio. “I was struck by a couple of things he said that indicated not just a change in tactics but a whole new attitude with regard to what’s necessary,” Thompson said. “He’s taking the gloves off.” Thompson, a strong supporter of the Iraq War who voted to authorize it in October 2002, ended with a soft but direct critique: “I’ll bet that a lot of folks who support the president on this are asking themselves ‘What if we’d taken care of business this way two years ago?'”

I asked Thompson if he was among that group (“Yep.”), whether the surge is the last hope for a victory (“In Iraq? Probably.”), and what specifically had led him to offer that criticism of the White House.

“The greatest source of my frustration,” he says, “is that in any situation involving military conflict in a democracy, the president has a limited window of opportunity to get the job done, or more precisely, to make progress. That window can be pretty wide if progress is being made. My concern is that we have waited so long that that window is almost closed. And you cannot carry on a war for any length of time at all without the support of the American people.” He adds: “If we had done this three years ago, I just think we would have been in much better shape.”

The Iraqi government, he says, was not ready to take over military responsibility for security in Iraq as quickly as the U.S. military tried to hand it over. “We misjudged,” he says. “War is full of misjudgments. You make corrections. I don’t fault the misjudgments as much as I d o the failure to begin moving in the right direction sooner. I’ve had concerns about rules of engagement in times past. It’s kind of like–you’re either in or you’re out. There’s no substitute for success and you garner no goodwill by appearing weak or being unsuccessful. And I’ve tried to resist the temptation to second-guess too much, but the facts are the facts.”

Spending

If restrictive rules of engagement were one of the mistakes of postwar Iraq, refusing to put more troops in Iraq from the beginning of the war is the other. It is one of several sacrifices, he says, that the American people were not asked to make. Talk of “sacrifice” is often political code for taxes, so when Thompson mentioned the lack of sacrifices in “economic policy” I was curious. Thompson has been a supporter of tax cuts over the years, and I doubted that he would call for raising taxes as he contemplated entering the Republican primary.

Are you talking about tax cuts?

“No. I’m talking about the other side of the equation, spending. I think the tax cuts are the things that have put the economy in the position it is today, which is very good. But on the spending side of the equation–and you can’t talk about spending without talking about the entitlements. The arguments we are having today over spending and budget deficits and even debt is Mickey Mouse stuff compared [to entitlements]. The numbers are just overwhelming. And so all of that has got to be on the table.”

The economics, he says, are directly related to the “global battle” that the United States is fighting. “It’s a part of the overall picture. The president’s right about that. But it’s got to be treated with the seriousness which we say that it deserves. You know, once every two months we make a speech about it, but there’s more to it than that. It’s got to affect us more seriously than that. You’ve got to put t he pressure on Congress to be honest with the American people and start addressing all those things which will help not only in Iraq but in our overall interests.”

Democrats, con and pro

Democrats in Congress, he says, are making policy decisions on Iraq based on their reading polls that suggest the war is unpopular. “I think they’re overreading them. I think they’re misinterpreting them. I think they’re going to overreach,” he predicted. “These attempts to cut off funding , especially at this stage in the game that the Democrats are trying to do back-door and now front-door, are tragic,” he says. “We are on the verge of a major defeat for this country. These are serious times and it’s not about personalities. . . . To me, it’s beyond a pro-Bush, anti-Bush deal in the war and I’ve been saying the same thing since back when he was 60 percent in the polls.”

One longtime Democrat Thompson praised at several points throughout the interview was Senator Joe Lieberman, a staunch supporter of the Iraq War and the War on Terror. Thompson worked closely with Lieberman as the senior senators on the Senate Government Affairs Committee in the late 1990s. Thompson says Lieberman backed him against the interests of his party in several difficult spots when the cameras weren’t on. It demonstrated character that Thompson says he saw again when Democrats abandoned Lieberman in his primary contest against liberal upstart, Ned Lamont. Thompson says he admires Lieberman’s willingness to fight for an unpopular war.

“I just thought, you know, it was the gutsy, principled thing for him to do. That ought to be rewarded every time we find it.” Thompson’s PAC gave Lieberman $1,000 in August 2006, shortly after his loss in the primary, and another $1,000 in October. (Thompson refused to answer my question about whether he would consider Lieberman as his running mate if he were to win the Republican nomination.)

