Is he for real? Assessing non-non-candidate Fred Thompson.

Philadelphia

IT'S late July, and even though he's been on the non-campaign trail for five months, Fred Thompson has yet to appear on the same dais with any other Republican presidential candidate. That's about to change here at the Marriott Downtown, where both Thompson, the former senator from Tennessee, and Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, are scheduled to address the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC. Its members aren't just any voters; they are state senators and representatives and other plugged-in politicos, mostly conservatives, from around the country. They're good people to know: If you're a Republican running for something, it never hurts to be tight with the top officials in Georgia, or Virginia, or Missouri. They're all here today, and a lot of them have been waiting for months to get their first up-close look at Thompson.

The event, a lunch in a hall packed almost beyond capacity, isn't really a contest, but it is a contrast. At this point in the campaign, Huckabee has performed well in three GOP debates and has polished his stump speech in hundreds of appearances. A man who has famously gone from obesity to running marathons, he's in top shape, on his game. He gives a speech that is tight, well-constructed, and impassioned, all from one scribbled notecard. By the time he's finished, the ALEC members are on their feet.

After a break, Thompson enters to great applause; the crowd is clearly ready to love him. But this, as it turns out, is not his day. He's just flown in overnight from San Diego, where he appeared at one of Sean Hannity's Freedom Concerts, and he appears a bit tired. Then, instead of delivering a rousing declaration of principles, he launches into a dry treatise on federalism. It's an important topic to these state officials, who agree with every word Thompson has to say about keeping the federal government out of state affairs. But it's just not what they expected, or were hoping to hear. To make things worse, the teleprompter goes on the blink for Thompson's speech, forcing him to put on his reading glasses and spend a lot of time peering at his text. And finally, when Thompson works a crowded rope-line after the speech, he becomes so overheated that when he ditches his suit coat he reveals a shirt soaked completely through, looking much the worse for wear. Huckabee, for his part, is shaking hands and posing for pictures on the other side of the room, coat on, looking cool.

When it's all over, most observers agree that the former governor has run rings around the former senator. "The consensus of the crowd was that Huckabee wowed 'em," John Wiles, a state senator from Georgia, tells me. "Thompson's speech was a disappointment."

"I thought Thompson really blew a good opportunity," says Bill Howell, who is speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates. "In my mind, Huckabee is right on, has a great delivery, is very articulate--all the things Thompson wasn't." Others are a bit more diplomatic--they say the speeches were just too different to compare--but they often add that they think Mike Huckabee is quite a speaker.

Thompson's Philadelphia stop is perhaps a small preview of his campaign to come. After much build-up, people came to see him with high expectations. Huckabee, having been in the race for months, was ready to rumble. And Thompson found himself under an intense--indeed, a literally hot--spotlight. Put it all together, and his appearance brought with it a high potential for disappointing, or at least underwhelming, the crowd.

Until now, Thompson, the former star of TV's Law & Order, has conducted an unconventional and brilliant campaign of "testing the waters," using the Internet, radio, and a few TV and personal appearances to attract an enthusiastic following among Republicans looking for an alternative to the current field of presidential candidates. But soon his campaign-to-be--he'll formally declare next month--will become more traditional. After Labor Day, voters will begin to pay serious attention to the candidates, and Thompson will be up against not just Huckabee but Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and his old colleague John McCain. Unlike his opponents, who will be cruising in high gear--they've been running hard for months now--Thompson will be learning on the fly, with a newly hired staff that is already having trouble working together and a candidate who hasn't run a serious campaign since his first election to the Senate in 1994. Most important, he'll have to convince Republican voters that he's truly different from the rest, that he's the real conservative in the race and, underneath the TV-star polish, not just another senator who wants to become president. It's an enormous gamble, even for a man who has undeniable appeal to the GOP base. These days, Fred Thompson is a man with no room for error.

CREATING THE BUZZ

The McLean Family Restaurant is a popular storefront--simple food, plain setting, folksy atmosphere--not far from Thompson's home and campaign offices in McLean, Va. Since it's in a well-to-do suburb of Washington, a lot of politicians pass through--you wouldn't be surprised to spot Newt Gingrich or Patrick Leahy there--and, one morning in August, Thompson joins me in a back booth to discuss the enormous effort of trying to get a presidential campaign going in the space of a few months.

Most candidates take years to decide that they want to run for president, he explains. He first started hearing from supporters perhaps nine months ago, after then-Sen. Bill Frist abandoned his run for president. (Thompson says he would not have considered running had his fellow Tennessean stayed in the race.) "I had a bunch of people from Tennessee want to fly up, a group of my old friends and supporters, to talk to me about it," Thompson tells me. He was flattered but not interested. "I asked them not to [come]," Thompson says. "It was going to be to encourage me to get in, and I didn't think I would."

