Fred Thompson Withdraws

The news is in, Fred Thompson has left the building. After a disappointing showing well...everwhere...but especially in South Carolina Thompson has decided to withdraw from the race for President. He was such an over-hyped candidate in the lead up to his entrance to the race. A lot will be made about whether he could have done better if he had entered the race earlier (Thompson waited until September to enter the race, about 7 months after the other candidates had entered the race.)

I could sort of see the logic behind that decision - wait until everyone gets bored with the existing candidates and then turn up as a breath of fresh air. One problem though: the voters back in the summer of 2007 didn't know or care who any of the candidates were. Only political junkies knew, and they're the kinds to take sides and stick to those sides. The kind of people who might get bored with a candidate and flip from boring to fresh are exactly the people who aren't paying attention to presidential races in the summer of the year before. Diehards and donors are the important constituency in the year before election - not the voters themselves. And so Thompson played to the wrong audience. By the time he entered many of the donors were sucked dry by the other candidates, and so he couldn't establish himself.

That, of course, is the one story of Fred Thompson. It applies political thinking to his decision to enter the race later on in the campaign. It was a bad strategy...but it was a strategy nonetheless. The other story about the Thompson campaign is that it has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with what would hurt Thompson throughout the campaign - his laziness. He's a lazy candidate. He's too hands-off. Not until the debate in South Carolina did I see the fire in the Thompson belly. It's possible to see fire even in a laid-back candidate. Huckabee is laid back, but I know that he wants it. I could never tell whether Thompson really wanted it or not...and I think that killed him. Who cares who the National Right to Life endorses when you're a lazy candidate who can't get fired up about his own campaign?

And so the Republican field reduces to five....what a crazy thing to say post South Carolina. This is one crazy race.