Right Wing Nut House

Failing in my obligation to post last week’s results, this week, you get a twofer. Enjoy!

Results from W/E 12/21

Council

1. “The Courage to Do Nothing” by Big Lizards

2. “Separation of Church and State, Secularist Style” by Cheat Seeking Missiles

3. “More on the Teacher Accused of Insulting Religion in His Class” by Bookworm Room

Non Council

1. “A Stand-up President” by The Ornery American

2. “A Muslim American” by National Review Online

Results for W/E 12/28

Council

1. “Judeo-Christian Doctrine and Moral Freedom” by Bookworm Room

2. (tie) “Ron Paul” by Done With Mirrors

2. “First Let the Lawyers Kill Us All” by Soccer Dad

Non Council

1. “Fear” by Silver Bullets

2. “Laughter and Tears” Eternity Road

If you’ve been following politics as long as I have or have been involved in a few campaigns, you usually have a sense of where the race stands on the day of the voting. Perhaps not exact numbers or even the winners or losers so much as who’s on the way up, who’s tanking, and who’s on life support.

On the Democratic side, while there seems to be a surge for Obama, that may be an illusion. According to the polls, a majority of Obama’s support comes from independents. In order for the candidate to translate the enthusiasm for his campaign into a victory, those independents will have to show up to the caucuses in much greater numbers than they have historically.

That’s why I think John Edwards will be the winner tonight. He also is enjoying a surge in support plus he has a genuine ground game in the state thanks to his union endorsements. It will be close but I think Edwards pulls out a narrow victory over Obama with Hillary not far behind in third. If independents do not show up for Obama, Hillary has a shot at second. But the Illinois senator has energized voters with his message of change and hope so look for enough unaffiliated Iowans to boost the candidate into a strong second place finish.

For the Republicans, I honestly don’t know. Enthusiasm for John McCain has become evident over the last 48 hours so anything is possible. I believe Huckabee is dropping while Romney is holding on. Fred also is enjoying a mini-surge according to Zogby. But when people around the campaign start setting a date for dropping out, the writing is on the wall.

Thompson himself denies the rumors:

GOP presidential hopeful Fred Thompson said in an in-studio interview with KCCI-TV in Des Moines that there is no truth to rumors that his campaign will fold before New Hampshire if he doesn’t have a strong showing in Iowa.

“That is absolutely made up out of whole cloth,” said the former U.S. Senator from Tennessee.

Thompson said a rival campaign was likely the source of that rumor.

“Can you imagine such a thing in politics?” he asked.

Thompson said his campaign is seeing a “surge” in interest right now, and said he has visited 50 communities in the Hawkeye State in the last couple weeks.

“I’m not going to play into any scenario that’s not totally optimistic,” he said.

Politico may be a little teed off at Thompson because bloggers exposed Roger Simon as a liar when the reporter mischaracterized a Thompson campaign event last month. But Jonathon Martin’s reporting appears to me to be sound, based on observations from both staff and politicians who are close to the campaign. And it’s not a secret that the campaign is out of money and that a poor showing - less than 15% - would place Thompson in an untenable situation where Fred would be forced to compete in New Hampshire with no money, little in the way of paid staff, and not much hope.

At any rate, I am not confident at all about the order of finish on the Republican side. But when in doubt, go with the man with the cash - in this case, Romney. The former Massachusetts governor has a huge organization in Iowa and a sophisticated get out the vote operation. Huckabee will depend on his network of churches and the Fair Tax crowd to get his people to the caucuses. In a war of amateurs versus pros, give the nod to people who get paid to deliver. Let’s go with Romney as the winner tonight.

Will Huckabee finish second? There has been an enormous amount of media generated buzz for McCain over the last 48 hours. But that’s all it is - buzz. It’s hard to see at this late date how you turn that enthusiasm into an organization that will get McCain’s people to the caucus sites. However, if Huckabee truly is melting down - not an impossibility - then there will probably be a shocker awaiting us when the results are announced. A second place finish for either McCain or Thompson would not be as far fetched as it might have seemed just 48 hours ago.

Then again, the trend for Huckabee in the polls has not been all that disastrous. So let’s give Huckabee second place with McCain not far behind in third and Thompson not far behind McCain in fourth. It’s possible that any of those three could finish second. If it’s anyone but Huckabee, we are going to have a barn burner of a race on the Republican side.

Or, everyone - the polls, the pros, the pundits - have all been wrong and its Ron Paul in a landslide. (I threw that in just in case the apocalypse is upon us.)

Allah has some thoughts on what might have been for the Thompson campaign that ring true. And his speculation about Thompson’s Veep prospects also appear to be about right. Glenn Reynolds has been saying for months that Thompson’s goal was the second spot all along.

However, if Fred doesn’t like campaigning, it’s hard to see him wishing for the Veep slot. While the nominee gets to go to all the glamorous venues, the Vice Presidential candidate gets stuck speaking before the Kiwanis and Elks. And is there any more thankless job than Vice President of the United States?

I think if Fred drops out, he goes back to Tennessee to bounce his kid on his knee and make a TV or movie appearance here and there. A sad ending to what began as a promising moment for conservatism.

UPDATE

Byron York talked to Thompson aide Rich Galen who vehemently denied the basis of the Politico story:

Galen told me, “I’m a Republican official in the Thompson campaign, and I’m denying it.” Galen also said that no one inside the campaign was a source for the story. “I can’t put enough adjectives in front of the ‘deny’ to accurately describe how vehemently I’m denying the story,” he said.

Galen said that “just to make sure,” he checked with Thompson himself, who told him the story was not true. “We have the schedule for Saturday and Sunday in New Hampshire, and then we’re going down to South Carolina,” Galen told me.

I have no doubt what Galen says is true. But reality might reach up and bite the campaign tonight. The Zogby tracking poll has Fred at 11% - still third place but a dismal number just the same.

Thompson may be hoping McCain and Romney savage each other which would give him a shot - if he does well in the debates this weekend - to gather some momentum for South Carolina.

But if money is the mother’s milk of American politics, Fred, at this point, is an orphan.

Joe Gandelman received a cryptic email from “a spokesman for Revelation Press” that indicates a major scandal is brewing involving a “Leading US Presidential Candidate.”

One of this year’s leading candidates will be “Swift-Boated” in a new book to be announced next Monday, January 7th at 1:30 p.m. in the Murrow Room at the National Press Club in Washington.

One candidate is about to be challenged – with hard and cold facts, presented cogently by an author, former TV business news editor, decorated military hero and college political science instructor who shares this candidate’s party affiliation – and who has known the candidate personally since their college days.

Next Monday, the truth will be revealed when a book that literally gives “chapter and verse” about this candidate’s less-than-candid candor with the American people.

This book is supported by 10 pages of meticulously-researched end-notes supporting every factual assertion about the candidate’s failure to shoot straight with the American people, and this breach-of-faith’s implications for the Presidency.

