whiteknight.gifI already covered some of this at my place, but I wanted to make sure the subject got a wider audience.  If David Brooks' latest travesty of a column is any indication, it looks like the Republicans want to set up a McCain-esque Straight-Shooter-Who-Will-Clean-Up-The-Beltway narrative around Fred Thompson:

Thompson’s core theme is that there is a disconnect between the American people and their rulers. He campaigns against concentrated Republican power almost as much as he does against concentrated Democratic power. Though a Republican, he’s able to launch a reasonably nonpartisan attack on the way government has worked over the last 19 years.

This suspicion of concentrated power in general and Washington in particular is not some election-year conversion for Thompson. It stretches back his whole life. He began his career, remember, investigating the Nixon White House. As Stephen Hayes reminded us in The Weekly Standard, as a young staffer on the Senate Watergate committee, Thompson asked the question that revealed the existence of the White House tapes.

He went home to Tennessee and became a protégé of Howard Baker, whose party apparatus has always had a folksy, country vs. capital ethos.

As a senator, Thompson investigated the Clinton campaign finance scandals (poorly), and established a reputation on one issue above all others: federalism….

(…)

He tells party strategists that there is a tide in the country against the way Washington does business, which he is best positioned to ride. He says the 2006 election was not primarily about Iraq, it was about corruption and pork-barrel spending.

(…)

Fred Thompson’s political skills are as good as anybody now running, but his challenge is going to be building a concrete agenda on his anti-Washington message…. For if there is one thing the last 30 years have taught us, it is that campaigns that are strictly anti-Washington do not command 50 percent of the vote because they don’t address the decentralized global challenges that now face us.

Notice anything… missing from that little mini-hagiography of Fred Thompson, Anti-Washington Crusader?  Like the fact that he was a high-powered corporate lobbyist for almost two decades in between "asked the question that revealed the existence of the White House tapes" and "investigated the Clinton campaign finance scandals"?  And not a very scrupulous lobbyist, at that:

Over about two decades of lobbying… Thompson made nearly $1.3 million and represented clients including a British reinsurance company facing billions of dollars in asbestos claims, Canadian-owned cable companies, and deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, according to government documents and media accounts from his first run for the Senate in 1994…'There's nothing wrong with lobbying. It's an honorable profession,' Thompson spokesman Mark Corallo said…A year after stepping down [from the Senate], he registered to lobby for British reinsurance company Equitas Ltd. The company paid him $760,000 to guard its interests against several bills seeking to protect businesses from asbestos lawsuits.

A little more:

[Thompson] spent eighteen years as a registered Washington lobbyist, doing the bidding of such high-powered clients as General Electric and Westinghouse, pushing for the passage of the deregulatory legislation that led to the savings-and-loan crisis of the eighties.

Sounds like just the guy to clean up the way Washington does business, right?  Okay, maybe his extended look at the underbelly of politics changed him.  Maybe he wants to clean up the the amoral swamp that he wallowed in for so long.  Maybe- Wait, I've just been handed this note:

[B]ased on his two-plus years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Thompson informed the audience, "In no other prosecutor's office in the country would a case like this one have been brought." Apparently, other prosecutors tolerate perjury and obstruction of justice. In addition, later in his speech, Thompson explained, "I have called for a pardon for Scooter Libby. When you rectify an injustice using the provisions of the law, just as when you reverse an erroneous court decision, you are not disregarding the rule of law, you are enforcing and protecting it."

Um.  Well.  I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for Thompson defending perjury and obstruction as non-crimes.  I- Oop, I've just been handed another note…

Backers look for Fred Thompson to use a June 2 speech to Virginia Republicans to step closer toward the race. Thompson allies have had discussions with Tim Griffin, the Arkansas U.S. attorney and Rove protégé, about taking a top job with the campaign.

Tim Griffin?  The Ragin' Cager who just resigned?  The US Attorney who may actually be a criminal?  That Tim Griffin?

I don't think Thompson's primary opponents will use any of this against him, as it would require them to admit Republican wrongdoing (heresy!).  But if he does get the nomination, the Democratic nominee should frame him as a pro-corruption Beltway insider.  We will be happy to help, of course.

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