Well, you know what we needed. Another Republican entering the race for President. I’m not really sure what it is that Gov. Thompson brings that is new.
Plusses: He did some pretty interesting things as governor of Wisconsin, mainly with welfare, but also to some extent with school vouchers (although that was, as I recall, an experiment confined to Milwaukee rather than statewide).
Minuses: Thompson is not very photogenic and very, very vulnerable to criticism from the Democrats on healthcare after having taken credit for reforming the system — about the worst scenario I can think of is having to have an election against Senator Clinton and having the election turn into a referendum of whether the country’s health care system is working well. Very few people are going to remember when things worked well, too many people will remember when things frustrated them or didn’t work out quite right, and it’s too easy for the Democrats to trot out horror stories of bureaucracy run amok.
(Since when was bureaucracy run amok an issue that worked for Democrats? Things have changed since I was in college.)
A friend offers some wisdom. “Pretty much everyone who gets elected to anything wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and thinks about the Oval Office. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Senator, a city councilman, or a water commissioner.” Certainly if you’re getting re-elected so often that people think “Governor” is your first name, you probably have a pretty strong sense that people like you. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, with a wide-open field, that there are so many entrants.
But there’s a reason that there are only a few “big” candidates at this stage of the game. While the field of available candidates is expanding (so far only one candidate has dropped out) the process is one of winnowing out, and the extraordinary thing this cycle is how early the process has gotten started. But the process has its own dynamic, and one of those dynamics is that if you get into the game too late, there isn’t enough money and there aren’t enough people to go around. I have a hard time seeing Thompson attracting the talent and the dollars. Sorry, Tommy.
