A first(?) thread on 2008: McCain,Giuliani & the Republicans

Any balance from the right is welcome news.

Yes, on 'Radical Secularism.' I believe people should have the freedom to believe in their religion.

What are the polls in Iowa saying? (I'm still going through some backlog.) Like with those in New Hampshire, there's a clear divergence from the picture of the national polls. [..]

Quote:

Mitt Romney leads Republicans

Not now, but radicals on either side can pose a threat to freedom. So far, in the US, radical christians have damaged more freedoms than the other way around. They can't see the discrimination factor in their zeal to disallow marriage for gay couples, attempts to overthrow abortion rights, restrict stem cell research, and teach ID as science in our schools.

Thompson criticizes immigration measures

Associated Press
May 25

Fred Thompson, a potential Republican presidential candidate, suggested that the 1986 immigration law signed by President Reagan is to blame for the country's illegal immigrants and he bemoaned a nation beset by "suicidal maniacs."

"Twelve million illegal immigrants later, we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women and children around the world," the former Tennessee senator said. "We're sitting here now with essentially open borders."

He made the comments Thursday night as he discussed the 1986 immigration reform bill and the Senate's current legislation to overhaul the immigration system during a speech to people attending the annual Prescott Bush Awards Dinner in Stamford, Conn. [..]

Reagan [..] signed an immigration overhaul two decades ago that gave amnesty to an estimated 2.7 million illegal immigrants who had been in the United States at least four years.

"Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people: American citizenship," Reagan said in a statement on Nov. 6, 1986, as the bill became law with his signature.

Immigration has dominated the Republican presidential race this week, with candidates seeking to navigate the tricky politics of the Senate measure that many conservatives oppose. They make up a large part of the GOP base whose votes are critical in the Republican primary contests.

Thompson, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani all oppose the measure to varying degrees, even though all three have made statements in the past in which they appeared to support a similar measure the Senate previously considered.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona is a co-sponsor of the new measure that would meld tougher policies to secure the country's porous borders with a guest-worker program and an eventual path to citizenship for most of the 12 million immigrants in the country illegally.

"We should scrap this bill and the whole debate until we can convince the American people that we have secured the borders or at least have made great headway," Thompson said last week.

His remark about "suicidal maniacs" drew a chuckle from McCain, who said in a telephone interview: "I don't know what to make of it."

"I travel around the country extensively and that's certainly not the impression I have," McCain said. "I have not detected a nation full of suicidal maniacs."

Giuliani said he hoped Thompson was not referring to immigrants in general.

"He was probably referring to the risk we now run that if we have borders that can be easily penetrated, well then, even though it's a small group, terrorists can come in that way, drug dealers, other criminals," Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, said in a telephone interview.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Thompson, said he was not calling immigrants "suicidal maniacs" but, rather was referring to terrorists who seek to enter the United States through borders that have lax security.

In the book, DeLay criticizes Gingrich for, among other things, conducting an affair with a Capitol Hill employee during the 1998 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. (The woman later became Gingrich's third wife.) "Yes, I don't think that Newt could set a high moral standard, a high moral tone, during that moment," DeLay said. "You can't do that if you're keeping secrets about your own adulterous affairs." He added that the impeachment trial was another of his "proudest moments." The difference between his own adultery and Gingrich's, he said, "is that I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There's a big difference." He added, "Also, I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time."

Now that Thompson is getting ready to announce who do you think will be hurt most by his enterance? I guessing Romney will lose the most. I think a lot of republicans are uncomfortable with his religion.

Another Beltway Bubba?

True story: it is a warm evening in the summer of 1995. A crowd has gathered in the auditorium of a suburban high school in Knoxville, Tennessee. Seated in the audience is a childhood friend of mine who now teaches at the school. On stage is Republican Sen. Fred Dalton Thompson, the lawyer/actor elected in 1994 to serve out the remainder of Vice President Al Gore's Senate term (when Gore's appointed successor retired after just two years). The local TV stations are on hand as Thompson wraps up his presentation on tax reform, in the plain-spoken, down-to-earth style so familiar to those who have seen him in any of his numerous film and television performances.

