The Republican casting call: Who was the actor on that stage?

By Tom Baxter
Editor
Southern Political Report

(10/10/07) A few minutes into the first nine-candidate Republican debate Tuesday, an off-topic question came to mind: If you didn’t know which of them was an actor, who would you have guessed?

Several good possibilities came to mind. Mitt Romney could be a Broadway leading man, showing his years slightly and headed for summer stock. Ron Paul could be the crusty sidekick in a Western. Mike Huckabee could be the affable father in a family comedy. Rudy Giuliani could be a bit player on “The Sopranos” – maybe the shrink’s former love interest.

The very last candidate this critic would have pegged as a thespian was Fred Thompson. He seemed nervous, self-aware, and anything but dramatic in his delivery, which steadied as the forum swung into its second hour but was halting at first.

There’s a reason for this. In an important sense, running for president is a kind of sustained performance. For all his screen experience, the former senator from Tennessee is new to this stage, and as yet incapable of the kind of scene-stealing Romney showed when he appeared slightly confused by some of Thompson’s responses.

“And to think, I thought I was going to be the best actor on this stage,” Thompson quipped toward the end of the debate, after Romney had made a joke about the similarities between this forum and “Law and Order.”

It was a canned line, but it was true.

Thompson’s theatrical shortcomings stood out more sharply than they would have because, as the latecomer to this show, he was in the spotlight. He got the opening question of the debate, the first after the first commercial break, and the last at the end of the two-hour forum. Small wonder that he looked a little nervous.

He also drew the only “gotcha” question of the evening, and in what may have been his finest moment, correctly informed Chris Matthews that the Canadian prime minister’s name was Harper. Of course all of us knew that one... didn’t we?

There’s no way to be completely fair in a debate when there are nine candidates on stage, but the singling out of Thompson for hardball treatment wasn’t the only egregious aspect of this forum. Romney was cut off in the middle of a punch line twice, while Giuliani inexplicably was allowed to ramble on a minute in what was supposed to be a 30-second response. And Paul, the bee in the bonnet of the GOP, continues to get short shrift.

Leaving theatrical questions aside and turning to substance, Thompson made no major gaffes, but he’ll have to sharpen up if he expects this series to be continued.

He’s been bold enough to revisit the subject of Social Security, that notorious third rail of American politics, but his suggestion that payments be indexed to inflation was too embedded in mush to make much impact. He let three other candidates on the stage voice their support for the Fair Tax without finding a way to bring it up himself. For a Republican trying to be the grassroots conservative, that’s dangerous.

And when he said that if Saddam had been left in power, the entire Middle East might have become “nuclearized,” he sounded uncomfortably like that fellow whose name comes up so seldom in Republican debates.

Nothing Thompson said was a thought-provoking as John McCain’s answer when he was asked how he would capture Osama bin Laden: establish a modern-day version of the OSS, the World War II precursor to the CIA, and put the brightest minds in the country on the hunt.

Too bad nobody thought of that six years ago.