I spoke to a Thompson Associate last night about the reports that his man had garnered the endorsement of the National Right to Life Committee. The Associate made clear that despite yesterday’s reports, NRLC had not yet confirmed the endorsement, and so his comments were not meant to infer confirmation.

“The NRLC came under huge pressure today as this leaked out, so it will be interesting to see how this plays,” the Associate said. “The Romney and Huckabee people seem very annoyed with this. Romney did everything he could to get this endorsement, and it was a smart move on his part – he clearly made the decision to go for this in a big way…

Thompson did what he needed to do. But there were no last-minute meetings, nothing like that… My understanding is that they made their decision based on the record and the information the candidates submitted to the candidates. Fred confirmed for them he was who he said he was, and he was who they thought he is.”

On bad buzz surrounding the campaign lately: “ABC was hearing rumors that Thompson was getting out of the race next week. Nonsense, of course. We’re just trying to go about our business get some work done, and we’ll see what the impact of any news coming out tomorrow is.”

On the importance of Iowa: People made some assumptions before there was a real campaign, based on things like not participating in the Iowa straw poll. They took that to mean that we weren’t competing in Iowa, when it meant something else altogether – namely, that participating in the straw poll would have taken money and organization we didn’t have at that point. But we’re competing in Iowa. We just did a big ad buy there. It’s been running for just under a week, and we’ll see in a week, when it’s gotten some circulation, if it has any impact on the poll numbers.