By Marc Ambinder, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Last Friday, Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., finally got the wink and the nod signaling former Sen. Fred Thompson's possible interest in running for president. So Wamp began to chat up his colleagues on the House floor. "I started taking names," he says. "And within literally an hour, I got the names of 40 people who either wanted to meet him or support him." Members of Congress from Georgia, Kansas, and South Carolina, Wamp said, volunteered to chair statewide campaigns for Thompson. "It was like I lit a fire."

	Some Republicans suspect that Thompson is an angler -- that his presidential flirtations will help him serve as a fishnet to scoop up conservatives and then dump them into McCain's basket.

But is Thompson's potential candidacy worth the fuel costs? Thompson's ABC Radio contract -- he's filling in for Paul Harvey -- prohibits him from endorsing any political candidates. Until the middle of last month, however, he was a very informal adviser to close friend John McCain, and he would occasionally telephone donors and potential supporters on the senator's behalf.

Some Republicans suspect that Thompson is an angler -- that his presidential flirtations will help him serve as a fishnet to scoop up conservatives and then dump them into McCain's basket. They think he'll raise his stature, muse publicly about the presidential race, build up anticipation, and then, presto change-o, announce that he thinks McCain would make the best president. A good many solid conservatives -- House members, donors, activists, and state party elites -- in the Thompson net would follow him to McCain. Or so the thinking goes.

On Friday, Thompson called McCain in South Carolina. What the two discussed remains private. An adviser to Thompson confirmed the call. Thompson, appearing on Fox News Sunday, made sure to say that his musings are "not really a reflection on the current field at all." Said Thompson: "I'm going to wait and see how it pans out, see how they do, how it develops."

In just seven days, a Draft Fred Thompson Web site run by a 27-year-old salesman from Memphis received more than 22,000 visitors. By Tuesday, hundreds of pro-Thompson e-mails cluttered the Tennessee Republican Party's main inbox, according to Bob Davis, its chairman. "The floodgates busted wide open, not only in Tennessee but across the country," he said.

Thompson's appeal is also regional. "I think he'd help where the Republican Party is growing," Wamp says. "He transcends the South, because he's on wide-screens and because he's kind of a global senator. But, yes, he has Southern charm."

Davis is close to Thompson. However, aside from a few friends -- McCain is among them -- Thompson has no real inner circle. He keeps a Tennessee office with a single assistant and commutes between New York, where Law and Order is filmed, and his home in McLean, Va. (His son told a newspaper that his father is looking for a house in Tennessee.)

When the cheers for a potential candidacy die down, scrutiny will inevitably follow. Thompson does not hail from the party's conservative wing. He is a disciple of a famous Southern moderate, Howard Baker, who battled conservatives over President Reagan's domestic spending cuts in the early 1980s.

In Tennessee, a useful way to distinguish between moderate and conservative Republicans has been to ask them whether they considered themselves Frist -- as in Bill, the former Senate majority leader -- or Thompson folks. "Frist" means the person is conservative, "Thompson" shows people are moderate. So it is to Thompson's credit that Frist openly backs his nomination.

But in 1994, the National Review described Thompson as "pro-choice," although he didn't vote that way in the Senate. As a former prosecutor, Watergate counsel, and trial lawyer, he opposed tort reform legislation in the 1990s. Thompson is a staunch supporter of McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation to curtail soft money. He does not oppose a guest-worker program for certain immigrants. He opposes gay marriage but, like McCain, would leave the issue up to individual states.

In Davis's view, Thompson "is the only conservative who can bring folks together from both sides of the aisle." Davis also notes that when Thompson ran for re-election in 1996, he received about 20 percent of the black vote.

An adviser to Thompson expects him to announce a final decision before the end of June. Ted Welch, one of the nation's most generous Republican fundraisers, would ally with Thompson in a heartbeat, except that he's already allied with Mitt Romney. In the wake of Thompson's Fox News appearance, Romney's finance team did some checking. "Yes, Ted is still with us," a Romney aide said.