If you’re serious about covering the 2008 Presidential campaign, you won’t want to miss this news announcement – and you will want to meet the author.

The candidate isn’t mentioned but the military angle would seem to suggest an attack on John McCain.

The same fellow who mounted the Viet Nam Veterans Against John Kerry now has a group called Viet Nam Veterans Against John McCain. Gerard “Jerry” Kiley is claiming that McCain betrayed the United States as a POW and hints that he is being blackmailed even today by the Vietnamese.

I will not sully this site with details of the charges. I will only say that any legitimate news outlet that attends that press conference or runs with any story connected with these folks should be sued by the McCain campaign.

Kiley also has a campaign committee to raise funds and presumably run commercials against McCain.

What has Kiley’s panties in a twist? Apparently, Senator McCain - despite his treatment at the hands of the enemy - was willing to make peace with his former captors, establish normalized relations with Viet Nam, and most of all, wanted to put the Viet Nam War behind us.

I think honest people can disagree about whether it is a good thing to normalize relations with Viet Nam. They are still a communist country with all the oppression and lack of freedom that implies. But not wanting to put the war behind us? I think it is long past time for that to occur. And McCain demonstrated true statesmanship by leading the way in Congress to achieve normalization.

Of course, at bottom, is the POW issue. So many are still listed as missing. To this day, sightings of white men in jungle prisons haunts the dreams of those whose loved ones never returned and are unaccounted for.

But nothing has ever come of those sightings. And while it is not my place nor my desire to close off hope for those with so little of it, I think McCain did well in leading the way to a new relationship with one of the emerging powerhouse economies in Asia. He put aside his personal feelings for the good of the country - a demonstration of leadership.

And the curious thing is that these charges against McCain have been around for years, dating back to the Senator’s 2000 bid for the presidency. I don’t recall hearing anything about them back then but of course, that was the era before blogs and a ubiquitous internet. Now all you have to do is throw a pile of crap out into the ether and someone will latch onto it and run with it. So it will probably be with this rehash of old charges against a courageous man.

Could Romney be behind this coming smear campaign? Not likely because all the principles have been active for years against Senator McCain. Besides, why wait until one day before the voting in New Hampshire to spring this? Anyway, this is pretty much as low as politics gets in America and I don’t think Romney is really that sort of candidate.

For some, the war will never end. Only when the last Viet Nam era American passes on will the War in Viet Nam truly be over. Until then, all we can do is honor the dead, comfort the living, and give thanks that patriots like John McCain - a man whose politics I sometimes abhor - are still serving this country today.

UPDATE

Tommy Toliver doesn’t think it’s McCain who is the target of the smear. I have also received several emails questioning whether or not it’s McCain.

My belief that it’s the Arizona Senator in the crosshairs was on the Viet Nam Veterans Against John McCain website. If you scroll down (no permalinks) you will find an article by John LeBoutillier entitled “McCain Bombs as Candidate.” Directly underneath is the subhead:

“Swiftboating” New American Political Jargon Term Meaning “Outing” the Fraudulent.

Several commenters on this and other threads have complained that by using the term “siwftboating,” the author of the upcoming smear against the presidential candidate is adopting the definition used by liberals; i.e., lies and distortions against a candidate.

But as you can see, they use the same definition that the “Revelations” emailer used when touting their press conference. This is what led me to believe that the Viet Vets Against McCain were behind this effort.

As far as the author knowing McCain back in their “college days” that could very well just be a substitution in order to hide the identity of the candidate to be smeared. After all, the Naval Academy is an accredited college - one of the finest in the country. If they had come out and said the author had known McCain from their days together at Annapolis, that would have let the cat out of the bag.

That was my reasoning for believing the target was McCain. However, other information emailed to me makes me doubt my original hypothesis and it may very well be someone else.

When I was 24 years old and fresh from the ivory tower world of the university (having been rudely disabused from the idea that I could make a living as an actor), my father sat me down and asked me what I was going to do with my life.

It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. He was quite subtle about it. He drew me out by asking what my interests were, where I saw myself in 10 years, and other questions designed to discover where my passions lay.

Somehow, our discussion turned to politics. It was at that point that he surprised me by recounting almost verbatim a conversation we had a couple of years previously where I had complained about a course on the American revolution I took my senior year. The long forgotten professor took a decidedly deterministic view of that event and I spent a very long semester reading long forgotten Marxist treatises showing how the revolution was actually a counterrevolution by eastern merchants and the plantation class who were eager to see their debts to British bankers disappear - or some such nonsense.

We resolved nothing with that little talk but a few days later, he gave me a book that was to change my life; Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. For him, a New Deal Democrat, it must have pained him to realize one of his offspring had eaten of the forbidden fruit and had skewed to the right in his politics. And the hell of it was, I didn’t even realize my transformation. I had always thought of myself as a liberal - largely as a result of my opposition to the Viet Nam war. But reading Kirk’s seminal work on conservatism, I recognized to my surprise that I had much in common with Mr. Kirk’s view of the state and society.

There followed something of an exploration - from Burke to Buckley to Strauss and Hayek, I delved into many different strains of conservative thought, realizing there were dichotomies but ultimately putting them aside believing some of the internal contradictions of conservatism - order versus liberty, tradition versus change - would eventually sort themselves out sometime in the future.

Well, the future is here and the internal contradictions of conservatism have generated cracks in not only the political coalition that animated an ideology but also the intellectual framework that has defined it for more than half a century.

I took some time in describing my own ideological journey because with conservatism at a crossroads, I am a firm believer in the idea that before you can fix something, you must go back to the beginning and retrace your steps to discover where you went astray. There are two examples in the last quarter century or so that illustrate that thought:

* Reagan’s courting of the religious right in 1980. Reagan’s rhetoric in support of social conservatives never matched his actions in support of their agenda - an example followed by his successor George Bush #41. Not surprisingly, after a decade of lip service to their agenda, the social conservatives became resentful and sought to increase their influence in the Republican party, rightly thinking that only then would their concerns be met.

* Pat Buchanan’s “Culture War” speech at the 1992 Republican convention. One can draw a direct line from Buchanan’s bombast to Mike Huckabee’s rise as a viable presidential candidate without deviating an inch. The rise of the social cons at the state and local level was a consequence of Buchanan’s run against Bush #41 so that by the time George Bush ran in 2000, the process was heavily influenced if not controlled by the religious right.

Herein lie the seeds of conservativism’s current dilemma; the idea that a decent society supports a just moral order coming into direct conflict with the need for simple, human liberty in order to allow for freedom of thought and action.

The various factions representing strains of conservative thought have started to come unglued as a result of this singular dichotomy - as basic to conservatism as breathing is to living. In the past, differences between social cons and other conservative factions were papered over or, more often, simply ignored. But the shock from being slaughtered in the 2006 mid-terms has brought the fractures into bas relief and the fight for the soul of the Republican party and hence, conservatism itself has been joined with a relish many thought impossible just 4 years ago.

