BartBlog

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2007/09/future-presiden.html

Future President of Petticoat Junction Seeks Florida Fun

Sopping up gravy wherever he goes, Republican hopeful Fred Thompson pays his respects to the good people gathered around the filling station.

“It’s good to be back among neighbors,” he said. “You know, in Tennessee, every time I had a day or two I always would try and find an excuse to get down to Florida. Well, it looks like I found a pretty doggone good one. I’m going to be down here a whole lot.”

One wonders why the former Senator from Tennessee was always itching so bad to get down to Florida. It’s not as if Tennessee and Florida are right next door to each other; it’s not a brief commute. Given my extensive reading of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels, where rich women with coral toenails hide their inscrutable pasts and bitter sorrows behind tinted sunglasses as their nymphomaniac stepdaughters go missing, I have a fair idea of what might have been enticing the Fredmobile southward on the flimiest of excuses, but it would be imprudent to speculate further. I do think it’s fair to speculate how long someone with Thompson’s history as a politician, lobbyist, and film-TV actor can get by with this Goober-Gomer “doggone” shtick. It’s true that Reagan had his folksy side, complete with cheeks that blushed like painted roses, but he also delivered fully-rounded speeches with rhetorical bridges and perorations; he didn’t just show up as if to shuck corn. I will say this, though: Thompson’s somewhat lackadaisacal lope is a smart counterfoil to Mitt Romney’s executive-vampire zeal and glinty opportunism–maybe it takes a real fake to show up a fake fake. Thompson at least seems to be composed of organic material; Romney is pure vinyl exterior down to the empty core.