California Conservative

You’ve gotta love the media savvy that Fred Thompson has shown thus far. He upstaged the second debate by doing taking on Michael Moore in the Breitbart video. Now he’s got new plans to be the center of attention without debating:

Thompson advisers point out that the new testing-the-waters entity is not quite a campaign committee, though it will officially begin accepting contributions on June 4. On that day, the First Day, as it were, the campaign will take in donations that it can then tout as an impressive one-day haul. A corollary benefit will be that news reports about Thompson’s non-entry entry will run on June 5, when the declared candidates will meet in New Hampshire for their third debate. (Thompson won’t be required to disclose his donors and the amounts they give to the Federal Election Commission until September.)

In other words, Sen. Thompson will send a ‘fundraising shot’ across the frontrunners’ bow the day of the New Hampshire debate. The next day, the debaters will have their headline, Fred Thompson will have his. And he won’t have to deal with Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo.

Simply put, Fred Thompson is setting the terms of his engagement and he’s benefiting from it. These aren’t debates. They’re an opportunity for fourth tier candidates like Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul to spew their purist blather to a big audience.

Former Georgia Senator Mack Mattingly, a First Day Founder who was on the conference call, says that he has chosen to back Thompson for two reasons. “First, he’s a conservative. Second, he’s a leader.” Mattingly believes that the creation of the new committee will change the dynamics of the race. “I don’t want to say anything bad about the other candidates,” he says. “There’ll probably be people who were supporting some other candidates who will be joining us. We’ll welcome them, too.” (Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn last week announced that she was switching her support from Mitt Romney, whom she endorsed in January, to Thompson.)

Sen. Mattingly states the obvious that Thompson’s entry into the race changes the dynamics of the race. That’s illustrated by Rep. Blackburn shifting her support from Mitt to Sen. Thompson. I suspect that she’s merely the first to switch allegiances from other candidates to Sen. Thompson.

Technorati Tags: Fred Thompson, Marsha Blackburn, Mitt Romney, Presidential Nomination, Election 2008, Michael Moore

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Election 2008, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.