He meant it. Tennessee congressman Zach Wamp, a friend, called Thompson last December, a few days after Frist's announcement, to gauge Thompson's interest. "It wasn't even on his radar screen," Wamp tells me. "He said his new child had just been born, his career was fantastic, and he was finally making some money. The answer was no."

At some point in the next few months, though, Thompson's mind began to change. Polls regularly showed that Republican voters weren't happy with their choices in the GOP race. Everyone knew the problem: Giuliani is too liberal on social issues, Romney is a flip-flopper, McCain--well, a lot of conservatives don't like him and never will. Thompson tells me he didn't size up the field when making his decision to explore a race--"My focus certainly has not been, 'Aha, this is a weak field, this is an opportunity for a nice young man like myself '"--but he did realize that he didn't see the perfect candidate out there. "Clearly, if I saw someone who I said, 'This is the right person for these times who can win,' and it was clear to me, I probably would have been thinking totally differently."

In January and February, Thompson started seriously thinking about a run, and while he was hearing encouragement from supporters around the country, he set about raising his profile to create more support. Along with his wife, Jeri, who played a key role in the effort, and three friends--Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department spokesman; David Bossie, a former top congressional investigator who now runs the group Citizens United; and Ed McFadden, another former Justice official, all of whom worked free of charge and in their spare time--Thompson devised the strategy that made him the talk of the conservative world.

First, the group paid a lot of attention to the conservative web. Jeri Thompson got in touch with NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE to ask if the website would be interested in publishing transcripts of Thompson's radio commentaries. (It was, and NRO published the commentaries semi-regularly until it became clear that Thompson was running.) Then they reached out to sympathetic bloggers. For example, in late January Erick Erickson, the Georgia political consultant who runs the blog Redstate, posted an article headlined "They All Suck," in which he denounced the Republican presidential field, "from the lecherous adulterer to the egomaniacal nut job to the flip-flopping opportunist with the perfect hair." A few weeks later, Erickson tells me, "I got a call from a friend of mine who is also a friend of Fred's. He said, 'I hear you're uninspired by other candidates. What do you think of Fred Thompson?'" Word of Thompson began to appear on Redstate, and Erickson soon heard from colleagues in the blogosphere. "I've had several other people say they had similar experiences--people calling them up and saying, 'I hear you're not excited by the other candidates, what do you think of Fred Thompson?'" Erickson says. "And all of a sudden they were enveloped in the campaign, networking back and forth with each other. It all happened very quickly."

The friend who called Erickson was Ed McFadden, who was also in close contact with The American Spectator's website, where pro-Thompson postings began to appear. In web-speak, Thompson had gone viral, at least in conservative circles. The buzz reached a climax in early March, when the possibility of a Thompson candidacy dominated the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Washington. Carl Cameron, chief political correspondent for Fox News, picked up on it and reported that Thompson was "seriously considering" a run for president. A week later, Thompson appeared on Fox News Sunday and confirmed all the talk. "I'm giving some thought to it," he told host Chris Wallace. "[I'm] going to leave the door open."

"The response was substantial," Thompson tells me, with a bit of dry understatement. "So I thought more about it, and the response continued to be substantial, so over a period of time, I decided that I was going to put myself in a position to do it." Still more buzz followed when Thompson filled in for radio commentator Paul Harvey in March, and later, when Thompson filmed a response to filmmaker Michael Moore's movie Sicko. Featuring Thompson in his office, an unlit cigar in his mouth, the video was brief--all of 38 seconds--and just as biting as Moore himself. In the space of a few days, Thompson racked up up more than two million views on websites like Breitbart.tv and YouTube. "We learned that rapid response, along with a conservative message and a bit of humor, delivered via video, can be a very helpful tool when you're trying to put together a campaign for president very late with a limited ability to raise money," says one insider. "It was an enormous boost for his potential candidacy."

By summer, Thompson was riding high in the polls without having engaged in any of the rigors of traditional campaigning. He had come up with a brilliant strategy, one that might well be studied closely in future elections. But it left one question unanswered: What would a Thompson candidacy be about?

IS HE DIFFERENT?

Americans like executive experience when it comes to choosing a president; every occupant of the White House since John F. Kennedy has been either a governor or a vice president before taking office. The senators and former senators who run for president know this, so they usually tout their experience by portraying themselves as can-do guys, making things happen in Congress--just like real executives.

