Hometown Hero

Reading this op-ed from Liz Garrigan, editor of the Nashville Scene, in the Washington Post you get one solid impression: Fred Thompson would be able to do one thing Al Gore couldn't - carry Tennessee in a presidential election. It is kind of an odd piece, in that it sounds like Garrigan genuinely likes Fred Thompson yet she also presents a bit of mildly negative information about him - which she then promptly dismisses. All in all, I'd say this reads like a piece trying to dispose of any negative information right up front.

Like voters everywhere, we Tennesseans want our politicians to be part professor, part John Wayne. But the top-tier candidates in the GOP field so far — John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney — somehow lack that magic merger of smarts and swagger, which is probably why nearly half of Republican voters say they're still waiting for the right candidate. Well, their John Wayne is standing just outside the corral.

He is Fred Dalton Thompson, and while he's no admiral, he has played one in the movies. The former senator is also the third man from our humble horizontal Southern state to be touted as presidential material in the past year, after former Senate majority leader Bill Frist and former vice president Al Gore. Thompson has yet to raise a nickel — or a presidential posse — but grass-roots Republicans from the East Coast to the West already see the man with the low drawl and the towering stature as their political savior. But is he?

It wouldn't be the first time a B-list actor united the country. In fact, part of what this former ladies' man has going for him is widespread Ronald Reagan nostalgia. That, and he's a refreshing contrast to the calculating likes of Gore and even Frist: He's a guy with a Senate legacy of bipartisanship and even-handedness. (When he led the Senate investigation into 1996 campaign-finance irregularities, he targeted not just the Clinton-Gore White House but Republicans, too.)

And he knows how to play the political game. At the start of his Senate race in 1994, Thompson was a high-dollar Washington lawyer and lobbyist who drove a Lincoln Continental, lived in a condo and wore dark suits and ties to even the most folksy barbecue-and-beans Tennessee campaign appearances. But nobody — nobody with an echo, anyway — accused him of being phony when he eventually decided to prop up his flailing bid with, well, props: a getup of jeans and work shirt and some down-home locomotion in the form of a used cherry-red Chevy pickup truck that he drove across the state and featured in television ads to transform his campaign.

Read the whole thing. Thompson comes across as both extremely likable and as politically agile. The anecdote Garrigan closes with shows Thompson's sense of humor in dealing with the press. That sense of humor and ability to win over critics might be exactly what is needed.