Pay To Play Thompson

Fred Thompson went on Jay Leno last night and yukked it up, but in the papers, it's starting to trickle out that he's not a lifelong actor, but a lifelong lobbyist. Apparently, this was also a line of attack in his 1994 Senate campaign against Jim Cooper, but Thompson showed off his red pickup truck and laughed it off, and the Tennessee media enabled him. The fact that these stories are coming out (and 17 months before the fact, no less) suggest that the national media may not give the same free hand:

By all accounts, Fred D. Thompson will soon be running for president, portraying himself as a Washington outsider on the campaign trail. But over the past three years he showed up every two weeks or so at a lobbying and law firm in downtown D.C. to plot how best to persuade Congress to help a British company.

His main assignment: to use his connections to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to extract information about goings-on inside Congress and use it to benefit his multibillion-dollar client.

In exchange for this insider wisdom he was paid a cool $760,000.

The right has been extremely successful in the past couple election cycles making a mockery out of their Presidential opponent. There's a difference between being ANGRY, like the right is with Hillary, for example, and making a mockery. The left has laid the seeds for making a buffoon out of Rudy and McCain and Romney, and I think this is the makings of what to do in the event of Thompson. There's also the fact that he just bagged a Cheney:

FRED THOMPSON IS adding more big-name policy talent as his testing-the-waters committee continues to grow into a real presidential campaign. Among the new additions: Mark Esper, national security adviser to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist; Joel Shin, a top policy staffer on Bush-Cheney 2000; and Elizabeth Cheney, a former top official in the State Department's Near East and South Asia department.

"Change vs. More Of The Same" is a very inviting target in 2008. Thompson is stepping right into that trap with these hirings. By the way, team Thompson now includes Rove oppo research guy and caging expert Tim Griffin, former Nixon spy Kenneth Reitz, a tobacco industry exec from Phillip Morris, and Liz Cheney. Quite a rogue's gallery.