The End of Fred?

“Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States,” he said in a statement. “I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.”

And it was over.

Last spring, as Thompson publicly contemplated a run for the White House, many conservatives lined up to support him. He was, like them, a conservative. And he was electable. Within weeks of Thompson’s first hint that he would run, he had surged to leads in several national polls among potential Republican nominees. And well before he was an official candidate, conservatives in Congress were offering to support him if he ran. Things were going so well in April that Thompson joked: “I can’t afford to announce. I’m doing too well.”

He quickly began to assemble the key elements of his non-campaign campaign. He consulted advisers from his days in Tennessee and friends from the Senate, and recruited a team of volunteers to handle the growing crush of media requests. In short order, he had the basics of a campaign operation, high-level political support, a recognizable face, and the potential (at least) for significant fundraising. He heard from many quarters that he would be late the moment he announced and that he should get in as soon as possible.

Thompson had other ideas. He wanted to run a different kind of campaign, to make up his own rules.

“The world changes so rapidly and politics do too,” he said last spring. “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.”

Thompson and his team believed that new technologies would be critical. One of the reasons Thompson first seriously considered running for president was the reaction he got to commentaries he did for ABC radio. At times on his own, at times as a substitute for Paul Harvey, Thompson provided his characteristically candid and sharp views on everything from Iraq and Iran to college football. Many of those commentaries ran on conservative websites and the feedback Thompson got was overwhelming and positive. He understood it as a hunger for a candidate who could talk about big issues–War and Peace, Social Security, entitlement reform–and could say things that were not politically correct by communicating directly with his audience.

“The response I got encouraged me that I could do this in a different way and not have to run for most of my adult life, not have to raise as much money as quickly as some others, to be able to do some things in a different way,” he said last spring. “What I’ve always believed, and a large element of what I’ve always done in politics is a little–it’s a little bit antiestablishment, a little bit of trying to reform, has always been doing things differently.”

So rather than spend time kissing the rings of precinct captains in rural Iowa or bouncing from townhall to townhall across New Hampshire, Thompson would stay home and shoot short videos to be released on the Internet. Cable news programs, always looking to fill airtime, would rebroadcast them endlessly and talk radio would take to his bold conservative ideas. Millions of Americans knew his face from Law & Order and his film career and when they put the face with his name, the thinking went, fundraising would come relatively easily.

Although there were doubts among some Thompson advisers, many of whom wanted their candidate to run a more traditional campaign, one event early in the process seemed to reinforce their new media strategy. When left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore attacked Thompson for smoking Cuban cigars, the candidate shot a 37-second video response. Thompson, chomping on a cigar, came back forcefully and ended his mini-lecture by suggesting that Moore seek mental help. Within minutes of its posting, the video had been linked on the Drudge Report and it spread across the web at a speed that surprised even Thompson’s most pro-Internet advisers.

The success of the short video–and the favorable reaction it received from conservatives–reinforced Thompson’s own inclination to run this different kind of campaign. Thompson had always had his own timeline in mind and his early success in generating buzz for his unconventional candidacy did nothing to encourage him to expedite the process. Advisers who were encouraging him to move quickly were tuned out.

So why did Thompson fail? Two reasons, mainly. First, he was going to be the new straight-talker, a candidate who was going to tell the truth even when that truth was unpleasant. We would always know what he was thinking because he would always tell us. That was the theory, anyway, and once he was a candidate Thompson was admirably straightforward, even when being that way hurt him politically. But from the beginning, Thompson played coy about his candidacy. As his advisers said privately that he had made up his mind and would run, Thompson’s string of public pronouncements seemed like a six-month political striptease. As a result, he badly undercut one of the main rationales for his candidacy.

Second, Thompson’s new way of running for the president proved to be wishful thinking. It turns out, for better and for worse, that presidential candidates need to do the kinds of retail politicking that Thompson found so annoying. (Thompson’s wife, Jeri, by contrast, seemed to enjoy it and was very good at it.) His first real sustained campaign trip came in mid-December, some three weeks before the Iowa caucuses. It featured occasional meet-and-greets, some local talk radio, a healthy dose of national conservative media appearances, and a 17-minute closing video that attracted nowhere near the attention of his Michael Moore smackdown.

Will Thompson endorse? Others have pointed out that Thompson was one of four senator to support John McCain in 2000. And when I asked him last spring about McCain, Thompson said he was sure they would remain friends even after a hard-fought campaign.

“If we do this, we’ll remain friends. We’ll be friends after this. But this is, John will be the first to agree that things that we’re talking about here today are more important than those considerations. We don’t have to sacrifice our friendship to do this. If he’s the kind of guy that he is and I’m the kind of guy that I ought to be, strange as it sounds in this whole world nowadays, we don’t have to sacrifice our friendship to do it and we won’t.”

The reality turned out to be more complicated. Several important Thompson advisers hold McCain sympathizers responsible for circulating rumors before Iowa that Thompson would drop out and endorse McCain after that contest. They believe that news reports based on those claims had the effect of suppressing Thompson’s vote in Iowa and cost him dearly.

Did it? That seems unlikely, but could the possibility that it did be enough to keep Thompson from endorsing his old friend?

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