President Fred?

While we’re contemplating possible Presidential firsts (first woman, first African-American, first Italian-American, first Mormon, first Vietnam vet) I don’t think we’ve ever had a President named Fred before, either.

Fred Dalton Thompson is best known to Americans as Arthur Branch, the District Attorney on TV’s Law & Order. He does a very convincing job in that role. Earlier in his acting career, he played a racist bad guy once, but most Americans won’t confuse a role with an actor. We’re willing to accept Anthony Hopkins as someone other than Hannibal Lecter, for instance. And he certainly looks the part of a conservative President from the South.

More important, he’s not an intellectual or political lightweight. He was also an accomplished prosecutor (on the Watergate team) who took down Tennessee Governor Ray Blanton for selling pardons, but whose legal career will forever be defined by being the man who formulated the question that, more than any other, resulted in Richard Nixon’s fall from power: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Thompson is solidly conservative on social issues and has been beefing up his foreign policy credentials at the American Enterprise Institute.

On the other hand, he is closely associated with recently-convicted felon Scooter Libby, having raised over three and a half million dollars for Scooter’s defense fund. While there may be some sympathy for Scooter as being the “fall guy” for Vice-President Cheney in the Valerie Plame affair, that is a simplistic and probably erroneous characterization of what happened – and Scooter did lie to investigators. Even if he was told to, that was still a wrong thing to do. No candidate is perfect, and this is one of several downsides Thompson might bring to the table. But on the other hand, I think he’d be able to make a credible play for the right flank of the GOP.

The biggest problem for Thompson – as it is for Newt Gingrich, another potential right-wing star – is that surprisingly, it’s getting to be reasonably late in the game already. It’s eleven months until the effective end of the primary season. So if these guys are going to go for it, they need to decide to do so very soon before all the money and organization gets snapped up by the other candidates.