There are two principal knocks against Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign: 1) he doesn’t know (or care) much about policy, and expects to get by on vague generalities and platitudes; and 2) running for president is really hard, and Thompson is too lazy to excel.<\/p>\n
On the first point, Thompson seems to be doing his level best to prove just how little he knows<\/a> about public policy, and on the second, he seems equally anxious to appear as lazy as he possibly can<\/a>.<\/p>\n His critics, already pointing to what they call Mr. Thompson’s skimpy Senate record, might find even more ammunition in his campaign schedule. In his second week as an officially declared candidate for the Republican nomination, Mr. Thompson has made a languid three-day swing through Florida ending Saturday with the candidate watching a football game in Gainesville. The pace has kept him on a jumbo air-conditioned bus far more often than he is actually campaigning.<\/p>\n Since Thursday morning, when the tour began, Mr. Thompson has made no more than three campaign stops a day, with long stretches in between. In recent spins through Iowa, he kept a similarly relaxed schedule. Mitt Romney, by comparison, often does six town-hall-style forums a day when in Iowa.<\/p>\n A spokesman for Mr. Thompson said the driving distances in Florida were a factor, and that he would add more impromptu stops later in the campaign.<\/p>\n Next week, his schedule has no public events at all<\/b>, limiting his appearances to fund-raisers in Florida, Tennessee and Texas. (emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Apparently, after one week on the campaign trail and a handful of events, Thompson needs a break. But once off the bus, Mr. Thompson has shown occasional signs of discomfort. In a speech here on Friday, he sweated profusely under the afternoon sun, breathed heavily and, while struggling over a question, asked no one in particular if his microphone was on. (It was.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Is this thing on<\/i>? It’s one of those old, comedy cliches asked when an audience isn’t laughing at the jokes. That Thompson even thought to ask is not at all a good sign.<\/p>\n At his second campaign stop of the day on Friday, just after 2 p.m., Fred D. Thompson was deep into a riff on the benefits of high-quality American health care.<\/p>\n “It’s allowing us to live healthier lives and to live longer,” Mr. Thompson, a former Republican senator from Tennessee, said at a Jaycee park here. “That’s good news. But we have more retired folks. I hope to become one of them one of these days.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Does this sound like a serious presidential candidate to you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are two principal knocks against Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign: 1) he doesn’t know (or care) much about policy, and expects to get by on vague generalities and platitudes; and 2) running for president is really hard, and Thompson is too lazy to excel. On the first point, Thompson seems to be doing his level […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nThis sounds particularly painful.<\/p>\n