Ross Douthat links to a liberal critique of this phenomenon written by Michael Tomasky, editor of the Guardian-America:

But the important question is not how the nominee will position himself next fall. Think, after all, about Bush’s talk of “compassionate conservatism” in 2000 and about how the national press fell for it. The important question is how he will govern should he win. And the generally ignored story of this race so far is that in truth, dramatic ideological change among the Republicans is highly unlikely. Despite Bush’s failures and the discrediting of conservative governance, there is every chance that the next Republican president, should the party’s nominee prevail next year, will be just as conservative as Bush has been—perhaps even more so.

How could this be? The explanation is fairly simple. It has little to do with the out-of-touch politicians and conservative voters Ponnuru and Lowry cite and reflects instead the central hard truth about the components of the Republican Party today. That is, the party is still in the hands of three main interests: neoconservatives; theo-conservatives, i.e., the groups of the religious right; and radical anti-taxers, clustered around such organizations as the Club for Growth and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Each of these groups dominates party policy in its area of interest—the neocons in foreign policy, the theocons in social policy, and the anti-taxers on fiscal and regulatory issues.[2] Each has led the Bush administration to undertake a high-profile failure: the theocons orchestrated the disastrous Terri Schiavo crusade, which put off many moder-ate Americans; the radical anti-taxers pushed for the failed Social Security privatization initiative; and the neocons, of course, wanted to invade Iraq.

Three failures, and there are more like them. And yet, so far as the internal dynamics of the Republican Party are concerned, they have been failures without serious consequence, because there are no strong countervailing Republican forces to present an opposite view or argue a different set of policies and principles.

Tomasky leaves out a few important factions; libertarian conservatives and their cousins, the federalists. Nominally supportive of fiscal conservatives like Norquist and hawks on foreign policy (wary of neocons but equally disdainful of Scowcroft realists), the libertarian conservatives and federalists (recently described as “Leave me the hell alone” conservatives) are bunched on the internet and dominate the conservative blogosphere. They consider themselves the true heirs of the Reagan legacy.

Tomasky’s analysis is pretty shallow and his criticisms, as befitting an editor of The Guardian, are exaggerated (”radical” anti-taxers?), selective (support to invade Iraq was broad based among conservatives), and just plain wrong (”conservative governance” hasn’t been discredited because it hasn’t been tried) except for his denoting correctly the three strains of conservatism that run the the Republican party.

Ross Douthat responding to Tomasky:

It’s true that the current conservative intelligentsia, forged in the crucible of Ronald Reagan’s successes, is heavily invested in keeping the triple alliance intact - hence the Thompson bubble, the anti-Huckabee crusade, and the “rally round Romney” effect. And it’s true, as well, that if the Republican Party recovers its majority in the next election the alliance will be considerably strengthened. But such a recovery is unlikely, and already, in the wake of just a single midterm-election debacle, it’s obvious that the Norquistians and neocons and social conservatives aren’t inevitable allies - that many tax-cutters and foreign-policy hawks, for instance, would happily screw over their Christian-Right allies to nominate Rudy Giuliani; or that many social conservatives don’t give a tinker’s dam what the Club for Growth thinks about Mike Huckabee’s record. (So too with the neocon yearning for a McCain-Lieberman ticket, which would arguably represent a far more radical remaking of the GOP coalition than anything Chuck Hagel has to offer.)

The “movement” institutions, from the think tanks to talk radio, have resisted these fissiparous tendencies, and if Mitt Romney wins the nomination they’ll be able to claim a temporary victory. But if the GOP continues to suffer at the polls, in ‘08 and beyond, the (right-of) center can’t be expected to hold, and the result will be a struggle for power that’s likely to leave the conservative movement changed, considerably, from the way that Tomasky finds it today. Like most such struggles, this civil war is beginning as a battle of the books - Gerson vs. Frum; Sager vs. Sam’s Club, Norquist contra mundum - but it’s likely to end with political trench warfare, and the birth of a very different GOP.

Sing it, brother.

Matthew Yglesias concurs and offers a realistic scenario for the near future:

Alternatively, maybe Romney gets the nomination and Romney gets beaten pretty badly. Then maybe conservatives say he was done in by (a) flip-flopping, (b) anti-Mormon bias, (c) bad political headwinds and decide nothing really needs to be done. Then, the congressional GOP just realizes that the conservative movement is really more comfortable in a quasi-opposition role, sets about using the filibuster and the timidity of the remaining southern Democratic senators to make the country ungovernable, does well in the 2010 midterms, and everything just kind of keeps on keeping on. It could happen. One’s natural desire, as an observer of the political scene, is for something dramatic and interesting to happen. And sometimes something dramatic and interesting does happen. And it really might happen. The signs are there. But then again, it might not.

Yglesias is referring to Dr. Johnson’s dictum of how the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully. The very threat of the coalition’s break up before next November will force the factions to seek accommodation - save perhaps the hard liners like Dobson and Richard Viguerie who would most likely sit out the election rather than form a third party.

Kevin Sullivan:

Richard Viguerie–a pioneer in direct mail fundraising–was one of those young activists. He has warned and petitioned against Giuliani’s candidacy, recently telling the Concord Monitor that “he’s wrong on every single social issue,” and under the mayor’s stewardship, “the Republican Party will be unrecognizable.” And it would be, at least as far as the party’s base is concerned. The thought of a socially liberal adulterer, with a weak record on all of the hot button base issues, getting the nomination must startle Republicans like Viguerie.

Viguerie has been grousing for years - going all the way back to Reagan’s presidency - that the party leader was betraying conservative principles. Ironically, what he and Dobson and the rest of the social conservatives have done is make both conservatism and the Republican party unrecognizable from the party and movement that was built in the 1970’s and 80’s that stressed personal responsibility, individual liberty, and that most wonderful of all conservative attributes; prudence.

Reading Russell Kirk’s “10 Conservative Principles” makes us all see how far the social cons have taken the Republican party away from its core conservative beliefs. At the expense of personal freedom, of “variety,” and “restraints upon power and human passion,” the social cons have elevated “a secure moral order” and consecrated themselves to making it their business in enforcing it.

This has led to pushing social issues to the fore of the Republican party’s identity, a monumentally bad idea politically that cost the party in 2006 and will no doubt lead to ruin in 2008 if a candidate like Mike Huckabee is nominated. While the chances are slim of that happening, stranger things have occurred in politics.

But no matter who is nominated and elected in 2008, the fracturing of the conservative movement, already well underway, will remain a huge issue. While I wouldn’t expect a rethinking of basic conservative principle, when the dust settles it is possible that conservatism and the GOP will not be as joined at the hip as they are now - especially given the animus between many mainstream conservatives and the social cons. I laid down some thoughts on what a post-fractured conservative movement might need to think about:

For conservatism to survive and even thrive, a new paradigm must be realized that recognizes we live in a different world than the one inhabited by our ancestors and that many of the old verities we cherished are just no longer relevant to what America has become. For better or worse, the United States is changing – something it has always done and always will do. Without altering most of the core principles of conservatism, it should be possible to change with it, supplying common sense alternatives to liberal panaceas for everything from health care to concerns over climate change.

