Regarding the Thompson '08 campaign (sic transit gloria mundi)

I've been pondering what I ought to write about Fred Thompson's withdrawl from the 2008 presidential race  after the South Carolina GOP primary.

Usually I'm not much of a pure "linker" as a blogger, because I figure most of you who find your way here already have your own regular reads, and you really don't look to me for recommendations so much as for something original or unique. (Or so I flatter myself.) But of all the postmortems I've read about the Thompson '08 campaign so far, this one, by Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard, is probably the closest to what I would have liked to have written myself. I commend it to your reading, and commend him for writing it, and I associate myself with his remarks (as they still sometimes say on the floor of the U.S. Senate). But reading it has helped finally crystallize my own post-postmortem for the campaign, which I spew here in what feels like the lancing of a moderately nasty boil.

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Among Mr. Ferguson's observations is that Fred's reticence to engage in retail campaigning (a dispiriting picture of which Ferguson paints very skillfully) marks him as a man out of sync with his own time. Mr. Ferguson points out, accurately, that the amount of hustling and bustling now considered mandatory for presidential candidates would have been considered very unseemly in past eras. But my own contemporaneous feelings, though, as the Thompson '08 campaign floundered and failed — although not necessarily inconsistent with Mr. Ferguson's — were that Fred's campaign was in fact ahead of its time, not behind the times. What was old, shall soon be new again (just ... digital).

Presidential primaries are anachronisms, designed to dilute some power from, and otherwise to organize on a pre-convention basis, local and regional king-makers left over from the era of unabashed party-machine politics. Entire states now have vested, obvious interests in the nomination process that conflict with the modern parties' interests, but more importantly, with the interests of the American nation as a whole. I mean no offense to the people of Iowa or New Hampshire, nor those of Michigan or South Carolina or Florida or Nevada, who've been behaving like squabbling kindergartners fighting for their respective places in line. But as a nation, we can't afford the luxury of indulging your regional pride/selfishness any longer.

The current primary system has never been so obviously ridiculous, so obviously antiquated, as it has been this year. And its demands were, in my view, terminally incompatible with the candidacy of the best potential American president to declare this year. More specifically, his personally and the requirements of that system could not be made to mesh because the current primary system is still fundamentally geared to require state-by-state retail politicking. Huckabee has a natural talent and thirst for it, which is why he was still on the GOP debate stage last night. Romney has the discipline and energy and money for it, if not the same natural retail skills, so he was still on-stage too. McCain has coasted in based on name recognition from 2000, adoration from the mainstream media, and a reasonable amount of retail campaign hustle too. And the nation is left looking at these three guys (plus a clown), and we're asking ourselves, with a fair measure of disbelief: "How come are they the last three candidates up there?"

I presume that Fred and Jeri watched the debate, like I did, from home, with more than a little melancholy for what might and ought to have been. He probably also feels some measure of relief, which I can't begrudge him. And he probably had a good cigar, over which he felt no guilt, and of which I'm moderately jealous. 

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I don't know if the system can be changed by 2012 or not. My current hope is that the fallout from the Democratic Party's stated intent to disregard the results from the Michigan and Florida primaries in their entirety may become the seed from which comprehensive, bipartisan primary reform grows. Someone other than the candidates themselves will have to become its champion, even if a partisan fight (here, between Hillary and Obama) starts the ball rolling.

But eventually the system will change. Television, even as augmented by cable news channels, wasn't sufficient alone to wrench the remaining power from the hands of the local and regional would-be king-makers, nor to impose rationality upon a system that developed for an age whose respective natural boundaries ought to have been marked by the advent of telegraphs and the demise of rotary telephone dials. But television plus the internet eventually will do the trick, because together they demonstrate just how great the gap is between what we need as a nation and what the current system is selecting for.

When it does, we'll have a better chance of getting candidates who would make the best presidents — not the best campaigners. The time for a thoughtful campaign like the Thompson '08 campaign will finally (once again) have come.

But this wasn't that year, and barring a GOP convention deadlock (which is still the longest of longshots), Fred Thompson won't be the first successful pioneer of a true 21st Century information-age candidacy. Alas and alack for that. But now, as I allow my digital video recorder to begin unspooling the first of the Democratic primary debates limited to two candidates, I'll raise a fond toast to the tall Tennessean, his bride, and their young family. I thank you for trying, and I don't fault you for failing to transform yourself into something you could not bear to be.