Especially in this election-cycle-with-no end, the U.S. media should be faulted (and severely beaten) for failing in almost every circumstance to provide the general public with any historical context, any candidate accountability, any meaningful analysis, or coverage of any policy substance. It is truly shameful.One article excepted from my Brutal Beatings List is a piece called, "The Failure of Normality: The unhappy lessons of the Thompson campaign", written by Andrew Ferguson and printed in the February 4, 2008 issue of The Weekly Standard.
Ferguson provides a very interesting overview of how and why Fred Thompson's campaign collapsed after starting off with such high expectations. The article does this by describing how candidates used to campaign for the presidency in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and argues that Thompson was a man out of time (and thus was doomed to fail). Thompson is here portrayed as unwilling to swap out his personal sensibilities and more traditional view of democracy for the modern (apparent) requirements of sound bites and non-stop campaigning.
He was a different kind of candidate but not an incompetent one. Indeed, his finest moment came in a debate before the Iowa caucuses, when the moderator asked the assembled candidates for a show of hands if they believed human activity caused climate change.
"Well, do you want to give me a minute to answer that?" Thompson said. When the moderator said she didn't, he said: "Well, then I'm not going to answer it. You want a show of hands, and I'm not going to give it to you."
The moderator looked as though Thompson had suddenly sprouted daffodils from his ears. So did his fellow candidates. After a stunned silence, they all courageously announced their refusal to show hands, too. They looked like the Little Rascals, hitching up their britches and flexing their biceps after Alfalfa clocked the neighborhood bully.
Ferguson also addresses the most oft heard criticism of Thompson, that he lacked "fire in the belly" - whatever that means. The article accepts this criticism as being accurate AND historically appropriate (if Thompson had been campaigning in the 1890s). Ferguson does a thorough job of describing the core democratic belief in the unseemliness of seeking power over other men, but if you've read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, then you got the basic thrust of the argument mirrored there:
"The major problem - ONE of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
Well, yes. Yes, they are. I think I'm done with politics for the year.
** Photo above is the film representation of Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox (a character from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the point of the quote above). **
