Oh, happy days. News analyses of the GOP's roster of presidential candidates just keep getting better ... for the Democrats. It's not that I'm enthralled by the Democratic offerings; it's just that I similarly feel the pain of "Godfather" mobster Pete Clemenza, who, after pondering the family's opposition said with philosophic economy, "I hate those goddamn Barzinis." So happy days indeed, for none but problem-children are swelling the GOP's presidentially hopeful ranks.
The latest in the keeps-getting-better department was yesterday's whacking by the Washington Post of Fred Thompson. The actor and former senator, as we all know, is being coy these days, tantalizing the anxious and emotionally deflated base with all the signals of a campaign but a campaign itself. But Thompson's delay in announcing St. Ronald's Second Coming may involve more than building dramatic suspense. It may, in fact, be dictated by tactical complications, which he and his consultants are stuck with sorting out and determining how best to overcome.
Thompson's principal problem is that he's a neocon doppelganger of John McCain, who isn't exactly lighting any fires under the Republican base. As the WP summarized it, "the man some in the GOP are touting as a dream candidate has often sounded like the presidential hopeful many of them seem ready to dismiss."
Their dismissal of McCain is chiefly a reaction to his stubborn, party-defeating insistence on the propriety of the Iraq war, which the Bush administration manages to mismanage even more than imaginable each time the senator proclaims its course is improving and we should, in effect, stay the course. That insistence is a surefire general-election loser, and even hardcore Republicans, with painful visions of a 1964 redux, are smart enough to figure that much out.
But Thompson remains ideologically arm in arm with McCain on the war, having been an early booster, having said midcourse that "every politician that describes Iraq as another Vietnam gives our enemies hope for success," and having said as late as last Friday that we should stay in Iraq till "there is some semblance of stability," which could of course be decades. That's a helluva self-constructed box to fight one's way out of, and no doubt it's increasingly clear to Thompson just how entrapping it is. If he avails himself of reason, he's a flip-flopper; if he sticks to his guns, he's a goner.
Yet he has another problem. It's true that Thompson as a U.S. senator racked up a reasonably faithful conservative record, trailing hidebound Puritan Sam Brownback by only a few brownie points in the American Conservative Union's ratings. And it's true that Thompson reads from all the approved conservative cue cards about Leviathan government, burying the nation in even deeper debt through even lower taxes and shifting the Social Security system to a faith-based gambling casino. And it's true that he blathers all the tedious platitudes about "reform-minded, change-minded leaders," without getting too frighteningly specific. All true. But still he has a conservative problem, one piled on his neoconservative problem -- in this instance a Giulini/Romney problem: He has violated the sanctity of pro-life absolutism.
"Operatives aligned with some of Thompson's would-be opponents," wrote the WP, "are circulating a clip from a Senate debate in which Thompson said he did not support banning abortions. 'Should the government come in and criminalize, let's say, a young girl and her parents and her doctors as aiders and abettors?... I think not,' Thompson said. And in 1996, he said the GOP should not make limiting abortion a major issue at the party's nominating convention, arguing that Republicans should focus on less divisive issues."
One need not wonder now why he argued that then, just as one can be sure he regrets more than ever his party's failure to heed his admonition. Any GOP candidate's moderation on the issue is as much a self-defeating box in the hazardous course of purist Republican primaries as Iraq will prove to be in the general.
So oh, happy days.