The Type-A President

Fred Thompson summarized why I prefer his campaign style in response to a question in Iowa. One of the questioners said “My only problem with you and why I haven’t thrown all my support behind you is that I don’t know if you have the desire to be President. If I caucus for you next week, are you still going to be there two months from now?”

Thompson responded that “I want the people to have the best president that they can have.”

If people really want in their president a super type-a personality, someone who has gotten up every morning and gone to bed every night and been thinking about for years how they could achieve the Presidency of the United States, someone who can look you straight in the eye and say they enjoy every minute of campaigning, I ain’t that guy. So I hope I’ve discussed that and hope I haven’t talked you out of anything. I honestly want—I can’t imagine a worse set of circumstances than achieving the presidency under false pretenses.

I go out of my way to be myself because I don’t want anybody to think they are getting something they are not getting. I’m not consumed by this process. I’m not consumed with the notion of being President. I’m simply saying I’m willing to do what’s necessary to achieve it if I’m in sync with the people and if the people want me or somebody like me. I’ll do what I’ve always done in the rest of my life and I will take it on and do a good job and you’ll have the disadvantage of having someone who probably can’t jump up and click their heels three times but will tell you the truth and you’ll know where the President stands at all times.

In a posting on Red State, commenter daveinboca echoes my own preference for a Thompson-Obama match:

Fred is low-key in an age of hyperventilating hysterics and johnny-one-note eccentrics. He’s not consumed by Potomac fever, not driven by overwhelming ambition, not determined to “rescue” the country from evil-doers of one stripe or another.

Fred is comfortable in his own skin, as the French say, and he drives hyperactive meddlesome busybody MSM types to new heights of nuttiness by disdaining the process of getting nominated—a process which obviously needs reform of one kind or another.

I’d like to see a final two of Fred Thompson and Barack Obama—both seem less driven by power-mad constituencies of hysterics and are not prisoners of the press/electronic lords of Mordor.

Sadly, Gresham’s Law may be driving out the best candidates—leaving the field to chronic campaigners who simply love the adulation of the masses filling the cavities of their own personal emptiness.

Concern about the creation of a political class is nothing new, but we may be entering a phase of specialization, where if you want to be president, wanting to be president will be your job, and your campaign starts the day after the polls solidify for the previous election.