World Affairs
The man on the white horse
Published 19 July 2007
Could Fred Thompson be the answer to Republican prayers? The party of George W Bush may yet opt for an obscure 64-year-old ex-senator who has no known achievements.
I was having breakfast here the other day with John Reid - yes, that one: the one with a Scottish accent who used to be home secretary a long time ago - when he suddenly asked me who I think next year's Democratic and Republican presidential candidates will be. "Hillary Clinton and Fred Thompson," I found myself replying, not taking the time to think, and then finding myself mildly surprised by my answer. New Statesman readers know I committed myself in these pages, as long ago as 2005, to the prediction that Hillary will be the Democrats' 2008 candidate - a notion that was greeted with scorn at the time, though all the polls now indicate that she is cruising comfortably towards being crowned formally at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August next year.
Barring mishaps or a last-minute loss of nerve among the Democrats - and the mighty Murdoch empire is beginning to marshal forces against Hillary's supporters to convince them that American men will never vote for a woman - that will happen. But Fred Thompson? He is an obscure 64-year-old former senator for Tennessee with no significant political accomplishments. He has not even declared his candidature. But, writing about the political climate in Washington these days, I warned Gordon Brown recently that he should not deride the possibility that he might find himself dealing with Thompson as the 44th US president - a man whose main claim to fame is that he plays a character called Arthur Branch in the long-running television series Law and Order.
Why such a risible possibility? The problem for the Republicans is that they still don't really have a credible candidate. At one point, John McCain looked a likely winner. But while the role of insurgent suited him to a T, all the energy deserted him the moment he somersaulted into being front-runner this year (it hasn't helped that he is nearly 71).
For the moment, Rudy Giuliani has taken over that position and may even keep it - but he will, I suspect, prove to be too much of a rough diamond, with his chequered past. That leaves the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney who, at 60, seems at first glance to be the ideal candidate: impossibly handsome, the only leading Republican candidate to have had (and still have) just one wife, and very wealthy. But he is also emerging as too glib by half, and the biggest blitz of TV ads by any candidate failed to gain him sufficient traction. His lifelong Mormonism, too, attracts unwanted attention.
Thoroughly demoralised Republicans, who no longer even bother to defend George W Bush, but don't know to whom they can turn, are looking desperately for a man on a white horse to come charging to the rescue. Who better than a B-movie actor described by Richard Nixon on the Watergate tapes as "dumb as hell", and who has 25 films and ten TV series (including an appearance in Sex and the City) on his résumé? A blank slate on to which voters can project what they want - and that still has the requisite acting skills to come over as strong, paternalistic and empathetic? Isn't there even a precedent in quite recent presidential history, maybe?
Step forward then Thompson, father of a grown-up family but also of a stunningly telegenic three-year-old daughter and eight-month-old son - by a clever lawyer wife, his second, who is 24 years younger and has looks that any presidential wife would kill for. Ronald Reagan, who plotted the beginnings of his political career on the set of the cowboy TV series Death Valley Days, must be beaming down with approval on the late-blossoming career of a former disciple whose vacuous right-wing outlook and acting abilities almost identically match those of America's 40th president.
"People listen to him and see someone who's very comfortable with who he is and confident about what he believes in," is how Chris Healy, chairman of the Tennessee Republicans, sees him. "That's a skill that, obviously, Ronald Reagan took to great lengths." His rhetoric sounds like Reagan's, too: "If we do the right thing, we'll be a magnet for people of all beliefs about all kinds of issues, but [who] basically [hold] their country's issues first and foremost, and that's the thing that we'll have in common." The platitudinous Reagan esque rhetoric complements his outrageous chutzpah: the Democrats, he told young Republicans recently, are "the party of despair". The audience responded with chants of: "Run, Fred, run!"
Thompson - not to be confused with Tommy Thompson, a champion bore who used to be health secretary and is already a declared candidate - has a classically Reaganesque rags-to-riches background: born in Alabama, grandson of a sharecropper and son of a second-hand car salesman. He married at 17 in the days when people who got their girlfriends pregnant had to get married, and quickly had two sons and a daughter (who was to die, at 38, of a drugs overdose). He seems otherwise to lead a charmed life, always managing to be in the right place at the right time. He was a lawyer for the Senate Watergate committee during the infamous 1973-74 hearings (that's how he came to Nixon's attention) when he was fed one of the most celebrated lines in US political history: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" Research has since discovered that Thompson was acting as a White House spy all the time, keeping the Nixon camp informed of how much the senators knew. He now says that the brief nationwide exposure in his very early thirties taught him the power of television.