Not Fred Thompson. During his years in the Senate from 1994 to 2003, it was well known that he wasn't terribly fond of the work. He still isn't. During our meeting in McLean, when I ask him to tell me about his two or three most significant accomplishments in the Senate, he quickly shoots back: "You mean besides leaving the Senate?"

After a laugh, he continues. "I came to the Senate in order to help balance the budget, cut taxes, make Congress live under the laws that everybody else had to live under, start to rebuild and improve our defense, and reform welfare. I was involved in all that, and I think I was the leader in some of it." While those are big accomplishments, they are group accomplishments, and Thompson's claim is pretty modest, at least for a presidential candidate; 50 other Republican senators from that era could say something similar.

Thompson also points out that he played a leading role in passing the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security, although he concedes that that may or may not have been the best way to address post-9/11 concerns. And he defends his role as a big booster of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law; he was the one who pushed, successfully, to raise what used to be the $1,000 limit on so-called "hard money" contributions. Whatever flak he has taken from conservatives who hated McCain-Feingold, Thompson tells me, "That bill would have been a lot worse if it hadn't been for me, because we would be where we are today, only with $1,000 limits."

That's not exactly the stuff of campaign commercials. Rather than his Senate record, Thompson will likely base his campaign on his belief that he can succeed in enacting a conservative agenda where other candidates would fail. And for the conservative voters who make up the Republican primary electorate, four issues--Iraq and national security; the Supreme Court; taxes and the economy; and abortion and gay marriage--will be critical.

On Iraq, Thompson, like all the other Republican candidates, supports giving the troop surge time to succeed. "We should not be competing with each other to see who can put up the white flag first," he tells me. "It makes us look weak and divided and gives encouragement to the enemy."

Still, Thompson doesn't hesitate to show his unhappiness with George W. Bush's conduct of the war in 2004, 2005, and 2006. "The strategy for a long time was just to kind of hold our own and hunker down while we trained the Iraqis to take care of themselves and for the government to get on its feet," he tells me. "Hindsight is 20/20, and I guess there's a case to be made for that, but there's not a case to be made for it year after year after year when the situation continues to get worse." When I ask Thompson about a statement last January by White House spokesman Tony Snow that American troops had "their hands tied behind their backs" by restrictive rules of engagement prior to the surge, he shakes his head. "The first thing I thought," he says, "was why in the devil were they ever fighting with their hands tied behind their backs?"

Now, even if American troops are on the right track, Thompson can't say how long the battle will go on. Calls for a quick American withdrawal from Iraq, he says, "reflect a lack of understanding that we are in a historic global conflict with people who look upon this as a war that's been going on for centuries, and they're plenty willing for it to go on for more centuries." On the campaign trail, he'll tell voters we're in the fight for a long, long time.

The Supreme Court, and judicial issues in general, are Thompson's strong suit. Not only does he have the background--the Watergate investigation, the Senate Judiciary Committee, private practice, and the job of guiding John Roberts through his confirmation hearings--he also knows the conservative legal stars who would likely be candidates for the Court in coming years. But he won't name names, beyond the men already there. "I like Roberts and Alito and Scalia and Thomas," he tells me. "We're in a heck of a lot better shape because of Roberts and Alito, and one more gain would put us in even better shape." Should he become president, Thompson would undoubtedly try to nominate that elusive fifth conservative.

On the economy, Thompson supports extending the Bush tax cuts, but he hasn't, as some have claimed, signed on to the "Fair Tax" proposal that would replace income taxes with a consumption tax. "I believe in a progressive tax system," Thompson tells me. "But we've got 40 percent of Americans now paying the entire tax bill, or 99 percent of it, and five percent are paying over half the taxes in America. That's pretty progressive, and it shouldn't be more so."

At virtually every public appearance, Thompson pushes the idea of entitlement reform. In a talk with donors before his Philadelphia speech, and again with me in McLean, he stresses the coming bankruptcy of Social Security. As president, he would try to reform the system. Since George W. Bush failed to do that--at perhaps his strongest moment as president, immediately after his 2004 election victory, and with 55 Republican votes in the Senate--I ask Thompson why he thinks he can succeed. "I think that's leadership that can only come from the top," he tells me. "What's happened in the past is interesting and relevant, but not in any way determinative of the future."

On abortion, Thompson has a solid pro-life Senate voting record. But he was hurt recently when the Los Angeles Times reported that in 1991 he lobbied on behalf of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which was seeking to change the rule against abortion counseling at clinics that receive federal money. Later stories showed that Thompson billed for nearly 20 hours of work on the project.

