Thompson's Waterloo (Iowa)
HAYES, STEPHEN F.
Thompson’s Waterloo (Iowa) Is he Napoleon or Wellington? BY STEPHEN F. HAYES Waterloo, Iowa Forty-five minutes before Fred Thompson spoke here last Tuesday night, young volunteers greeted...
...Huckabee appeals because of social issues, but I’m not so sure about fi scal issues...
...It’s freezing back in Washington, too, he assured them...
...Even inside, the frigid air gave those manning the registration table an icy blast every time anyone opened the door...
...But the more I research his positions, the less comfortable I become...
...Fred follows her lead...
...Over the next 25 minutes, Thompson portrayed himself as a limited-government conservative whose values are in line with Iowa Republicans...
...No, we remember those phrases and we remember how he inspired those people...
...And Winston would dictate just page after page after page after page...
...On national security: “The best way out of the fi ght is to be stronger than your adversary...
...But there’s a grain of something there that everybody who aspires to be a leader ought to keep in mind...
...A small group of Waverly citizens have waited in the cold for twenty minutes to meet the former senator...
...The other candidates, he reminded the crowd, followed his lead...
...Thompson paused for a few more pictures on his way back to the bus...
...Gade says he is a conservative Republican who recently decided to caucus for Thompson on January 3. He says Thompson seems “down to earth and easy to relate to...
...I don’t know how you’re going to stand up to leaders of Iran and North Korea if you can’t stand up to an overbearing moderator...
...Hi, I’m Jeri Thompson,” she says cheerfully, offering a warm smile...
...Not my cup of tea...
...The ads they’re talking about are Mitt Romney contrast ads, designed to paint Huckabee as soft on crime and illegal immigration and liberal on taxes...
...So we researched it...
...Chelle is the secretary of the Blackhawk County Republican party, and Scott has had a leadership position with the party, too...
...Instead, he is running around the state talking to every talk radio host who will have him on and dropping by small-town newspapers with the hope that they will run stories about the visit...
...Before his speech in Waterloo, Thompson spent part of his afternoon in Waverly, Iowa, population 9,000...
...As he lumbers toward the door of the newspaper’s headquarters, he makes small talk with those who have come to see him...
...BY STEPHEN F. HAYES Waterloo, Iowa Forty-five minutes before Fred Thompson spoke here last Tuesday night, young volunteers greeted reporters and potential Iowa voters just inside the front door of the Waterloo Center for the Arts...
...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...
...Well, in terms of everything...
...The Pepsi sign in front looks like it has been there since the 1950s...
...It read: “The Clear Conservative Choice: Hands Down...
...He continued by offering an analogy...
...It’s not...
...If I remember history correctly, he would dictate, you know, have a cigar and a brandy and—the good old days—and dictate...
...The world changes so rapidly and politics do too,” he said...
...People laughed out loud...
...You mean in terms of timing...
...He boasted about his endorsement the day before by Steve King, the conservative Republican who represents Iowa’s Fifth District...
...It was cold—it got so cold that the politicians had their hands in their own pockets,” he said...
...They believe a slice-and-dice fi ght on the ground here creates an opening for their candidate, though Thompson has very little money to spend on paid media...
...I’ll be the good sport...
...After taking several questions from the audience, Thompson asks the crowd for its support on caucus night, then makes his way into the crowd to shake hands...
...But the point is, and she said, it’s hard to believe, and she said for every hour of speech he made, he prepared ten hours...
...Those meetings...
...And, you know, different times, totally different circumstances, different country...
...Across the street, several stores sit empty...
...the fi remen laughed along with her as they posed for pictures...
...And if that’s the case, I’m already out...
...But a strange set of circumstances— the two current Iowa frontrunners cutting each other apart and two former national frontrunners essentially skipping the caucuses—means that despite his late start Thompson may still have a chance to emerge from Iowa as one of three or four candidates with a real shot at the nomination...
...Two things—illegal immigration and the taxes...
...As he chats with voters, Dierks Bentley’s “Free and Easy Down the Road I Go” comes blaring from the sound system...
...He’s so heavily into religion,” says Gade, wrinkling his nose...
...He pointed to a column by the Des Moines Register’s David Yepsen, the state’s most infl uential columnist, saying Thompson could still excite conservatives...
...If we don’t do what we need to do in Iowa, it will be tough to compete effectively down the road...
...From the beginning, Thompson said he would run a different kind of campaign...
...Free and easy down the road he goes...
...I get lots of points for this, guys...
...The most of it puts on one pair of shoes every morning and goes out...
...I ain’t gonna do it,” he says, laughing...
...I looked a lot at Huckabee— but that recent stuff that’s come out...
...Chelle jumps in...
...Scrambling around...
...He introduced himself to another volunteer, and they chatted about their reasons for supporting the former senator from Tennessee...