Folksy man of the people
His credentials as a DC wheeler-dealer thus established, Thompson worked solely as a behind-the-scenes lobbyist in a murky period from 1975 to 1997 (of which more later). For decades, his assiduously self-promoted image as a folksy Southern man of the people notwithstanding, he has lived in the expensive Washington suburb of McLean ("the next Georgetown", as people like to say). Al Gore became Clinton's vice-president in 1993, leaving his Tennessee Senate seat vacant. Thompson jumped in and then won a second term as senator, remaining virtually unnoticed until he left office - so much so, that the Democrats, who are more than alive to the threat now posed by him, have just made available a "research document" titled Major Legislative Accomplishments of Fred Dalton Thompson (1994-2002). The document is blank.
Though he has yet even to declare his candidature, Thompson has been greeted like a conquering hero at Republican rallies in New Hampshire, Iowa and Florida. He's also been campaigning in the South, which becomes especially important next February, when the primaries timetable will be pushed forward. He paid the obligatory homage to that fabled heroine, Baroness Thatcher, in London last month. This past weekend, grass-roots Republicans paid $1,000 to attend a Thompson dinner in Atlanta, or $2,300 if they wanted to go to the VIP reception beforehand to actually shake the great man's hand.
He has just taken out leases on campaign offices in Nash ville and Virginia, and put together a campaign staff that includes as general counsel Michael Toner (who played that role for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000) and Tim Griffin (former special assistant to Bush and a Karl Rove protégé who was also "research director" - meaning dirt digger - for Bush and Cheney). Polls already put Thompson, a non-candidate, ahead of the candidates Romney and McCain, and only just trailing Giuliani. Rasmussen, one of the most respected polling organisations, even has Thompson consistently ahead of Giuliani.
The acting career that brought him the self-projection skills and fame across America that could prove crucial in 2008 took off by chance in 1985 when he appeared as himself - a young Tennessee lawyer - in a true-life film called Marie, a moderately big-budget effort starring Sissy Spacek. Over the 22 years that followed, Thompson pursued a three-pronged career as a politician, lobbyist and actor. In the 1993 film Born Yesterday, he even played the role of a senator; he has also played the president, White House chief of staff, head of the CIA and an FBI official - all roles of authority and power. In Law and Order, from which he recently announced his retirement after five series, his Arthur Branch cha racter is a tough, Republican district attorney.
In his lucrative career as a lobbyist, Thompson's clients have included Westinghouse, the Teamsters and the lovable Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti. From 2004-2006 he worked for the British insurance firm Equitas, lobbying Congress on behalf of Lloyd's of London to lessen compensation to asbestos victims; Equitas paid $5.3m (£2.63m) to Washington lobbyists to this end, and $760,000 (£378,000) to Thompson alone. Jon Nash, a spokesman for Equitas, is unabashed about why the company wanted Thompson's services: "He had a good relationship with the then [Senate] majority leader, Senator Frist." The amount paid out was reduced hugely.
Thompson still has significant negatives to overcome, however, and once formally in the race his record will come under intense scrutiny. He has been consistently inconsistent on abortion, the issue threatening to sink Giuliani, and he supports the Iraq war. In his bachelor days in Washington in the 1990s, Thompson was a notorious playboy - making a married woman pregnant, according to DC gossip - before settling with his second wife, Jeri Kehn, five years ago. That hellraising phase alone will not go down well in the Bible Belt; and some will undoubtedly perceive his wife as a trophy bimbo, though she is actually anything but. He also has a mild form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but says it is not life-threatening.
My hunch about Thompson, therefore, could yet veer off course, but he is a 6ft 6in, cigar-chomping bear of a man who talks tough and gruff in the way Americans love. We must not forget that the Republicans are brilliant, ruthless campaigners: Iraq may be a terrible millstone, but Nixon managed to romp home for a second presidential term in 49 out of 50 states in an election year in which Vietnam was raging and by the end of which the American death toll stood at 56,844.
Parked outside Thompson's mother's house in Franklin, Tennessee, is a rusting red pick-up truck in which the good ol' boy - clad in plaid shirt and jeans - campaigned in his two Senate elections, "driving" across the state. The media dutifully reported his man-of-the-people campaigning as fact, failing to note that he switched to a luxury limousine and changed back into his elegant suits the moment he was out of their sight or back home in McLean. He duly zoomed from behind in 1994 to win by 22 points.
Expect that red truck to be wheeled out and given a lick of paint any day now. Never mind that Fred Thompson is the quintessential Washington insider, more at home at the Monocle restaurant on Capitol Hill than at a Tennessee diner. Today, more than ever, it is image rather than substance that counts in presidential elections. And if we can have President George W Bush, why not President Arthur Branch?
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