Fred Thompson tied Hillary Clinton head-to-head in a recent poll.

But he trails Obama, 49 percent to 37 percent. Mostly this reflects that 41 percent of voters have no opinion on Thompson, and so they like the guy they don’t know about to Hillary, but not to Obama, since they’ve heard good things about Obama.

By the way – when the Washington Post chooses to do a story on Saul Alinksy, the rabble-rousing social activist whose methods were taught to Obama and also influenced Hillary, about a week or two after the New Republic wrote a massive profile on Alinsky’s influence on Obama… shouldn’t the Post do more than just refer to the New Republic story towards the end? This isn’t plagiarism, but TNR looked at a little-noticed section of Obama’s young adulthood, and several weeks later, the Post covers essentially the same ground in a Sunday front-page feature story.