George Will on Fred Thompson:
Some say he is the Republicans’ Rorschach test: They all see in him what they crave. Or he might be the Republicans’ dot-com bubble, the result of restless political investors seeking value that the untutored eye might not discern and that might be difficult to quantify but which the investors are sure must be there, somewhere, somehow.
Ouch. On the one hand, Thompson has been leading a one-man crusade to return something resembling sanity to the presidential selection process. He is waiting to announce his interest at a time (summer the preceding year) that would have been only mildly early in cycles before, say, 2000; most others treated December 2006/January 2007 as the starting gun.. And yet, one of the results of this slow, gradual opening is that expectations for Thompson are through the roof. Will he have to blow the doors out the back of the auditorium in his announcement speech in order to meet expectations?