Newsweek, June 11, 2007

Thompson and the 'Laziness' Issue
Holly Bailey
SECTION: PERISCOPE; CAMPAIGN 2008; Pg. 8
472 words

Does Fred Thompson have what it takes to be president? The former senator turned "Law & Order" actor, who launched an exploratory committee last week, has been dogged by rumors that he doesn't have the work ethic for a long campaign. "The book on him is he's lazy," David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union, said last week. The criticism seems fed by Thompson’s time in the Senate, where he maintained a less rigorous schedule than his colleagues and was known to duck out of late-night debates. Of the 90 bills he introduced during his eight years in the Senate, only four became law.

Thompson has never denied being irritated with the pace of Senate life and cited it as one of the reasons he opted out of a 2002 re-election bid. "I don't like spending 14- and 16-hour days voting on 'sense of the Senate' resolutions on irrelevant matters," he said in 1998. "There are some important things we really need to get on with--and on a daily basis, it's very frustrating." His 2008 competitors have privately questioned his endurance, with one rival consultant (anonymous so as not to reflect badly on his own man) telling NEWSWEEK, "I doubt he has the fire in the belly to compete.”

Thompson allies are pushing back. "Anyone who says he's not a hard campaigner doesn't know what they are talking about," Tennessee GOP chair Bob Davis, a former Thompson aide, tells NEWSWEEK. "I was there, they weren't." Still, it's true that Thompson is preparing to mount a somewhat untraditional bid for the GOP nomination. Aides say he will spend less time on the road than his competitors and will instead rely on new forms of communication with voters, including blogs, online videos and other Internet tools. Thompson allies acknowledge that might not always fly in early-primary states where candidates are often judged as much by their ability to flip a pancake as on policy issues. Last week Thompson reached out to GOP officials in several primary states, including South Carolina, where he offered to emcee a fund-raiser for the state party. He is planning visits to Iowa and New Hampshire later this month.

One of Thompson’s key talking points will be that he's a Washington outsider, but he and his advisers are all Beltway vets. He's been consulting with former senators Howard Baker, Bill Frist and incumbent Sen. Lamar Alexander. He's tapped Tom Collamore, a former aide to Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, as his campaign manager and former Federal Election Commission chairman Michael Toner as the campaign's general counsel, with more hires expected in coming weeks. That's high productivity from a guy with a rep for laziness as far back as high school. In his yearbook at Lawrenceburg County High, Thompson put this quote next to his senior portrait: "The lazier a man is, the more he plans to do tomorrow.”

GRAPHIC: Running for president is a hard job: In California last month