Fred Thompson still dominate the online straw polls by a significant margin:
Maybe this will send a message to the Dobsons and Robertsons that Christians have no problem voting for Thompson.Unannounced presidential candidate Fred Thompson easily leads all announced candidates in an online poll by the American Family Association, one of the nation’s leading conservative Christian and pro-family groups.
In the ongoing poll, Thompson had collected 17,280 votes by Thursday afternoon, with another unannounced candidate, Newt Gingrich, behind at 6,857 votes.
[...]
Mitt Romney led the announced Republican candidates with 5,219 votes, ahead of Rudy Giuliani (4,313), John McCain (3,559) and Mike Huckabee (2,235). Sam Brownback led the other GOP candidates with 2,021 votes.
Of course now that Thompson has announced that he has cancer, it's considered a major drawback of his candidacy. Reagan's son, Michael writes the following:
The only problem with this is that two of the front runners have cancer as well. So this shouldn't really be an issue.No matter how non-life threatening his form of the disease may be, the very word “cancer” when applied to anyone, especially a presidential candidate, raises all kinds of doubts in the public’s mind. Those doubts, even if totally unjustified, are very hard to erase from the public’s consciousness.
Assuming that his rugged appearance and obvious good health manage to allay public uneasiness about his cancer, once he successfully climbs that wall -- like the bear that climbed the mountain only to face other mountains -- Fred Thompson will have to surmount a series of other high barriers.
Reagan also believes that Thompson has other major obstacles in his way to the White House and can you guess what they are? Of course they are the same as we've heard since this whole movement started to gain steam: money and campaign staff.
This is really a straw man argument because it assumes that Thompson won't do any campaigning if he announces next month or that next month is too late to start campaigning. So the competition got a head start in Iowa by a couple months, I don't think that matters if the people aren't connecting to the candidates.Assuming Thompson can get over this obstacle and is able to organize at the grass roots, he is still facing the need to get out there in all those primary states and carry the flag of his candidacy. There is no way he can rely on his obvious charisma to substitute for being on the scene. And the fact that overwhelming numbers of primary states are having their primaries on the same day next February imposes a huge burden on all the candidates they can’t shrug off. They have to be there and highly visible.
Where have I heard that before? Oh, I know -- it was in 1980, during the crucial Iowa primary caucuses. My father, Ronald Reagan, was an obvious absentee candidate. His top advisers convinced him that his presence in that key state was not really necessary -- after all, he was a major celebrity with charisma radiating out of every pore in his body. He could simply rise above the battle by staying off the battlefield.
Unlike my dad, I was there and I saw at first hand how much his campaign was suffering from his absence. My fears were totally justified when George Bush, who was all over the place, beat my father hands down. After that, he fired those campaign advisers and went out and beat the bushes and in the end won the nomination.
I think this Hugh Hewitt mindset that if you weren't in the race by March, it's too late to enter is just silly. Campaigns that start early have to be financed longer. And as for the staff and the workers, Thompson's consideration of the presidency was enough to freeze the race until he's ready to enter (as I've said before).
And Brody responds to his critics over his Thompson supporting Chafee silliness. He got a lot of angry emails from Thompson supporters. Good going, Thompson supporters. Let the Religious Right know that we support our candidate (potential candidate) and won't let people get away with misrepresenting him. I have to object to Brody's title, "Brody Gets Mugged By Thompson Supporters," it really should be "Thompson Supporters Object to Brody Mugging Thompson."
And if Thompson runs, be prepared for a steady stream of this type of superficial journalism. *Yawn* Reminds me of the lazy journalism of the Reagan years. The template for Thompson is exactly the same for Reagan: lazy and lacks vision. That's OK liberal MSM, you aren't the only game in town who can spin the candidate. Everyone on the Internet has access to his voting record and his credentials, we're not going to let you have the last word on our candidate.
