The Thompson Momentum Builds
Saturday, June 9th, 2007If you haven’t been reading Stephen Hayes lately, you’ve been missing the best reporting on the Fred Thompson campaign. This article talks about the genuine groundswell of support that’s propelling his campaign. If this continues, it won’t take long for Fred Thompson to achieve frontrunner status. Here’s what I’m basing that opinion on:
Thompson’s wife Jeri, a savvy Republican strategist with Capitol Hill experience, asked Mark Corallo, an old friend and public relations guru, to see what he might do to raise her husband’s profile in Washington. Thompson had not altogether retired from politics when he left the Senate in January 2003: He was serving as chairman of the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board. He was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a member of the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission, and a commentator for ABC Radio.
Corallo had left his job as spokesman at the Justice Department to open a media consulting firm and agreed to take on the low-intensity work as a favor and without pay. He quietly began to highlight Thompson’s activities, in particular calling attention to Thompson’s radio work. When the provocative radio commentaries were published on National Review’s popular website beginning in January 2007, other conservative websites began to link to them with some regularity, viral marketing, as they say in the online world, and arguably the informal beginning of Thompson’s campaign.
In early March, when Thompson acknowledged on Fox News Sunday that he was seriously considering a presidential run, support for a potential bid exploded. Thompson and his friends were flooded with phone calls from would-be supporters eager to start raising money. Public officials began to endorse Thompson without any promise that he would become a candidate, a risk in the trade-and-barter world of politics.
On April 7, Carl Bearden, the speaker pro tem of the Missouri House of Representatives, sent an email to colleagues expressing his support for Thompson and encouraging them to do the same. In time, 60 of the 92 Republicans in the Missouri House signed a petition backing a Thompson run. The lawmakers did so despite the fact that two of the state’s leading Republicans, Governor Matt Blunt and Missouri House speaker Rod Jetton, had endorsed Mitt Romney. (So confident is Bearden that he offered some good-natured smack-talk to Blunt and Jetton. “I told them to enjoy it while it lasts, because when Fred gets in, it’ll be over.”)
In Texas, Jerry Patterson, the colorful commissioner of the General Land Office (a statewide elected office that is more powerful than it sounds), began to circulate a petition encouraging Thompson to run. By late April, he had gotten the signatures of 58 Texas Republican lawmakers. “No other presidential hopeful from either party is close,” reported the Houston Chronicle. According to Patterson, that number now stands at 67, and includes 59 of the 81 Republicans in the Texas House.
As you can see, legislators are flocking to Thompson without Fred Thompson courting them the way that other presidential candidates have done. (more…)