Actor Doesn't Cover it [Jonah Goldberg]
Watching the little bit of the GOP debate that I could, a thought occurred to me about Thompson. Many of his "he's-the-next-Reagan" fans suggest that because Thompson is a former actor too, he has the same communication skills. But that doesn't necessarily follow. Reagan's stint as a "traveling ambassador" for GE, as well as his jobs in radio, gave Reagan a gift for extemporaneous speaking. Recall that Reagan went toe-to-toe with Robert Kennedy over Vietnam and beat him handily. I remember listening to him talk a mile-a-minute on a C-Span radio rebroadcast of a 1950s talk show and was blown away by his ability to talk big ideas and politics rapid fire and elegantly. The young Reagan was a talker on par with Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Obviously as Reagan got older he slowed down and became more deliberate and more prone to lapses in memory and the like. But the point remains that his non-political background wasn't just about being an actor. He was essentially a public raconteur. As far as I'm aware Thompson's experience isn't remotely similar and I think it showed. Thompson does have great stage presence. But his skills as an actor basically depends on being given a good line to read. Off-the-cuff he's simply no Ronald Reagan, and being an actor doesn't change that fact.
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Jobbing pols [Mark Steyn]
While musing on presidential ambition, Betsy Newmark observes:
I've always thought that, other things being equal, I would prefer someone who has done something else in his or her life besides being involved in government.
Me too. If one looks at recent history, the Republican nominee with the fullest, most profound political philosophy, the one who'd thought most seriously about the role of government and its relationship to individual liberty, was Ronald Reagan, who formed his views while doing other stuff. If instead of spending the Fifties doing movies and TV and speechifying for GE (and reading National Review), he'd been a Congressman or Senator, I doubt he'd have developed any kind of coherent worldview.
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