The Undeclared Candidate
HAYES, STEPHEN F.
The Undeclared Candidate Fred Thompson debates Michael Moore rather than the other Republicans. by Stephen F. Hayes As the ten declared Republican presidential candidates traveled to Columbia,...
...To some, it was an odd decision...
...His friends and advisers have moved on from the will-he-won't-he talk of just a month ago...
...The New York Daily News highlighted the exchange and, more important, so did the Des Moines Register...
...Two of Thompson's informal advisers made their way out to his Northern Virginia home with a cameraman and an Apple laptop...
...Here's the backstory...
...Thompson was named the winner of the debate in an unscientific poll on Glenn Reynolds's high-traffic conservative/libertarian blog, Instapundit.com...
...The Associated Press distributed a story about the confrontation on its wire...
...As they did, Thompson composed a response in his head...
...While the announced candidates put on suits, smiled, and fielded questions about Iraq, taxes, and terrorism, Thompson shot a homemade video to be posted on the Internet responding to a frivolous attack from lefty filmmaker Michael Moore...
...It is all part of Thompson's plan...
...And on it went...
...health care system...
...A mental institution, Michael...
...The video response, released to the Breitbart.tv website and also linked on Drudge, was played more than 200,000 times that day...
...by Stephen F. Hayes As the ten declared Republican presidential candidates traveled to Columbia, South Carolina, last Tuesday to participate in a nationally televised GOP debate, Fred Thompson stayed home...
...Said O'Reilly, "I'm giving it a win for Fred Thompson...
...It wasn't just the Internet...
...Moore challenged Thompson to a debate on health care...
...You know, the next time you're down in Cuba visiting your buddy Castro, you might ask him about another documentary filmmaker...
...Moore, seizing on a detail from a story in The Weekly Standard last month—that Thompson's office features many boxes of Montecristo cigars—wrote a letter to Thompson suggesting the former senator is a hypocrite for liking to smoke Cubans...
...They believe he can use the Internet—in videos, audio files, and written commentary—to communicate directly with voters...
...Barring some new unforeseen obstacle, he will be in by late June...
...His name is Nicolas Guillen...
...Might be something you ought to think about...
...That night, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly replayed part of the video on his ratings-topping show and discussed it at length in his "Impact" segment...
...His message will be unfiltered and therefore somewhat protected from mischaracteriza-tion by a left-leaning press corps in Washington...
...Campaign events will be filmed and posted so that interested parties—in this case, very interested parties—can see for themselves whether a Thompson performance was actually "lackluster" or lackluster only in the eyes of reporters...
...Thompson wanted to do it as soon as he heard about the letter from Moore, and four hours later his response was online...
...As to the cigars, they are the result of the generosity of a friend of mine who gives me a few from time to time...
...It would take several days, but by week's end the answer would be clear...
...But I may be the least of your problems...
...National Journal's Hotline, the insider's guide to campaign reporting and analysis, put it this way: "Thanks to Michael Moore, Fred Thompson may have upstaged the entire GOP field without even showing up to 5/15's debate...
...Now, they speak of an exploratory committee...
...Elected officials who have not yet committed to one of the announced candidates are being encouraged by those candi-dates—in some cases threatened—to do so soon, so as to keep them from waiting for a possible Thompson announcement...
...CNN ran the Thompson video in full the next day...
...In Moore's world, the comparison favors Cuba...
...Seriously...
...By the end of the week, that number would have more than tripled...
...Thompson has had a timeline in mind ever since he told Chris Wallace in early March that he was seriously considering a bid...
...There was little discussion of the wisdom of a response...
...He traveled to Cuba for some of the filming in an effort to contrast the care available to Americans with that provided by Fidel Castro's regime...
...Conservative blogs posted the video with their own commentary on Moore and Thompson, the former deemed moronic and the latter most excellent...
...So did MSNBC...
...You know, I've been looking at my schedule, Michael, and I don't think I have time for you," said Thompson, sitting in a leather chair, chomping on a big cigar...
...We intend to see to it that they are destroyed over the next few months...
...Thompson criticized the trip...
...The letter was first reported Tuesday morning on the Drudge Report, the news website once derided by mainstream reporters as too gossipy and now has become the most important political site on the Internet...
...When I pressed him on whether he'd be a full-fledged candidate by the Iowa straw poll in Ames on August 11, Thompson demurred, saying only that he was well aware of the date...
...Even as Thompson gets pressure to accelerate his schedule from those folks and others, he seems content to do things his own way...
...Despite lots of advice about the timing of an announcement—most of it unsolic-ited—his timeline remains largely unchanged...
...No doubt one at a time...
...The current challenge is to keep uncommitted Republicans and other potential supporters in the uncommitted camp...
...Why would Thompson choose to engage a hack propagandist looking for publicity while his would-be rivals discussed the important issues of the day at a forum designed to make them look "presidential" (even with Ron Paul on the stage...
...Moore is preStephen F. Hayes is senior writer at The Weekly Standard...
...The GOP debate went well...
...He did something Castro didn't like and they put him in a mental institution for several years, giving him devastating electroshock treatment...
...Underneath the smiling public faces, Republican candidates have been engaged in a ferocious battle to secure endorsements, to build organizations in early primary states, and to land top fundraisers...
...paring to release a new "documentary" on the U.S...
...Both Rudy Giuliani and John McCain turned in strong performances, and Mitt Romney, the clear winner of the first contest, didn't do anything to hurt himself...
...And he makes no apologies about the cigars, either...
...And Thompson is planning to run for president...
...Still, Thompson's tete-a-tete with Moore ensured that he was mentioned in post-debate analysis...
...When they arrived, he did a quick run-through as they set up, and then recorded the 38-second video in one take...
...When Thompson and his advisers talk about running a "different kind of campaign," this is what they mean...
Vol. 12 • May 2007 • No. 35
