Some Old Fashion Law and Order

Fred Thompson edged out Rudy in today's Rasmussen poll, 28%-27%, with McCain and Romney each garnering 10% in a national poll of likely Republican primary voters. There is a lot of speculation about why Thompson has risen so quickly in the polls with relatively little name recognition going into this race. Many people say he is garnering the support of conservatives disaffected with the perceived "moderate" candidates at the front of the GOP pack, Giuliani, McCain, and Romney. That might account for part of it, if Thompson were even that conservative; but he isn't. If being a hardcore conservative were the primary motivating factor, then Newt Gingrich's 9 months of trial ballooning would have landed him at the top of the polls in spite of not having announced his candidacy.

Clearly it is something else. My thinking, and I tend to like Fred Thompson actually, is that Thompson is just a sigh of relief from the last four years. Even though he is a former Senator and has been in politics, we just aren't tired of him (yet). That is why Barrack Obama is doing as well as he is, too. John McCain has been running for President since 1999. Giuliani has been in the public spotlight, for better and for worse since 1993 when he first ran for Mayor of New York. He is now on his third marriage, after a rather public divorce this last time around, and unfortunately for him, the magic that surrounded him in the aftermath of September 11th has faded into a distant memory. Mitt Romney, a fresh face on the national scene, has other baggage, namely his Mormonism and his classic John Kerry-esque ability to flip flop on an almost hourly basis depending on the direction of the political winds. The other "outsider" candidates in the race are plagued by having been in it so long already that they have been confined to the single digits, which is a death knell for fundraising.

Thompson, on the other hand, has a bit of star power, some mildly accurate comparisons to the Gipper, and was out of the spotlight enough not to already be a tired figure on the national scene. The trick for Thompson will be to prevent the voters of fatiguing of him too. If he can manage to do that over the next 7 months, then he has a fighting chance of grabbing the nomination. If he can manage to accomplish the feat of remaining a fresh face through November of 2008, he could defeat Hillary's bid to recapture the White House for the Clinton Clan. Absent a Bloomberg candidacy materializing at some point (and he vowed in a speech yesterday at Google that he had "done the government thing" and would be going back to philanthropy, intimating that he would not in fact be a candidate for the White House), then my bets are on Thompson, at least for the time being.

[As an aside...rumor has it in Republican circles that Thompson's campaign staff is a predominantly outside of the beltway crowd of young technorati who understand the Web and its importance to the future of campaigns and politics.]