...I saw one time a history thing, history program that interviewed his secretary who was obviously an elderly lady...
...Thompson advisers are counting on it...
...The money, the organization, the preparation—all that’s very important, but it’s less than 50 percent...
...The priority, these advisers say, is getting Iowans to connect Thompson’s well-known face with his name...
...But is Romney peeling voters away from Huckabee and sending them toward Fred Thompson...
...A month ago, Huckabee looked like he might be a great candidate...
...And what do we remember...
...He rolled into town on a rock ’n’ roll style tour bus with an oversized picture of him on the side...
...After a quick meeting with the staff of the newspaper, Thompson climbs aboard the bus for the four-block drive to the gleaming new building that houses the fi re department...
...On the Democrats: “the leftwing, big government, high taxing, weak-on-national security Democratic party...
...On his Republican opponents: “You’re not electing a set of plans, you’re electing a leader...
...And he delivered the kind of conservative message many in the crowd said they’d been waiting for since the campaign began...
...Mitt Romney came close for me,” says Scott...
...His driver pulled up in front of the modest onestory building that houses the Waverly Democrat...
...In terms of timing, in terms of the role of money, in terms of the timing of the money, in terms of all the steps that you traditionally need to make and when you need to make them...
...He is cordial, even friendly, but his wife outshines him...
...It was a ritual that has played out countless times across Iowa—something Mitt Romney’s volunteers were probably doing more than a year ago...
...We still, when we get a chance, we listen to the exact words he used...
...He warmed up his audience with a joke about the weather...
...I asked her for specifi cs...
...I’ve got a silly-hat rule that I’m about to violate,” he says, raising it toward his head before thinking better of it...
...Even his bumper stickers have a picture of the candidate...
...This worked in Tennessee when Thompson fi rst ran for Senate, and they think it could help them again in a much smaller state...
...A young man with a “Fred Thompson” button stood by a table with coffee and hot tea...
...And it’s important that that person knows exactly what they’re doing...
...I’d seen lots of advertising on how he raised taxes, how he was for a cigarette tax...
...More applause...
...After the candidate and his wife, Jeri, arrived and were introduced, Thompson took the stage...
...You know, Winston Churchill used to spend most of his day, I guess a good part of it, in bed dictating, even in the height of the war...
...Like Brad Gade, they have considered other candidates...
...You can’t trust what you get from the media,” Scott said, as I furiously took notes...
...He and Jeri walk down the line of fi remen assembled to greet him...
...In the height of the war, he’d get up at 1 o’clock and go on about his business...
...And indeed she did...
...That’s something he hasn’t found in other candidates...
...I’ll put it on,” Jeri says with a wide grin...
...The “Sub-City” sandwich shop, located in an old gas station, is closed...
...She skips down the stairs and thrusts her hand toward the fi rst person she sees...
...So in the end, it could mostly come down to Fred, which is how he envisioned it even before he decided to run...
...When the door to the bus swings open, Thompson’s wife, Jeri, emerges fi rst...
...So at the height of the war, when everybody’s scrambling around and everybody panicking and you can imagine the meetings that were being held, his emphasis was on the communications to the British people...
...Most of these campaigns are still the candidates,” he said...
...He shared his philosophy about the process in an interview at his McLean home shortly after he fi rst acknowledged publicly that he was considering a bid...
...I was really turned off on illegal immigration, too...
...Ain’t no tellin’ where the wind might blow Free and easy down the road I go Livin’ life like a Sunday stroll Free and easy down the road I go Free and easy down the road I go If you only get to go around one time I’m gonna sit back and try to enjoy the ride If the Republican nomination were decided only by performances like this, Fred Thompson—whose policy views make him the most mainstream conservative in the race—would be on a glide-path to the Republican nomination...
...Later, I spoke to Scott and Chelle Adkins, a young couple from Waterloo...
...What stuff...
...Brad Gade, an insurance representative from nearby Cedar Falls, asked Thompson to autograph a “Days of Thunder” DVD box, and “Big John” obliges...
...Iowa is critical to our campaign, and it may in fact be everything to our campaign,” says a Thompson offi cial...
...Thompson made much of his strong showing at the last Republican debate, when he refused the moderator’s request for a show of hands on global warming...
...Much of the speech was the political equivalent of chum...
...The conventional wisdom, from all I can tell, is that you need years of preparation...
...And it is Thompson’s lackluster effort in all of those other areas of a campaign that has him running a distant third in most polls less than two weeks from the Iowa caucuses...
...A thermometer down the street reported the temperature as 22 degrees, and the wind made it colder...
...I don’t think they do...
...When someone presents him with a fi reman’s helmet to wear for a photo-op, Thompson holds the helmet away from him to get a good look at it and laughs...
...But there was just something missing...
...There is a lot of anecdotal evidence—now backed by some polling— that suggests they’re accomplishing that much...
Vol. 13 • December 2008 • No. 16
