Run By An Idiot, For An Idiot

I want to laugh at the Fred Thompson campaign. I really should be able to. Thompson is, by all accounts, lazy and an intellectual light-weight. And his supporters, more often than not, also seem to be lazy and intellectual light-weights. It's would be a funny combination. But I can't laugh, because eight years ago that very combination drove a candidate to victory. Hubris and all that.

But even still, sometimes I can't contain myself. Let's take this "critique" of Barack Obama's candidacy by Black Five. In between a lot (no, I mean a lot) of senseless babbling, he gives three main reasons for why Obama is teh suck. The first is that he's inexperienced. Now, this is a spectacularly dumb claim, as Obama has more electoral office experience than Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, Edwards, and Clinton, but it's a common mistake, so we'll let it slide. The second and third are the ones that truly blow my mind. They are that the Columbia/Harvard educated, first Black President of the Harvard law Review, described by Lawrence Tribe as one of the two brightest students he's every taught, is not intelligent, and that the bring-down-the-house "Audacity of Hope" orator is not a good public speaker. Now, I'm as much a fan as anybody of the "slam one's opponents where they're strongest" line of political strategy, to prevent them from building a narrative, but seriously, this is what you've got? Obama is a babbling moron? I guess the problem is credibility. I'm listening to a blogger complain about Obama's lack of intelligence while saying he'll "probably support Fred Thompson just because he sounds like a President should sound...." (and, as an added bonus, he does "actually like the policies he has been talking up"!), which is the mark of someone who really is putting intelligence in the "one" priority spot, and claim that Obama isn't sufficiently eloquent while being a White guy writing phrases like "before you accuse me of hating on light-skinned brothers...."

Meanwhile, Garance Franke-Ruta talked with a prominent Iowa Republican on why he was supporting Thompson. He offered up a comparison to Clinton:

"Can you imagine what debates are going to be like with great big Andrew Jackson-looking Fred and Hillary on her stubby little legs, stamping her feet?" Thompson, if elected, would be the tallest president ever. Republicans are not just looking for the usual John Wayne-type signifiers as they go about selecting a candidate, but thinking about who can best loom over Hillary Clinton and make her look like a shrill, small, silly little woman. Thompson's booming voice will make her "sound like Madame Defarge."

As Kevin Drum notes, Clinton would likely "eviscerate" Thompson in a debate, and watching that happen is the best reason he can think of for supporting Clinton as the nominee. But it amazes me just how much Thompson's support is based on him being tall and strong-looking. Speaking of which, Black Five also trots out the old "nobody would be talking about Obama if he wasn't Black" argument. In addition to referring back to Cass Sunstein's takedown of that point (would anybody have talked about Bush if his last name wasn't Bush?), Thompson is a particularly bad foil for this point, because nobody would be talking about him at all if he wasn't on the cast of Law & Order.

Thompson is the ultimate Potemkin candidate, and the way his supporters embarrass themselves while talking about him just makes his candidacy that much more ridiculous. Voters are not going to make the same mistake three Presidential elections in a row.