Obviously, there is no lack of ideas in this regard if you read the policy prescriptions appearing on the pages of Heritage, AEI, Cato, or other places where academics and policy wonks gather to supply these alternatives. But there seems to be a disconnect between the thinkers and the doers – politicians, pundits, and activists. Having read most of the Republican candidates stands on issues, outside of Fred Thompson’s detailed critique of entitlements and his ideas on a muscular kind of federalism, there isn’t much in the way of deep thoughts being generated in this campaign so far. In fact, there appears to be little in the way of original thinking at all; just a rehash or recycling of projects and programs that wouldn’t stand a chance of passage in Congress.

Now I am not saying that conservatives should compromise their principles to gain success in the legislature nor am I saying those principles should be abandoned in order to gain electoral victory. But there is a difference between having a vital conservative movement that shapes and informs government and one that has no relevancy whatsoever to modern America.

Clearly, applying conservative principles to governance should be the goal. And just as clearly, there is no lack of ideas on how to make that happen. The disconnect I speak of above arises from the cage that Republican candidates have been placed in by the various factions of conservatism that makes them slaves to an agenda that is out of date, out of touch, and after 2008, there’s a good chance that it will lead to Republicans being out of luck.

Breaking out of that cage will be difficult unless the party continues to lose at the polls. And part of that breaking free will be making the Reagan legacy a part of history and not a part of contemporary Republican orthodoxy. The world that Reagan helped remake is radically different than the one we inhabit today and yet, GOP candidates insist on invoking his name as if it is a talisman to be stroked and fondled, hoping that the magic will rub off on them. Reagan is gone and so is the world where his ideas resonated so strongly with the voters.

But Reagan’s principles remain with us. Free markets, free nations, and free men is just as powerful a tocsin today as it was a quarter century ago. The challenge is to remake a party and the conservative movement into a vessel by which new ideas about governing a 21st century industrialized democracy can be debated, adopted, and enacted. Without abandoning our core beliefs while redefining or perhaps re-imagining what those beliefs represent as a practical matter, conservatism could recharge itself and define a new relationship between the governed and the government.

But before reform comes the fall. And even if, as Yglesias believes is possible, the party and the movement are able to limp along for a few years with a cobbled together coalition, eventually the piper must be paid and the wages earned. It won’t be a quick or easy process. But it will happen nonetheless. And out of the bitterness and recriminations will emerge a different Republican party, animated by conservative principles and true to a legacy that has as its foundation a belief in individual liberty and personal responsibility.

The next time you see the Huckster on TV look closely. Are those horns sprouting from his head? And is there the beginnings of a tail that is barely poking through his $1000 populist inspired suit?

Is Mike Huckabee morphing into Satan right before our eyes?

The devil, as we all know, is extremely clever. And frankly, there has been no more clever, or underhanded, or downright dispicable stunt pulled by a campaign than Huckaliar’s “rope a dope” of the press yesterday.

You’ve all heard by now that Huckadope called a press conference in order to unveil a new attack ad. But then, according to “top aide” Charmaine Yoest, the holy spirit descended from heaven and the candidate decided not to run the ad sliming Romney. Actually, Charmaine said no such thing but it would be a perfect explanation given Huckabee’s now blatant use of his Christian religion and Christian symbols in his advertising. Huckasaint has abandoned any pretext of secularism in his bid for the presidency and has now made his campaign a mobile tent revival meeting.

I can’t wait for the healings to start.

And then, in an act of cynicism so profoundly disturbing that the assembled press broke into nervous laughter, Huckabee went ahead and showed the ad to the press anyway, hoping the assembled cameras would do his dirty work for him and spread the ad’s message across the country while flanking the candidate were 5 screens highlighting charges against Romney’s flip flopping.

Elmer Gantry couldn’t have done it better. Aimee Semple McPherson has got nothing on Huck when it comes to pure “hucksterism.” And what made this little episode so nauseating was the dripping, oily, insincere explanations of the candidate himself:

But he then opened his press conference by saying that while the ad was expected to start appearing on local television at noon, he had decided an hour before to pull it. Conventional wisdom is to attack back if one is attacked, he said, but he had decided there was much negativity and he wanted to tell voters about why he should be president, not why Mr. Romney should not.

What a crock.

“The people of Iowa deserve better,” he said.

In the past few days on the campaign trail, Mr. Huckabee has painted Mr. Romney in the harshest of terms, flatly calling him “dishonest.” He vowed today that in addition to stopping the ad, he would stop criticizing him in his speeches.

“It’s not worth it,” he said.

Asked if he wasn’t being hypocritical by showing the ad to a roomful of cameras that were likely to replay it, Mr. Huckabee said he was showing it only because reporters were so cynical that if he didn’t show it, they would not believe that he really had made it. “You’d say, ‘Where’s the ad?’ ” he said.

“It’s never too late to do the right thing,” he said.

Unless you want to believe that the Huckabee campaign is a complete amatuer hour organization, this little drama put on by the Huckster and his staff has taken political cynicism to a new low.

Will this bit of blatant dishonesty matter to his base of holy rollers? Given everything else about the candidate that has come to light in the last months, I sincerely doubt it.

UPDATE

Gag me:

At a Huckabee rally this morning at a Pizza Ranch restaurant in Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, Huckabee’s longest applause line came when he talked about pulling the ad. “If I can’t do it with self respect, and can’t do it with decency, it isn’t worth doing,” he told the crowd from a podium next to the salad bar.

Jesus effing Christ! What a pompous, gut churning lump of hypocritical milquetoast. A pox on the party if they nominate this slug. And a pox on those of you who think this guy is qualified to be anything other than an itinerant preacher who doubles as a snake oil salesman.

The final poll conducted by the Des Moines Register newspaper before the Iowa Caucuses on Thursday is out and Barack Obama has widened his lead over Hillary Clinton while Mike Huckabee continues to outpace Mitt Romney on the Republican side:

Obama was the choice of 32 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers, up from 28 percent in the Register’s last poll in late November, while Clinton, a New York senator, held steady at 25 percent and Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, was virtually unchanged at 24 percent.

The poll reflects continued fluidity in the race even as the end of the yearlong campaign nears. Roughly a third of likely caucusgoers say they could be persuaded to choose someone else before Thursday evening. Six percent were undecided or uncommitted.

The poll also reveals a widening gap between the three-way contest for the lead and the remaining candidates. No other Democrat received support from more than 6 percent of likely caucusgoers.

The findings mark the largest lead of any of the Democratic candidates in the Register’s poll all year, underscoring what has been a hard-fought battle among the three well-organized Iowa frontrunners.

Huckabee enjoys a 6 point lead on Romney, 32-26% with John McCain a distant third at 13% and Fred Thompson in fourth with 9%.

