Fred Thompson is not a President but he may play one on TV someday so vote for him in 2008

The only halfway rational reason Fred Thompson can have for thinking he can be the Republican nominee for President is that he believes none of the other candidates stands a solid chance of winning the nomination and when they all fail to go into the convention with enough delegates wrapped up he'll be there, ready, willing, and able to step in as the compromise.

But those other candidates include Rudy Giuliani and if Giuliani can't convince enough Republicans he should be President then how on earth can Fred Thompson?

To put this in the tivial, politics as a combination of sporting event and Hollywood Battle of the Celebrities that the Beltway Press Corps prefers, Fred Thompson is the guy you cast if you can't cast the guy you would normally cast when you can't cast Rudy Giuliani.

Or:

Fred is Rudy's third-string backup.

The Mo Dowd Approved knock on Hillary is she is ambitious.  She shouldn't be President because she wants to be President.

Don't they all?

Well, sure.  But Hillary wants it too much.  How can we tell she wants it too much?  Why, she's actually worked hard all her adult life to be qualified and competent to do the job.

By that standard, if working for the job is a sign you don't deserve it, then not working at all for it must be proof that you should have it and therefore Fred Thompson is the candidate, of either party, who has most earned the job by doing nothing to earn it.

Since he left the Senate, after a single term, Thompson has half-assedly pursued a second-rate acting career and diligently piled up big bucks as a lobbyist.

Ah, but while all the other candidates were busy working at being United States Senators or mayor of the most important city in the nation, or at serving as governors of out of the way backwaters like Massachusetts and New Mexico, Arkansas and Wisconsin, or at founding and running their own organizations for political and economic change, Fred Thompson was doing the more important work of building an image as a movie tough guy.

And image is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know when you walk into the voting booth, at least as far as the beautiful minds of our elite Press Corps are concerned.

Fred Thompson is a tough guy, declares Newsweek's Howard Fineman, as if being a tough guy was the qualification for President of the United States as opposed to the leader of a street gang.  How do we know he's tough?  Why, says Time's Mark Helperin, we know Thompson's tough because he's played so many tough guys well on TV and in the movies.

This is what it takes to be President, according to one of the most influential journalists in America:  The ability to be passively accepted in a part someone else has written for you, someone else has directed your performance in, someone else has dressed you for, someone else has photographed to make you look like what you're playing, and someone else has edited to make sure only the very best of what you said and did makes it onto the screen, proves you are what you appeared to be and that then qualifies you to be President of the United States.

This isn't even childish.  Children aren't normally that divorced from reality.  This is so mind-bogglingly delusional that if your average fifth grader suggested it the school guidance couselors would swoop down on him and carry him and his parents off into therapy.

The reason it isn't proof that Helperin is insane is that it is representative of the political views of the chattering class to which Helperin belongs.  In their reality, politics is always and solely about winning.  It's a game without any real consequences to consider.  The game ends on election day and immediately a new one begins.  Image is a deciding factor in an election, but Helperin and Fineman and their ilk have declared it the deciding factor.  This would be stupid enough if they hadn't also decided, against all evidence, that only one kind of image is a winning image, the image they imagine Ronald Reagan projected.

It's stupid, because Reagan is the only President of the last three generations who won by projecting Reagan's image, although it can be argued that several Democratic contenders have lost because they did not in the judgment of the pundits project a sufficiently Reaganesque image.  It's stupid and disingenuous because the pundits and insider journalists keep pretending that the Image is defined objectively by rules set by the American people, instead of being a product they themselves have helped create and which they themselves judge.

A aside:  the Insiders have fallen in love with Rudy Giuliani because he's such a tough guy.  He is in fact a tough guy, but he's tough in the way every garden variety sadistic, narcissistic, authoritarian bully is tough.  He pushes people around because he doesn't care about them and he takes it as his due that he can push people around.  But the Insiders don't see the real tough guy.  They see the one he played on TV on September 11.   Giuliani, in their minds, is qualified to be President not because he ran one of the biggest cities in the world, but because he was on TV a lot the day that city suffered a major terrorist attack.  They are in love with the image of Rudy as surrogate President, a role he was playing that day by default.  Imagine if we'd had a real President taking charge, instead of the puppet one who was ordered to go into hiding by his Puppetmasters so he wouldn't get in the way while they tried to figure out what to do about the fact that the terrorist threat they'd ignored had proved horrifically real?

What would have happened is that Rudy Giuliani would have been on our TV screens a whole lot less often that day.  He'd have still been a major presence on the local news, in which case he'd have been the hero for the moment not to the country but to New Yorkers, who would have reacted in the way they have reacted since, by saying, Good job today, Rudy, now what are you going to do about cleaning up the mess and taking care of the firefighters and the cops and their families?  The answer would have been exactly the same, not much. This explains a fact that the Beltway Media is studiously ignoring, that despite his image as the hero of 9/11, if he's the Republican nominee in 2008 he's going to get killed in his home state.  Killed!

Image unsupported by acts is meaningless to those who know the truth.  David Broder and his disciples keep waiting for George Bush's poll numbers to bounce back but they forget that during Hurricane Katrina the Media accidentally reported the truth about George Bush---his image as a regular guy and tough, hands on President was just that, an image.  Faced with a real job to do as President, he was, as he always was and always will be, in way over his head.