Finishing his talk, Thompson shakes a few hands, then walks out with the rest of the crowd to the red pickup truck he made famous during his 1994 Senate campaign. My friend stands talking with her colleagues as the senator is driven away by a blond, all-American staffer. A few minutes later, my friend gets into her car to head home. As she pulls up to the stop sign at the parking lot exit, rolling up to the intersection is Senator Thompson, now behind the wheel of a sweet silver luxury sedan. He gives my friend a slight nod as he drives past. Turning onto the main road, my friend passes the school's small, side parking area. Lo and behold: There sits the abandoned red pickup, along with the all-American staffer.

Clearly, there's more to Fred Dalton Thompson than first meets the eye--which is saying a lot considering this sleepy-eyed Southerner stands 6'5" and weighs 225 if he weighs an ounce. With his pickup truck, his blue jeans, and his deep, friendly drawl, Thompson has cultivated the perfect political image for today's anti-Washington climate: a straight-shooting, no-nonsense man of the people with a big helping of horse sense and a hankering to clean up our nation's capital. Both his 1994 and 1996 Senate campaigns played up this outsider image, portraying Thompson as an average Joe who shares his neighbors' disgust with a political system that no longer serves regular citizens.

But even without the Hollywood credits, the 54-year-old Thompson is far from your average good ol' boy. In the mid-1970s he served as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, and later as a special counsel for both the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. Even more significantly, for nearly two decades preceding his election to Congress, Thompson was a high-paid Washington lobbyist for both foreign and domestic interests.

Despite his Beltway ties, Thompson has maintained his just-plain-folks status among voters, a feat critics attribute to the senator's acting talents and his shameless use of "props" like the red pickup. Indeed, the charismatic Tennessean's ability to charm a crowd is undeniable. During the 1994 race, whenever the opposition tried to pin the "insider" label on him, Thompson would drawl a few lines about the kind of world he wants to leave his grandkids, and all insinuations that he was part of the Washington establishment disappeared like wood smoke on a warm breeze.

For those outside Tennessee who've never seen Thompson in action, now might be a good time to run down to Blockbuster and rent a few of his flicks. [..] You'll almost certainly be seeing more of this face in the coming months, because Sen. Fred Dalton Thompson may well be the future of the Republican party.

POPULIST POSEUR FRED THOMPSON
Pickup Artist

by Noam Scheiber
Post date 05.26.07

By the time Fred Thompson decides whether or not to join the presidential fray, you will have heard the story of his red pickup truck at least a dozen times. The truck in question is a 1990 Chevy, which the famed statesman-thespian rented during his maiden Senate campaign in 1994. The idea was that Thompson would dress up in blue jeans and shabby boots and drive himself to campaign events around Tennessee. Upon arriving, he'd mount the bed of the truck and launch into a homespun riff on the virtues of citizen-legislators and the perils of Washington insider-ism. For good measure, he'd refer to himself as "Ol' Fred" and the Chevy as "this ol' baby."

There was no real reason to think the tactic would work. Thompson's own campaign manager dismissed it as "gimmicky and hokey." Thompson, after all, had spent the previous two decades as a well-paid Washington lobbyist and sometime screen actor. He was about as close to being a salt-of-the-earth Southerner as Truman Capote, and it was a stretch to think average Tennesseans wouldn't pick up on the dissonance. Yet the gambit proved wildly successful. Thompson was down big to Democrat Jim Cooper when he initialed his car-rental agreement. He went on to win the race with more than 60 percent of the vote.

It's tempting to credit Thompson's success at populist play-acting to his numerous tours in Hollywood. If ever there were a millionaire who could persuade voters of his regular-guy bona fides, it would be the man who, in The Hunt for Red October, lectured Alec Baldwin that "the Russians don't take a dump ... without a plan." But Thompson is hardly the only Republican to have ridden phony populism to elective office. In 2003, Haley Barbour, perhaps the most accomplished Washington lobbyist of his generation, pig-in-a-poked and dog-won't-hunted his way to the Mississippi governor's mansion. [..] And, of course, a certain Yale-educated Northeastern Brahmin reinvented himself as a brush-clearing country boy en route to winning the White House in 2000. These days, phony populists win with such regularity that you've got to look beyond any particular candidate to find an explanation. [..]