A Thompson spokesman first denied that Thompson had ever lobbied on behalf of the association. Then the campaign began to backtrack. Now, Thompson, who admits he mishandled the controversy, says he doesn't remember what happened. "Clearly, I did some work for them," he tells me. "I don't remember what I did, but clearly I did something, so I was representing a pro-choice group."

As for abortion itself, Thompson says he's always been against it, but his feelings have deepened since seeing sonograms of his daughter Hayden, now three. "Although my votes remain the same, and my administration would remain the same as they otherwise would in terms of being pro-life, as a person, as a human being, I do have a deeper understanding and feeling than in times past."

On gay marriage, Thompson is opposed, but he believes states should be free to recognize civil unions. "If people want to make arrangements and understandings with each other, there's nothing the government should do to interfere with that, as far as I'm concerned," he tells me. But the issue should be left to the states, which "ought to have the right to make whatever different laws on civil unions that they want to make, or not have them at all."

Altogether, there's no doubt that Thompson is a solid conservative who would govern as one. But it's hard to claim that his positions are terribly different from those of the other conservatives running for the Republican presidential nomination. Instead, what Thompson is betting on--he said so explicitly in his discussion of Social Security--is that he will be a more effective leader than the other guys, and that he will be more able to convince ordinary Americans to support his initiatives. But first he has to convince them to vote for him.

THE COMING CAMPAIGN

In the spring, Thompson brought in pollster John McLaughlin for advice on the state of the GOP race. McLaughlin had felt there was a gap in the field ever since his favored conservative candidate, former Virginia senator George Allen, dropped out of the race. He told Thompson conditions were right for a new candidate. "You could see where, among voters who were supporting Rudy and McCain, support was soft," McLaughlin tells me. "The actual voters were to the right of the candidates they were voting for. Six out of ten of Rudy's and McCain's supporters were conservatives, and three out of ten were very conservative."

McLaughlin became part of a group of advisers that has grown from the original team of Thompson, his wife, and three friends to the proportions of a formal campaign. Thompson has hired a new campaign chief, a communications director, a spokesman, issue people, advance people--lots of staff, although their number is still significantly smaller than other campaigns. With that growth has come what insiders call growing pains. In July, the campaign parted ways with Tom Collamore, a Thompson friend who ran the effort in its early days. Other staffers departed as well, as Randy Enwright, a respected GOP operative from Florida, was brought in to run the effort. Thompson calls it nothing unusual for a new campaign. "It's not a wholesale shakeup," he tells me. "Hell, I may do that another time or two before it's over with."

The changes came amid rumors that Jeri Thompson was really running things, and that her presence caused friction among the staff. There's no doubt she has been a powerful force in the effort from the beginning: "We started literally from the kitchen table a few months ago," Thompson says. But during our conversation Thompson tells me she has always acted at his behest. "She did what I asked her to do."

The criticism is sure to accelerate in coming months, as Republican opponents who mostly steered clear of Thompson during the summer will include him in the normal rough-and-tumble of the campaign. Things are already getting tough in private conversations. "He is a conceptual candidate," sniffs one insider from a rival campaign. "Sure, he can point to how he voted on motions to recommit, but this campaign is going to be about the future, and he hasn't really laid out any positions beyond rhetorical talking points."

"It's a non-non-campaign, and maybe there's more media fabrication about it than anything else," says an official from another camp. And from yet another: "The whole thing got out of hand. Everyone thought it was going to be easy and fun, and it's not going to work. Campaigns are really, really hard, even when you're doing everything right and have the fire in the belly. You can't do it on the back of an envelope at the last minute."

Is Thompson ready? Despite the claims that he's not a hard charger, he seems to be going pretty fast these days. He's been working out and slimming down (at McLean Family Restaurant, he ordered a vegetarian omelet with EggBeaters). He looks good, but at some point his health and motivation will become issues. In April, he revealed that he has non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a slow-moving cancer that his doctors say is in remission; beyond that, he says, his health is good. And then there is his age. Thompson will be 66 on Inauguration Day 2009. Only two presidents--Ronald Reagan, who turned out pretty well, and William Henry Harrison, who didn't--were older when they took office. "My cards are on the table," Thompson tells me when I asked about his age. "People are free to judge for themselves."

In the end, the verdict on Thompson will depend on whether he can convince voters that he really is different from the other, more established GOP candidates, and that he has the best chance of defeating Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in November 2008. Thompson is an impressive man, sly-smart with varied life experiences, and he has convinced himself he can do it his way. Whether his plan can survive contact with the real world of the campaign trail is another question.