Yes, I do and have said so. And I see Thompson as the Republican Obama - a person with a minor political record who’s trying to ride personal charisma to the White House.
According to what I’ve heard from reliable conservative sources, she ran the country for eight years already - so she must be experienced.
Whooshed much?
GOTCHYA!
So? Does that make him better or worse, IYO, than the other Pub candidates in the field?
Dunno how it is in Canada, but in the U.S., the best way to get yourself taken seriously as a candidate for the presidency is to first be governor of a state. Even if it’s just a piddly little state like Vermont or a constitutionally negligible, near-powerless governorship like Texas’. That’s executive experience, considered much better, much more weighty, than service in Congress. This election is highly unusual in that there are few governors or former governors in either party’s field and they are not the front-runners. (Unless you count Giuliani, who has been chief executive of a political entity more populous than many states.)
It also helps to have been a vice-president. But having served in a president’s cabinet, getting massive executive experience as head of a government agency, doesn’t seem to count for much, I don’t know why.
I think that’s the point. Same old turd in a brand new wrapper. Maybe he’d appeal to more Republicans but I see zero crossover appeal. Reagan II he ain’t.
Anyone in the Pub field who does have crossover appeal?
I think Giuliani has some. A lot of people admire him for the decrease in crime in NYC and for staying in the war zone on 9/11. McCain used to have it, but he forfeited his maverick reputation by supergluing his lips to Bush’s posterior. To me, Huckabee sounds like the nicest fellow but I don’t have a lot to agree with him about. Other than that, I don’t see a lot of Dems switching sides this time around.
Weighted how? Wasn’t he simply 1/535th of the legislative branch (100 in the Senate and 435 in the House)?
Reagan was governor of Alaska? When?
And if you mean California (which he was governor of)…California is the largest state in the country? Since when?
Well, let’s be honest; your data sample is not that great, and it’s simply the case that almost all Presidents are eithyer former governors or VPs:
George W. Bush 2001-2009: Governor of Texas
William J. Clinton 1993-2001: Governor of Arkansas
George H. Bush 1989-1993: Vice president under Reagan
Ronald Reagan 1981-1989: Governor of California
Jimmy Carter 1977-1981: Governor of Georgia
Gerald Ford 1974-1977: Not elected to the office
Richard M. Nixon 1969-1974: Vice president under Eisenhower
Lyndon B. Johnson 1963-1969: Vice president under Kennedy
You have to go all the way back to Kennedy to find a PResident who wasn’t a VP or a governor. But that’s just 8 men; it’s not necessarily a meaningful data set.
It’s interesting that you asked how it is in Canada, because here it’s sort of the opposite with regards to the governors, or as we have, premiers. It’s been like a hundred years since anyone who served as Premier because Prime Minister. Does that indicate a curse or a trend? Meh, probably not; it’s probably just happenstance. William Davis, might have become Prime Minister if he’d wanted to - it would have taken some hard work to win over the West, but could have been done - but he didn’t really seem to want to; he was happy being Premier of Ontario, and retired from politics at a relatively young age. It may well be that in ten years we’ll start electing premiers as Prime Ministers.
The data samples involved here just are not that great. I mean, you can say Bill Clinton become President by virtue of being a governor but he started his run as a huge long shot and his record as governor of Arkansas was mediocre, and he beat a guy who actually WAS the President. I really don’t think anyone was thinking in the voting booth “what this country really needs is the guy who took Arkansas from being a poor, backwards state and brought it to being a poor, backwards state.”
In terms of population, I believe it was 1962.
Largest in the sense of most populous, which matters a lot more than land area.
To my mind, “most populous” is not synonomous with “largest”. If that’s what he meant, then fine, but that’s not the way I would have phrased it, and thus not how I parsed it.
It’s not that being a governor helps you win the election, or even the primaries, but that it helps you get taken seriously (by the media, punditocracy, party leaders, etc.) as a candidate in the first place and do all that essential pre-primaries organizing and fundraising. It doesn’t make much sense, IMO, but that’s how it seems to work.
Now Alan Keyes is thinking of getting into the race! 
Remember what happened last time you went up against Obama, Alan?
Land area is of little interest when talking about the dificulty or complexity of running a state. Rather, the size of the population (and more importantly) the size of the economy are the metrics that are generally considered when talking about the size of states in terms of politics and governorship. That’s what I meant, but I understand that I wasn’t very precise, so my apologies.
Back to Thompson: My point is simply that is seems bizarre to tag him as a ‘lightweight’ or an ‘empty vessel’ when he seems to have at least the kind of qualifications of many people who run for president. I happen to think he’s far more qualified on paper than is John Edwards, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, and yet I don’t hear any of you calling any of them ‘lightweights’.
I understand that executive experience is valuable, and that coming from the Senate has not been a traditional road to the White House. But then, I don’t recall John Kerry being called a “lightweight” because he doesn’t have executive experience. John McCain doesn’t either.
So maybe someone could explain the definition of ‘lightweight’ in such a way that it would include Fred Thompson but exclude Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards? Other than that the latter three are Democrats, of course.
Another argument, shot to hell.
Well, we’re talking about politics. People vote, not land.
It’s not like people just invented Thompson’s reputation for laziness this week in order to attack his Presidential campaign. He had the reputation back when he was a Senator. Before that Thompson himself used to say he liked acting because it was an easy way to make money. Even his yearbook motto made fun of him because of his reputation for being lazy in high school.
That would be material, IMHO, if the Senate and the House were a single body. But they’re two separate and more or less co-equal bodies, each comprising half of the legislative branch. So Thompson’s nominal importance in that branch, as one of 100 Senate members, should be 1/2 x 1/100 = 1/200.