Greenville, South Carolina — At various times during Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign, there have been moments in which Republicans who admire Thompson and want him to succeed have said, “Yessssss! Yessssss! Why haven’t we seen more of that?” One such moment happened in December, after Thompson’s “no hand shows” performance at the Des Moines Register debate in Iowa. Another came nine days ago after Thompson’s forceful performance at the Fox News debate in Myrtle Beach. And there was another last night, in the final appearance of Thompson’s South Carolina primary campaign, in a packed room at Greenville’s Embassy Suites hotel. At that appearance, Thompson was so good, so energized, so non-laid-back-Fred, that many of his supporters wondered where the man had been during the campaign.
If anyone came to the speech to hear specific proposals for any specific problem, they were bound to be disappointed. The right kind of speech for election eve is almost always a broad declaration of principles, mixed with get-out-the-vote exhortations, and that’s what Thompson did Friday night. But he had a more specific message, too, directed to the debate going on inside the Republican party these days. And the message was: Don’t listen to those people who say the party has to change. Stick to the conservative principles that got us here.
“The Founding Fathers had it right from the very beginning,” Thompson said. “The wisdom of the ages, the fact that our basic rights come from God and not from government, the notion that a government big enough and powerful enough to give you anything is big enough and powerful enough to take anything away from you…respect for the rule of law…the institution of the market economy…[the belief] that if a person earned a dollar, that dollar belonged in the person’s pocket…” Those should be our guiding principles, he said.
“We’re having a little discussion in the party nowadays about what that means for the future,” Thompson told the crowd. “Some people think we need to get away from the Reagan coalition, because it doesn’t exist any more.” The audience erupted into boos. “Some people seem to think that we need to be a little bit more what they called progressive…Well, I reject that concept with every fiber of my being.”
After walking through a few issues — “a nation that cannot secure its own borders will not remain a sovereign nation”; “our principles mean that we don’t let a federal government that can’t even chew gum and tie its own shoelaces half the time take over our health-care system”; “the security of our people underlies everything else” — Thompson hit again on the main argument for his candidacy: Unlike some other candidates, he’s always been a conservative, and he always will be. “I’ve always been there,” he said, “I’m proud of my record, what you see is what you get, where I was yesterday, I am today, is where I’ll be tomorrow. I wear no man’s collar, and I’ve never been accused of changing my political opinion about something because of a political consideration.”
On a number of occasions, the crowd — somewhere between 300 and 400 people jammed into the ballroom — interrupted with chants of FRED! FRED! FRED! And at one point, I heard the woman standing next to me — we had talked earlier, and she was a Thompson fan from the very beginning — say, to no one in particular, “Where was this six months ago?” A few minutes later, when Thompson made an especially powerful point, she said it again.
Thompson spoke without notes, and with obvious feeling. He so clearly believed what he was saying that he made an emotional connection with the crowd, and they responded with enormous enthusiasm. To everyone in the audience, Friday night in Greenville was what the Thompson campaign was supposed to be about. What made it particularly compelling was that it followed one of those quirky appearances that have come to represent what the Thompson campaign became. Three hours before the Embassy Suites speech, Thompson’s bus pulled up in front of the Westin Poinsett hotel on Main Street in Greenville, where Thompson emerged to…wander around.
First Thompson walked into Joel’s Java, where a manager told me he had no idea Thompson would visit until a few minutes beforehand, when a couple of campaign aides popped in to say the senator would come in. In the coffeeshop, Thompson did a brief interview with a local TV reporter who asked him the inevitable are-you-out-of-the-race-if-you-don’t-win question. “I’m not going to talk about any unsuccessful scenarios,” Thompson answered. After that, he ambled around a bit, saying hello and posing for pictures, and was out the door in a few minutes.
Back on the sidewalk, Thompson headed north, with several photographers ahead of him, walking backward to get photos of Thompson walking forward. A short block later, Thompson stepped into Halfway to Habana, a cigar store. Not that many candidates would associate themselves with smoking these days, but Thompson headed straight for the walk-in humidor. He checked out a few brands and picked up a single La Gloria Cubana, a cigar made in the Dominican Republic. “I’m going to save this for later,” he told owner Paolo Varvaro as he paid at the counter. “I like to chew on them more than I do smoke them. They taste pretty good.” And then, after a few more hellos, Thompson was out the door.
At that, Thompson headed back toward the bus. Before he got there, a young man named Jason Beard approached him. Beard, who later told me he drove nine hours from Memphis to see Thompson, had brought a paperback copy of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. He asked Thompson to sign it, and Thompson was happy to oblige. “I hope it inspires you as much as it inspired me in college,” Thompson told Beard. Later that night, at the Embassy Suites, Thompson would credit the book with inspiring him to be a conservative. I saw Beard there, still carrying around his signed copy.
The RealClearPolitics average of polls in South Carolina has Thompson virtually tied with Mitt Romney for third place, well behind John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Most observers view this state as Thompson’s last stand, although his aides say simply that they don’t know what’s coming next. If he does leave the race, there will be lots of suggestions that he didn’t really want to run, that he didn’t have the taste for the frenetic campaigning that wins presidential primaries. No one beyond Thompson himself knows the answer to the first question, but there’s no doubt the latter is true; throughout the campaign, Thompson showed great impatience with some of the ridiculous demands presidential campaigns place on candidates. But on those occasions when he put himself into it fully, as he did at the Embassy Suites on Friday, Thompson left supporters wanting more — and wishing they had seen this months ago.
