Fred Thompson Wasn’t Exactly the Most Popular Guy on Senate Campus
Posted by Mike Gehrke on July 25, 2007 at 12:07 PM
The evidence keeps piling up to show that Fred Dalton Thompson is not the man conservatives think he is:
Thompson’s hearings grew even more unpopular with his own party when he diverted the proceedings to the subject of campaign-finance reform (Senate Republicans opposed such reform for fear of losing hard-won fund-raising advantages). Lott was furious, and Thompson suspected the majority leader was the anonymous author of quotes criticizing the hearings.The senator further angered conservatives by becoming an early supporter of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform legislation. Although Thompson has recently tried to minimize his enthusiasm for the bill, his Senate papers include a handwritten note from Senator Russell Feingold after the measure passed the Senate in 2001 reading, “You were essential to our success from the outset!”
Thompson’s Senate years also featured a level of sympathy for Bill Clinton that conservatives don’t tend to share. In 1995, Thompson’s archives show, he sent Clinton a note after the State of the Union address that partially read, “The speech probably would not have seemed so long to some of us if you hadn’t been putting the wood to us so effectively.” Thompson’s 1999 split vote on Clinton’s two counts of impeachment squared with one of his off-the-record sessions in 1998, when he told reporters, “I’m prejudiced in his favor, I object to the tactics used against him.” This didn’t stop Thompson from sending Kenneth Starr a congratulations letter at the end of the Clinton saga.
Thompson may blast colleagues for not draining the Washington swamp, but he did his share of feeding the alligators. His papers include ingratiating notes to George Will, Arianna Huffington, and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. There’s a mash note from Bruce Willis (“You were great in Die Hard”) and a letter from Oliver Stone thanking Thompson for brokering an interview with Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray.
Thompson’s off-the-record chats with reporters also suggest that his claim that he hasn’t given much thought to running for president might be somewhat disingenuous (his campaign has attempted to make a virtue of the fact that Thompson, unlike his competitors, isn’t obsessed with power). During one 1998 off-the-record bull session, Thompson boasted to a reporter, “Al Gore goes to bed at night and says, ‘Please don’t let it be Fred Dalton Thompson.’”
