Jill Lawrence, a "reporterette" for USA Today tells us that Fred Thompson:
... doesn't like modern campaigning, isn't that interested in running for president and "will not be devastated" if he doesn't win.
Well, then what is he doing on the campaign trail? Perhaps the answer can be found in what Fred actually said:
Question: (Courtesy ABC News) My only problem with you and why I haven’t thrown all my support behind you is that I don’t know if you have the desire to be President. If I caucus for you next week, are you still going to be there two months from now?
Fred Thompson answer: That is a very good question, not because it’s difficult to answer, but I’m gonna answer it in a little different way than what you might expect.
In the first place, I got into the race about the time people normally get into get into it. The fact of the matter is people get into it a lot earlier than they used to. For some of them, they were juniors in high school.
The first place, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. I wouldn’t be doing this. I grew up in very modest circumstances. I left government and I and my family have made sacrifices to be sitting here today. I haven’t had any income for a long time because I figured to be clean, you’ve got to cut everything off. I was doing speaking engagements and I had a contract to do a tv show. I had a contract with abc radio…and so forth. A man would have to be a total fool to do all those things and to be leaving his family which is not a joyful thing if he didn’’t want to do it.
I am not consumed by personal ambition. I will not be devastated if I don’t do it. I want the people to have the best president they can have.
When this talk first originated from people around the country both directly and through polls, liked the idea of me stepping up and of course, you always look better form a distance.
But most of those people are still there. I approached it from the standpoint of a deal. A kind of a marriage. If one side of a marriage really has to be talked into the marriage, it probably ain’t going to be a good deal. But if you mutually decide it’s going to be a good thing. In this case, if you think this is a good thing for the country, then we have an opportunity to do some wonderful things together.
I’m offering myself up. I’m saying that I have the background, the capability and concern to do this and do it for the right reasons. I’m not particularly interested in running for president, but I think I’d make a good president.
Nowadays, the process has become much more important than it used to be.
I don’t know that they ever asked George Washington a question like this. I don’t know that they ever asked Dwight D. Eisenhower a question like this. But nowadays, it’s all about fire in the belly. I’m not sure in the world we live in today it’s a good thing if a president has too much fire in the belly. I approach life differently than a lot of people. People, I guess, wonder how I’ve been as successful as I’ve been in everything that I’ve done. I won two races in TN by 20 point margins in a state that bill Clinton carried twice. I’ve never had an acting lesson. I guess that’s obvious by people who’ve watched me…
When I did it, I did it. Wasn’t just a lark. Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing well. But I’ve always been a little more laid back than most. I’m only consumed by very, very few things. Politics is not one of them. The welfare of our country and our kids and grandkids is one of them.
If people really want in their president super type-a personality, someone who has gotten up every morning and gone to bed every night and been thinking about for years how they win the presidency of the united states, someone who can look you straight in the eye and say they enjoy every minute of campaigning, I ain’t that guy. So I hope I’ve discussed that and didn’t talk you out of anything. I honestly want – I can’t imagine a worse set of circumstances [than] achieving the Presidency of the United States under false pretenses. I go out of my way to be myself.
So,, Jill, does a man who does not want to be president give up a good job and subject himself to the anal exams that cretins like you perform ... why?
Follow up question: do you always write a story after you decide what the spin is going to be and without doing some fact checking?
More commentary from Railtank, Flopping Aces, Bob Krumm, and Red State.
See, this is what I don't understand. The flow of information is no longer uni-directional. There are more fact checkers out there than ever before. The quality control of the drive-by-media practitioners has never been high. Now the quality checkers are swarming around the Jills of this world, and the putrid product they produce looks less and less appetizing the longer it's examined. They claim to have "fact checkers" and, in fact, disdain the blogosphere for not having them. So why do the "fact checkers" (the MSM QC people) let this sort of junk get published? The answer is simple, really, the fact checkers are as clueless as the Jills of the world. The sort of idiocy that Jill wrote would strike a reasonable person as highly suspect and worth checking out. But to the sort of people who "fact check" this trash, given their ideological homogeneity, this sort of thing is, to their mind, "natural," coming from a Conservative. To them, conservatism is uncharted territory and they have no feel for what real conservatives say or do.
It does not have to be this way. But like the US auto industry, it's going to take the bankruptcy of some of the news "manufacturers" before the rest of them understand, really understand, that the old business model no longer works. Fox has found a niche and is willing to try a newer model. Rush Limbaugh has created a who new genre of broadcasting filling this untapped market. But the old MSM is convinced that its customers have no where else to go. They could not be more wrong. Detroit auto makers found the Japanese eating their lunch, but they were a long time adapting. Same for the MSM.
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