The Libby trial

Thompson has backed another well-known supporter of the Iraq War at what some think might come at a political cost to his prospective presidential bid. Thompson says he doesn’t care. Scooter Libby “is getting the shaft,” he says, “and I’ll help him if I can.”

Thompson speaks with a slow drawl, characteristic of his upbringing in southern Tennessee, and his demeanor is similarly laid back. He gestures infrequently and deliberately, only when he is particularly determined to underscore a point he is making. The closest he came to being animated during our discussion came as he discussed the chain of events that led to the prosecution of Libby. His comments are worth quoting at length:

And if that assistance damages his presidential prospects? Too bad. He’s helping anyway.

The announcement

As Thompson considers whether or not he will run, he is getting a lot advice about the timing of his announcement. I asked him whether he had a timeframe in mind. “Just generally, I do. But not specifically and I’d rather not talk right now about it because that might change. But yeah, I have in my own mind a range that I think is right. You know, a lot of different ideas going on out there about that people have been at this for a long time apparently some have been laying their financial organization groundwork for three years and have raised and spent an awful lot of money.”

When I noted that polls show Thompson leading some of those candidates, he said: “I told somebody the other day, I can’t afford to announce. I’m doing too well. But you know, the world changes so rapidly and politics do too. 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.”

In terms of timing?

“In terms of everything. In terms of timing. In terms 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. The conventional wisdom this year was that you needed to raise $100 million in 2007. If that’s the case, then I’m already out. Clearly, I don’t believe that. . . . If you do it, you’ve got to be able to hit the ground running, not only from an organizational standpoint but from yourself. You need to know why you’re doing this, what your message is, and when you want to deliver various parts of that message, and how best to deliver them. Most of these campaigns are still the candidates. 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.”

I bungled my attempt to ask Thompson how long he had seen himself as a potential presidential candidate: “You know the old adage–I’ll butcher it if I try to get it exactly right–but you know there’s not a person in the Senate who isn’t either currently thinking about or hasn’t thought about–”

Thompson knew the one and finished my sentence. “Sees a president every morning in the mirror when they shave.”

“Right,” I said. “When did it first occur to you, ‘Maybe I could be president?”

He laughed. “Oh, a long time ago.”

Thompson did seem to be angling for a potential run in December 1997, when Larry King asked him about that possibility on CNN. He characterized himself then as a different kind of politician.

“I think that I came at it from a little bit different vantage point. I was not a professional politician. I had never run for public office. I had done several other things, been very fortunate in many respects, decided it was a time to take a certain portion of my life and devote it to public service, maybe make a difference, maybe approach things from a little different vantage point. Be in position maybe to say the emperor has no clothes every once in a while, because I wasn’t dependent on the system. Do what I can do and then leave it. And that has been my attitude so far, and I’m happy that I did it.”

Thompson would not rule out a run for president, but he didn’t embrace it, either. The timing wasn’t right.

“I have not been one of those people who came to Washington because I wanted go the White House. I think it is much too early to think about things like that, anyway. I don’t see no reason to take myself out of it, or put myself in it. But it’s really not on my mind, and it is not going to be–if ever, for at least a year.”

He added: “You know, times and people come together, sometimes. And the times have to be right for certain people.”

I asked him about that comment when we got together. He seemed very interested–almost surprised–that he had said it.

“That’s really kind of ironic, I guess, because that is the way I’ve always felt. I don’t think I was ready then, personally. I was not married. I was not willing to go through the aggravation level because, you know, who I was dating and all that kind of stuff. It seems like a long time ago.”

Thompson says before 9/11 he thought the United States was in “an era of caretaker presidents”-that the American people did not want to talk about some of the more difficult issues. Although Thompson credits Bush for campaigning on Social Security reform, such bold policy proposals were the exceptions after eight years of Bill Clinton. “George Bush comes along and talks about compassionate conservatism, it seemed like a perfect thing that fit the times and I’m sure his advisors thought so. And that’s not worth it. I was wrong. September 11 happened. We realized, everybody realized, that the earth had shifted under us. It became in most people’s eyes, a different era, requiring much more of a president. Giving a president much greater opportunities to do things than it ever had before.”

Thompson says he would campaign on bigger ideas befitting this changed world. Times and people come together sometimes.

“I would, if I do this, then I’ll have a wonderful way to test out my theories. It’s called the primaries. And I don’t want to get the nomination under false pretenses. But if I can speak what I believe, what is the truth, and get it, we may well just have something here.”

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