Giuliani isn't all image; it's just that his image---the image they've created for him---is all his fanboys in the Media care about. Thompson, though, is all image.  He has no record of any kind of real political achievement in his past.  You'd think that after the last six years it might have sunk into a few heads in Washington that it's not a good idea to elect a guy despite his lack of real achievement, even though you like the image you've helped create for him.

But that lesson can only be learned by people to whom what has happened to the country as a result of George Bush's incompetence matters.

The Howard Finemans and Mark Helperins of the world have managed to separate cause from effect in their thinking about politics and in the process have learned to ignore effect entirely, so entirely that a President's actual Presidency is irrelevant to trying to assess what he has done and what he might do.  Again and again, they cover the image, and they judge the image by whether or not it wins the particular game at hand.

And it's through "thinking" like this that Fred Thompson becomes a serious candidate for President of the United States.

Thompson can be a President because he projects the image of a President of the United States.  That image earns him the right to the job because that image can win him the job, and winning the job is the job.

Ok, let's move on to 2012.

Related:  Back in April, Richard Brookhiser wrote an article for TIME in which he praised Thompson as a great communicator, ranking right up there with Ronald Reagan and---wait for it---Arnold Schwartzegger.  This prompted David Sirota to say, "What the---?" which in turn prompted Bill Nothstine to make a list of all the special skills a politician needs to become a Great Communicator.

"Great communicators," advises Bill, "learn their craft in media designed to sell popcorn and soap."

Read Bill's entire list and you too can one day be a Great Communicator according to TIME.

Comments

[Mike Schilling]

Not being a Californian, Lance, you probably didn't hear it become common media wisdom that the recall of Gray Davis wouldn't become a serious campaign unless Arnold Schwarzenegger entered it.

[Winghunter]

LOL! Rudolph Ghouliani is far too left for the Republican or Independent parties. Once his real history is revealed, not the one the MSM invented, his days of consideration are all but over. If you want to learn about Rudolph;
Guns and Rudy; The Whole Story by Michael Gaynor
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/article.html?id=25471
Why Rudy Giuliani Really Shouldn’t be President by Jim Sleeper
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/specialguests/2007/mar/08/why_rudy_giuliani_really_shouldn_t_be_president
Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins
http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Illusion-Untold-Story-Giuliani/dp/0060536608?tag=dogpile-20
The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania by Jack Newfield
http://www.amazon.com/Full-Rudy-Mayo...856764-0047156

Once you're thoroughly disgusted as I am, start really looking at stable candidates who truly want to hand our country back to its citizens.

That can be found here;
Fredipedia - http://fredthompsonfaq.com/tiki-index.php?page=Fredipedia

[PooleBowman]

Mr. Mannion,

This essay was perfect! You nailed it!
Man, you are a great writer.
If the MSM cretins like Joe Klein had the talent, intellect,
integrity and courage that you possess, America wouldn't be
in this current nightmarish mess.
Keep making my day!

[Lance]

Poole, Thanks. Much appreciated. I'm just summarizing what the likes of Bob Somerby, Eric Boehlert, Atrios, Eric Alterman, the gangs at Crooks and Liars and Media Matters, Bill Nothstine, digby, Will Bunch, and others have been saying for a long time. And, although I forgot to put it in the post, I think the idea that the Beltway Insiders think of politics as just a big game should be known as Shakespeare's Sister's Theory of Insider Media Notions of Consequence-less Government.

[mac macgillicuddy]

It's worth noting that a previous issue of Time focused on how "presidential" Mitt Romney looks. To Time and others, what's interesting is the fund raising and image building, and that's why they've made their story front-page news so far in advance of any serious candidate emerging or articulating any cohesive policy.

Meanwhile, as they cover the campaign to be the leader of fundraising, the current "leaders" are doing this, in plain sight:

http://alternet.org/story/52801/

[Kevin Wolf]

I've commented previously, over at Shakes I think, that the coverage of the presidential campaign is going to be nothing but painful for any thinking person. It will focus on backstory and narrative and "types" and not on policy. It's easier that way and can be blamed on the general population who "want" it that way.

[ken Houghton]

If Fred Thompson is truly the Republican candidate, the commercial to run is that clip from In the Line of Fire right after the balloon/gun incident, where Eastwood tells Thompson's White House Chief of Staff, "Well, at least I wasn't a frightened chicken the way you were." (Paraphrase; someone with the disc or access to Showtime On Demand probably could find the moment and provide the actual quote.)

[Jim Robinson]

During his eight years in the Senate, Thompson won his free trade credentials with his votes to extend the president's fast-track trade promotion authority and to approve permanent trading relations with China. One right-wing critic in a widely circulated internet column called Thompson a "neocon globalist" for his immigration, free trade, and foreign policy positions.
Social conservatives are also likely to question Thompson's "liberal" voting record on immigration. Although Thompson has recently written and spoken out about the need for strong border control, while in the Senate he voted to increase visas for skilled foreign workers and to increase permits for unskilled foreign farm workers. Overall, Americans for Better Immigration, an anti-immigration lobbying group, gives Thompson a career grade of C for his mixed voting record. Thompson will likely come under withering criticism from anti-immigrant candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), who mixes his social conservatism with a heavy dose of nationalism and anti-corporate populism.