When it comes to Fred Thompson’s burgeoning presidential campaign, there are a variety of predictable knocks. He’s lazy. He’s inexperienced. His most valuable skill seems to be his ability to pretend to be someone else. He considers moving to northern Virginia “getting out of Washington.” When it comes to his infamous red truck, he’s a shameless and transparent phony.<\/p>\n
But the WaPo’s Jeffrey Birnbaum touches on<\/a> another potential problem for Thompson’s candidacy, which probably hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Most people think of Thompson as a politician\/actor. It’s more accurate to describe him as politician\/actor\/lobbyist<\/i>.<\/p>\n By all accounts, Fred D. Thompson will soon be running for president, portraying himself as a Washington outsider on the campaign trail. But over the past three years he showed up every two weeks or so at a lobbying and law firm in downtown D.C. to plot how best to persuade Congress to help a British company.<\/p>\n His main assignment: to use his connections to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to extract information about goings-on inside Congress and use it to benefit his multibillion-dollar client.<\/p>\n In exchange for this insider wisdom he was paid a cool $760,000.<\/p>\n Even casual observers of the presidential race know that in recent years Thompson, a Republican former senator from Tennessee, was a lobbyist between his acting gigs. What is less widely known is what he did in D.C.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And what he did was serve as an “access man” for a British company worried about how asbestos legislation might affect its liabilities. (As Birnbaum put it, “In an earlier era, the term of art for what Thompson did would have been ‘foreign agent.'”)<\/p>\n Now, just to be clear, Thompson’s role as a lobbyist, as far as I know, was entirely legitimate and above-board. Lots<\/i> of former lawmakers cash in on their congressional careers by moving to K Street offices, and by all appearances, Thompson was good at his job.<\/p>\n But the point isn’t that Thompson’s lobbying career was scandalous, but rather, that Thompson is running for president as some kind of outsider. He’s actually a former high-paid DC corporate lobbyist. The two don’t exactly go together well. On occasion, Thompson lobbied for causes he would later criticize as a senator. For example, Thompson led a Senate effort against “corporate welfare.” As a lobbyist in the 1980s, he represented Westinghouse in its failed bid to win billions in subsidies for a nuclear reactor project in Tennessee, which the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, called “a multibillion-dollar folly.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But more importantly, there’s the question of “authenticity,” which Paul Krugman explained<\/a> yesterday.<\/p>\n [C]onsider the case of Fred Thompson. He spent 18 years working as a highly paid lobbyist, wore well-tailored suits and drove a black Lincoln Continental. When he ran for the Senate, however, his campaign reinvented him as a good old boy: it leased a used red pickup truck for him to drive, dressed up in jeans and a work shirt, with a can of Red Man chewing tobacco on the front seat.<\/p>\n But Mr. Thompson’s strength, says Lanny Davis in The Hill, is that he’s “authentic.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Keep in mind, Dems have tried to highlight this point before. Thompson’s opponent for the Senate in 1994, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), labeled Thompson a “Gucci-wearing, Lincoln-driving, Perrier-drinking, Grey Poupon-spreading millionaire Washington special-interest lobbyist,” all of which was true. But Thompson would just point to his red truck — the one he drove “the final few hundred feet before each campaign event, and then ditched it<\/a> for something nicer as soon as he was out of sight of the yokels” — which somehow managed to quell the criticism.<\/p>\n
\n
\nFor one thing, there’s a bit of a hypocrisy factor<\/a>.<\/p>\n