A couple of thoughts on this poll that will probably be echoed by some of the campaigns as they try to spin the results to their advantage.

First, I find it striking that observers on the ground in the last 72 hours who have been reporting surges for Hillary and Romney and the consequent drop of Huckabee and Obama are either seeing things or the poll itself is just not accurate. The reason for the latter could be due to the novel experiment of polling during the biggest holiday season of the year.

Polling is a science where methodology is all. What kind of sample? Was it “random” enough? Was it a big enough sample? How do you determine a probable caucus goer? Couple that with the astonishing information that up to a third of those who say they will attend the caucuses could change their mind between now and caucus night and I believe it more than likely that the holidays have been a distraction to the process. It could very well be that a sizable percentage of people will walk into their caucus on Thursday night not knowing who they will support.

I think as an indicator of a general trend, the poll is accurate. Romney and Huckabee are probably pulling away from the rest of the field while Obama is putting a little distance between himself and Hillary/Edwards. But beyond that I don’t know how accurate it is even as a snapshot.

The poll was taken over 4 days - December 27-30 - with 800 “likely” Caucus goers being polled. If you follow the first link to the story on the Democrats and go to the bottom, you’ll find a chart showing how the polling percentages broke down over the 4 days. What you see is a remarkable surge by Obama over those 4 days as late deciders are evidently flocking to his banner while Hillary’s numbers tank over the same period. Obama starts at 29% and ends up at 34% while Hillary starts at 27% and drops to 23%. John Edwards also saw his numbers climb dramatically over the 4 days from 23% to 26%.

This is exactly the opposite of what has been reported on the ground over the last 3 days by many reporters who saw Clinton on the upswing with Edwards peaking and Obama dropping.

So much for our vaunted political press.

For the GOP, Iowa has apparently become a two man race between Romney and Huckabee. Is Huckabee really up by 6 points? Sometimes you can tell more from the candidate’s behavior than you can published polls. They are reacting to internal polling which measures support a little differently than public polls. And the way Huckabee and Romney have been acting would seem to suggest that it is Romney on the rise with Huckabee trying to stop a slide.

For Fredheads, the only good news is that Thompson is the only GOP candidate whose support rose during the entire polling period. But 10% won’t cut it by any means and if that’s the best the candidate can do, I would expect him to drop out on Friday morning.

If polls are considered snapshots of a moment in time, there’s plenty of mud on these photos making it difficult to read. We may as well resign ourselves to the idea that we’re just going to have to wait until late Thursday night to find out the winners and losers.

UPDATE: LET THE SPIN BEGIN

TNR is puzzled by the same things I am:

This totally shatters the CW of the political crowd here in Des Moines, which had been convinced that Edwards was on fire and really might win, and that Huck was totally imploding. (Although the polling stopped yesterday, before today’s Huck presser fiasco.) It also reaffirms my instinct that Fred Thompson isn’t booking a flight to New Hampshire.

Update: The Edwards camp is already spinning the numbers–which, as Ben Smith notes, swing a wrecking ball through their “surge” storyline–not unreasonably questioning the accuracy of polling over a holiday weekend, and noting that many respondents remain uncertain of their vote.

In a post over the weekend I cited a campaign operative who worried polling around the holidays would be wacky. But he predicted that variable would undercount traveling young people, doing damage to Obama. If you believe his theory, Obama may be even stronger than this poll shows. But that’s a little hard to believe.

Crowley also believes Fred will drop out on Friday.

Register columnist David Ypsen:

* Undecideds exist. There are 6 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers and 4 percent of the Republicans who have no first choice. Their final decisions will be enough to change the order of finish in both parties. That fact alone should keep anyone from using these polls to forecast the outcome of the race.

* Last-minute developments won’t be reflected. In 2004, 21 percent of those who showed up at Democratic caucuses decided who they’d support in the last three days of the campaign. This poll won’t reflect those decisions because it came out of the field on Sunday night — four days before people vote. So, for example, it can’t reflect the goofy press conference Huckabee held on Monday in which he promised not to run attack ads against Mitt Romney while producing them and showing them to reporters anyway. Right.

* Some support is soft. Of those who have decided on a candidate, 34 percent of the Democrats say they could still be persuaded to change their minds. Among Republicans, it’s 46 percent.

That GOP number reflects a profound dissatisfaction with their choices not, as some would hope, Iowans who can’t make up their minds.

Read the rest of Ypsen’s analysis. It contains some very bad news for Republicans next year as above all, voters are seeking a change.

Here’s wishing all of you a very happy and safe New Year.

I urge you to be careful and not do something stupid like drink and drive. The process that one must go through legally in order to get your license back is the biggest racket in the history of American jurisprudence. The state, the courts, the lawyers, the DUI and alchohol rehab centers - everyone ends up making a pile of money. And it all comes out of your pocket.

Besides, it’s the second most dangerous thing you can do in life - besides going to a Moveon.Org meeting wearing your Ronald Reagan T-shirt and hat.

And while we’re all celebrating, why not toss a few back for The House.

My little weblog just passed two million visitors since January 2005 - and a million since April of last year. Let me just say I am grateful for your patronage and I hope you continue to pay me regular visits in 2008.

Hello, I’m Fred Thompson.

In the closing days of this historic contest here in Iowa, I wanted to take a few moments to talk quietly with you about the stakes in this election and the critical issues you will soon decide.

Because there is no frontrunner here in Iowa and because yours will be the first votes cast in this crucial election year, your decision will be one the entire country closely watches and learns from.

When you go to your local caucus on January 3rd and fill out your paper ballot - and, by the way, it’s just that easy - how you vote will go a long way towards deciding who will lead us as president through dangerous years ahead.

That the years ahead will be dangerous needs no elaboration from me. Most Americans know the forces of terrorism will not rest until a mushroom cloud hangs over one of our cities. The recent tragic assassination of former Prime Minister Bhutto in Pakistan again demonstrates the terrorists’ will to power and their relentless cruelty.

Along with threats to our national security, we have great domestic challenges before us - the economy, taxes, protecting our borders, and protecting the right to life.

So, I want to talk to you now about the threats and dangers that we face as a people — but also about the hope and opportunity I see out there.

Before doing that, however, I’d be remiss if I did not — on behalf of myself and my wife, Jeri - thank the people of Iowa for all your hospitality and warmth over the past few months. Traveling around the state with all our wonderful volunteers and staff and especially with your great congressman Steven King meant getting to know all of you better. And that’s been one of the great privileges of our lives.

You may have heard about our bus tour - we’re visiting about 50 cities. Having that time out there in the heartland has also taught us once again about what counts in life - the importance of passing on to our children and grandchildren the same safe and free future that others protected and passed on to us.

By any measure, we live in the greatest country in the history of the world. Every generation of Americans has an obligation to keep it that way. And to do that we must remember how we got to where we are — and why we are so blessed.

That means remembering the fundamental, conservative principles that have unified us for over two centuries.

What are those principles?

o First, the role of the federal government is limited to the powers given to it in the Constitution

o Second, a dollar belongs in the pocket of the person who earns it, unless the government has a compelling reason why it can use it better

o Third, we don’t spend money we don’t have, or borrow money that our children and grandchildren will have to pay back

o And the best way to avoid war is to be stronger than our enemies. But if we’re caught in a fight, we need to win it because not doing so makes us much more likely to be attacked in the future

o Also the federal judiciary is supposed to decide cases, not set social policy — and bad social policy at that

o And the bigger the government gets, the less competent it is to run our lives.

Now these are ideals and principles that made our country free, prosperous and strong. And these principles are the foundation of a conservative movement that I’ve been faithful to throughout my adult life. These are not principles I decided on a few years ago. They are not concepts that I learned from a focus group. And they are not ideas I came up with to curry favor or to win an election. These principles are part of who I am and, I suspect, they are views and instincts I share with most of you.

And every single one of these principles is under assault today - under assault from a left wing, big-government, high-taxing, weak-on-defense Democratic party. A party whose leadership is licking its chops just waiting to take over the reins of government - waiting to bring to the United States presidency the same reckless power-seeking and incompetence it’s brought this year to the United States Congress.

That’s why the upcoming caucuses are so important. On January 3rd, the people of Iowa are going to answer an important question. Who’s the man you want to represent us — to stand against this assault and protect our principles and values?

It’s a little late in the process to be coy. I believe I’m that man. I can stand up to those who would trifle with our great founding principles. I’ve done it before. I’ll blow the whistle on their schemes. And I know how to beat them in the war of ideas.

And in demonstrating that, I have laid out plans for:

o A simplified, flatter income tax to take away power rom the IRS

o A way to save a Social Security system that is going bankrupt

o A stronger military ready to face the threats of a dangerous world; and

o A solution to our illegal immigration mess.

Any number of publications and commentators - the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, Investors Business Daily and others — have praised these plans. And many have pointed out that I’m the only Republican in the race for the presidency who has stepped up to offer such bold, conservative ideas. I invite you to check the policy details on my website Fred08.com

But you’re not electing a set of position papers. You’re electing a leader - at a time when strong leadership is going to be needed.

Now if you watched or heard about the most recent debate between the Republican candidates you probably know that I declined when called upon by the moderator to do any hand-raising - I just thought that there should be some things that are below even the dignity of presidential candidates. But the point’s this: I don’t think it was difficult to pick the leader out of that line-up. If those other fellas can’t stand up to an overbearing moderator in a debate, I’m not sure how they would fare against the leader of Iran or North Korea.

Now there are many good men running for our party’s nomination. Each of them loves our country. Each of them has something interesting and useful to offer. But the fact of the matter is that the Republican Party is a conservative party. That’s the philosophy that’s shaped us. That’s the philosophy that has won us elections. And that’s the philosophy we must champion if we are to win again in 2008.

And on that score, among each of the men seeking our party’s nomination, my record stands out. I entered public life as a conservative. I served in the Senate as a strong, consistent conservative with a 100% pro life voting record. And I have the same philosophy today that I had back then. What you see is what you get. I dance to no man’s tune. And no one has ever accused me of changing my position on anything for the sake of political expediency. That’s why when someone here in Iowa said conservatives were looking for a horse to ride in 2008, I responded, “Saddle me up.” And in the battle of ideas, we can’t afford a Republican leader who doesn’t have a core philosophy that grounds him. I know who I am. I know what I believe. And I am ready to lead.

When I was in the federal government, I concentrated on national security. I served on the Intelligence Committee, met with foreign leaders around the world. And I managed for the Republican side the passage of the Homeland Security bill which I believe has helped us prevent another “9/11.”

I continued public service after I left government. Although my role on TV’s “Law & Order” got considerably more publicity, I took on other roles from time to time as well. When Condoleeza Rice needed someone to advise her on matters of international security, she called on me. When the President needed help to get a good conservative judge confirmed as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, he called on me.

What it all comes down to is this: The most important issue facing us is the national security of our nation and the safety of our people.

I’ve spent a lot of time both in and out of government working to make the American people safer. I know the world we live in, I know what we need to do, and I know it’s going to require strong leadership.

And I would ask people to think one thing before they caucus: When our worst enemy is sitting across from us at the negotiating table, and they’re thinking about what they can do to harm the United States of America, and what they might could get away with, who do you want sitting on our side of the table representing you, working to keep you safe? That’s probably the person you ought to elect as President.

I’ve been tested. And I believe our country’s best days are ahead of us if we take on the responsibility of leadership. The American people are waiting for us to step up, protect our values, our principles and our country. Together we can do something great for America. I welcome that challenge.

But, my friends, I need your help.

Because right now in this final weekend another issue is before us: that of electability.

I believe I am the only candidate in this race who can bring our party to victory in the Fall. First, because of the firmness of my principles and the trust that that engenders. Secondly, because of the detailed program I’ve put before the people. Third, because I’ve been tried and tested - and I’m a known quantity in public life.

But, most of all, I think I know how to talk to the American people about the opposition and the danger their victory would pose to the principles we hold dear.

You know in the last debate - when I was asked the biggest problem with American education– I had a ready answer: “The NEA.”

By which I meant the National Education Association — that highly politicized, Washington-based union that is a hindrance to students as well as to the teachers it claims to represent.

But you know the NEA is not the only problem. Just like its education policy, the Democratic party’s foreign policy is heavily influenced by another left-of-center pressure group-Move On.org which implied that our leading general in Iraq betrayed us, that tells our men and women in uniform that the war they are fighting is lost, and then tries to cut off funds for our troops in the field.

And its social policy is heavily determined by the radically secularist ACLU — which tries to take God out of the public square and leaps to the legal defense of our Nation’s enemies.

You know, when I’m asked which of the current group of Democratic candidates I prefer to run against, I always say it really doesn’t matter. Because these days all those candidates, all the Democratic leaders, are one and the same. They’re all NEA, Move On.org, ACLU, Michael Moore Democrats. They’ve allowed these radicals to take control of their party and dictate their course.

So this election is important not just to enact our conservative principles. This election is important to salvage the once-great political party from the grip of extremism and shake it back to its senses. It’s time to give not just Republicans but independents and, yes, good Democrats a chance to call a halt to the leftward lurch of the once proud party of working people.

So in seeking the nomination of my own party, I want to say something a little unusual. I am asking my fellow Republicans to vote for me not only for what I have to say to them, but for what I have to say to the members of the other party — the millions of Democrats who haven’t left the Democratic party so much as their party’s national leadership has left them.

In this campaign I will be seeking the support of millions of Democrats who no longer believe that they can trust their own party’s leadership on the issue of national security.

I will be seeking the support of millions of Democrats with young families who are beginning to see the economic burdens they may face because of their party leadership’s taste for high taxes and politically motivated refusal to fix social security and remove the threat of a shortfall in federal benefit plans that could be a catastrophe for younger taxpayers.

And, finally, I’ll be seeking the support of Democrats who are weary of spin politics and the permanent campaign and endless attempts to control the media dynamic– who think policy stances ought to be judged on a higher criteria than what works better in a sound bite or fits this week’s campaign-message guidance.

So I’ll be asking good Democrats as well as Independents to give us another chance - to see if a Republican president and Congress that’s dedicated to conservative principles can move forward with an agenda that goes beyond narrow partisanship and political expediency and actually deals with the long-term foreign and domestic crises we face.

I know we can do better than a 14% approval rating the current Congress had. And I know we’ve learned our lessons from last year’s election. We’re the party of smaller, smarter government, lower taxes, and less Washington spending. And the only way we win is if we understand that, remain true to it, and refuse to yield to those who would have us abandon it.

All of this, then, and more is why I’m running for president. I believe, that, yes, we can deal with the dangers and threats before our nation and the world.

And we can begin now by remembering who we are, where we came from, and what we’ve done before as a people. This isn’t the first time our nation has been in grave danger, even in our own lifetime. Not long ago ours was an East-West world where the democracies were beleaguered and small in number. Now so much that was once unimaginable is happening before our eyes. We see a world where representative government is flourishing. A world where the global economic boom is taking millions out of poverty every year. A world where there’s even talk of a permanent end to poverty.

Well, we got to this place because of leaders who saw something more than political expediency, leaders like a Ronald Reagan. A Ronald Reagan who would use his time in office wisely precisely because he thought politics had higher uses than just the pursuit of power.

He spoke often of the abuses of government power that our founding fathers feared and warned against. You know, I’ve always thought one of the most impressive things about one of those founders — George Washington — was his willingness to walk away from power. Having spent eight impossibly difficult years in a military struggle against the greatest military power on earth, he was filled with an awe and wonder not at the work of mere mortals but at the workings and power of Providence, an awe and wonder that was never to leave him. To his dying day he was to remind Americans that the one condition of a prosperous and free people was a belief in a will higher than our own, a trust in Providence.

Lincoln had it too — the conviction that no free people and certainly no president can long endure without a belief in a wisdom far exceeding any human understanding.

I know the people of Iowa think that way. I recognize it when I see it. That’s one of the great advantages that comes from growing up in another part of the heartland — Lawrenceburg Tennessee. On Sunday morning, my hometown was a pretty busy place- people on the way to hear the good news - the good news that the future is in better hands than our own. So, thanks to what I learned in those early days I’ve always known no matter how much we want it otherwise, we humans aren’t in charge. Life is sometimes harsh though in teaching us that truth.

And all this was much on my mind last summer when I decided to run for the presidency. Especially as I looked around my home at another generation — a three-year old and a five-month old — and thought — as have so many of you over the past few years - about the safe future I had and how much I wanted to make that future a certainty for my children and yours.

So for this reason and all the others I mentioned, I’m hoping that you support me in the days ahead. I am hoping too that you’ll join me in something that comes pretty easy here in ‘the heartland” — a prayer of thanks for the great things that have happened in our time. And a prayer of hope too. Hope that when the history of our own age is written it will be said of us what was said of those before us. That we were unswerving in our dedication to the cause of human freedom and dignity. And that we kept our trust in the will of Him who made us — and who enjoins us to now go forth and make a newer world ,

Thank you all. May God bless you and May God bless America

Writing about Fred Thompson has always presented a challenge to me as a blogger. The analyst in me is in conflict with the cheerleader - a common conundrum for most bloggers who have a favorite in the race. I must confess there are times when the cheerleader part of me takes control and I become overly enthusiastic about a candidate who many see as no one to get very excited about. And there are other times where I highlight the cold, analytical facts and figures of the race - much to the disadvantage of the candidate - which drives many of my fellow Fredheads up a wall.

Indeed, from a purely analytical point of view, looking at all the polls (not just the select few that seem to give a rosier picture of Thompson’s chances), Fred Thompson will probably not be the Republican nominee for President of the United States. There are few serious professionals I have heard or read that give the candidate much of a chance. Too many lightening strikes would be necessary for that to happen, too many improbable scenarios in too many of the early primaries would have to come true for Fred to survive.

The candidate has little money on hand and with the February 5 Super Tuesday gaggle of 21 primaries a little more than a month away where 50% of the delegates to the national convention will be chosen, it seems an impossible task to raise money in amounts that would allow the candidate to be competitive with Mitt Romney’s bottomless pit of funds or Giuliani’s reservoir of cash.

As I have said before, all of this is beside the point. As long as there is a chance for success and as long as the candidate himself believes he can win, his supporters should back his play to the best of their ability. And in the here and now, Iowa is the battleground where the candidate has chosen to make a stand and where he absolutely must do better than the pundits and pros are expecting.

I was gratified to see yesterday on CNN’s Late Edition that Fred was touting the fact that he thinks he can finish second in Iowa:

BLITZER: OK. Let’s talk a little bit about the chances that you have in Iowa right now. Some of the more recent polls have you coming in at third or fourth. What do you have to do? How do you have to emerge in Iowa in order to justify moving on to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan and beyond?

THOMPSON: Well, the overwhelming number of polls out this way have me running third right now, and the last couple of credible polls that have come out have showed me in the teens or the high teens and not that far back from the pack.

You know, I think I have a decent chance of coming in second out here, and it’s moving in the right direction.

We’re in the middle of a 50-county, 50-town and city tour out here. And we’re going out, taking the grassroots, the numbers are reflecting that. People who get a chance to hear us, and we’ve had a little chance to spend time with them, it’s resulting in on-the-ground activity, and it’s resulting in contributions coming in and things of that nature.

When the conventional political wisdom dictates the candidate play down his chances thus lowering expectations, Fred once again goes against the grain and ups the ante considerably by giving himself a shot at second place - presumably at the expense of Mike Huckabee who is being turned into hamburger by Mitt Romney’s multi-million dollar last minute negative ad blitz. It is not a likely scenario but is one of those lightening strikes I mentioned above that would have to occur for Thompson to become viable in the eyes of conservatives elsewhere.

In fact, Thompson has eschewed “conventional wisdom” for the entire campaign. From his unorthodox “front porch” campaign in the spring and early summer, to his effective early use of the internet, to his unconventional (and controversial) mode and method of campaigning, Thompson has followed the dictates of his inner voice about how to go about running for president. It has placed him at odds with the media, the punditocracy, and most of the political class - all of whom worship at the altar of conventional wisdom. These gatekeepers love CW because it makes their jobs easier.

Rather than doing any real reporting or analysis, it is much easier (and much more profitable as a writer) if you can take the CW about any candidate and with a clever turn of the phrase that either sticks in the knife or places a halo around their head, simply repeat what every other reporter, columnist, and analyst is saying. It has made political reporting in this country as monochromatic and boring as can possibly be - mostly because the lack of originality is so glaringly obvious. Only on blogs (and a precious few online magazines) does one find the kind of fresh and penetrating analysis that used to be the hallmark of political reporting in this country.

So when a candidate that rejects conventional wisdom about how to run a presidential campaign comes along, there is resistance from the gatekeepers. According to CW, a candidate must run around like a whirling dervish from campaign stop to campaign stop, torturing themselves in order to make themselves worthy in the eyes of of the high priests of politics inside the beltway.

Most forget that this kind of all out, pedal to the metal campaigning is a relatively new phenomena - at least during the primaries. It was Jimmy Carter who began campaigning in Iowa two years before the caucuses in order to grab headlines and gain momentum going into New Hampshire. Since then, CW has dictated that the candidates who flails away the most and knocks themselves out campaigning are deemed worthy of consideration. All others need not apply.

For whatever reason, Thompson has rejected that model and followed his own instincts. And the candidate has also rejected the normal appeals by a politician to people’s fears and emotions and instead tried to engage the voters on an intellectual level. This has led to charges that he is “uninspiring” or boring. To answer that, Thompson has recorded a 17 minute appeal to Iowa voters, laying out his case to support him.

Conventional wisdom says that this recording is a waste of time, that no voter will sit through 17 minutes of a politician talking about himself and his qualifications to be the next President of the United States. I’m not so sure. The video is compelling and revealing. It shows a man offering himself for public service not a politician bragging about and exaggerating his meager accomplishments. There is little in the way of embellishments or histrionics. It is just Fred Thompson being Fred Thompson - refreshing in a way that is not easily dismissed.

It is, as the candidate infers, the anti-sound bite. It is not the background noise of a campaign that floods the airwaves with 15 and 30 second spots with the deep intonations of a narrator talking about some superficial attribute of the featured candidate. This message has meat on the bone and gives a voter who watches it the opportunity to fully take the measure of the man speaking. No artifice. No subterfuge. Simple, straightforward, from the shoulder facts about Thompson, his reasons for running, and his belief that he can win.

But what Thompson’s message to Iowans shows above all is a very serious man talking about very serious issues and the fact that the years ahead will demand a thoughtfulness and a seriousness of purpose from our President if we are to successfully navigate the treacherous shoals of history and bring the ship of state safely through to the other side.

No other candidate that I’ve seen possesses this kind of serious approach to the enormous problems facing this country in the years ahead. That’s why I support Fred Thompson despite his long shot chances and despite all the criticisms levelled against him by the conventional wisdom crowd.

Fred Thompson says he is “not consumed by personal ambition.” He says that he won’t slit his wrists if he loses the presidency. He says “I’m not particularly interested in running for president, but I think I’d make a good president. Nowadays, the process has become much more important than I think it used to be.”

The press is having a field day, of course. They love it when a candidate seems to confirm all the supposedly nasty things they’ve been saying about him. Go here for a full transcript of what Thompson said in response to an earnest question from a voter who asked “if I caucus for you next week, are you still going to be there two months from now?”

It’s too late for Thompson to change the minds of the press regarding the importance of having an overweening ambition to be president. Collectively, it appears they have decided that this is an extremely relevant and serious criteria by which to judge a candidate’s worthiness for high office. Somehow, a candidate’s thoughtfulness, integrity, instincts, temperament, and views on the issues have become secondary to an artificial measurement of the heat given off from how much fire is in his belly.

Our gatekeepers are, if nothing else, consistent in their criticism of Thompson’s commitment to running for president. Ever since the first weeks of the campaign when the press woke up to the fact that Thompson was going to run the campaign his way and not the way that everyone (including the press) expected him to run it, the conventional wisdom developed that it didn’t matter what Thompson was saying or what he believed. What mattered is that he failed to meet the arbitrary standards set by the media denoting what might be termed “the cup of desire” test. Thompson refused to drink deep draughts and has been skewered for it.

I can’t think of any other candidate in the last 35 years who has been judged by such extraordinarily shallow criteria. There were whispers prior to Reagan running for President in 1980 that the candidate was too laid back. Indeed, Reagan’s loss in Iowa in 1980 was attributed to a “lazy” campaign. But no one accused The Gipper of lacking desire for the office or even that his laid back style disqualified him from consideration.

This is an entirely new phenomena in politics and is directly related to the fact that running for President has become pretty much of a 4 year undertaking. A large part of the reason for that is the ungodly sums of money that must be raised to build what amounts to a $100 million nationwide business whose only product is electing the candidate president. Those few candidates who can accomplish this have a huge leg up in the race.

Declaring early means wrapping up the party “whales” and “bundlers” who invest in a candidate as they would a promising stock or top performing mutual fund. When you consider the fact that the top 4 fundraisers in the race had all been mentioned as possible presidential candidates as far back as 2004, you begin to see where a candidate like Thompson, already at a huge disadvantage, would seek to break the mold and run a different kind of campaign, freed from the necessity of living up to anyone’s expectations about how a successful run for office should unfold.

Unfortunately, mold breakers are inevitably punished for their apostasy. In Thompson’s case, the candidate himself hasn’t helped much. Voters may not have been asking the questions raised by the media about Thompson’s demeanor and desire, but judging by the poll numbers, those questions may have been uppermost in their minds. The fact is, Thompson has failed to adequately address the issue - until he hit a home run with his response yesterday. Predictably, the press spun the story the way they wanted - an easy task given the complexity and subtly of Thompson’s argument. But an examination of his explanation reveals a refreshing honesty about the candidate’s inner thinking and what exactly is motivating him to run.

Surprisingly, the reasons are no different than any other candidate. A desire to serve, a belief that he can accomplish “special things,” the confidence that he is running for “the right reasons.” So if it is not his motivation for running that is in question, what exactly is it that has the press so doggedly determined to portray him as “lazy” or “lacking fire in the belly?”

In an age when candidates run campaigns that are dependent on emotionally connecting with the voter (usually by trying to frighten them to death about their opponent), Thompson seeks to engage people on an intellectual level. Rather than using rhetoric to inflame passions, the candidate tries to make the voter think. There is little pizazz and less of the campaign superficialities in Thompson’s effort than one finds in any other campaign. In short, as entertainment, the Thompson campaign receives failing grades. The candidate does not make good copy nor do his appearances necessarily make good TV. Rather than giving off sparks, the campaign emits a stolid, steady feeling of seriousness.

The press uses code words like “lazy” simply because they can’t bring themselves to describe the campaign and the candidate as “boring” - a description that would reveal them to be as stupid, shallow, and cynical as we all know that they are. In our media saturated world where people (and the press) demand to be constantly entertained, Fred Thompson fails miserably.

That is his greatest sin. He has broken the mold of what the press expects of a candidate and a campaign and is being punished for it. Not a very elevating reason to eliminate a candidate from serious consideration for the presidency but given the reality of presidential politics and the times we live in, it is perhaps not surprising.