Alas, USA Today woke up today and decided “Hey, Fred Thompson was a lobbyist. That’s news!” Welcome to the party.
That unlikely pairing [of FDT and Harold Ickes] offers an insight into Thompson, 64, who declared his interest last week in running for president. Although the folksy-sounding Tennessean recently told USA TODAY that he would run an outsider, just as he did while campaigning as a “country lawyer” in a red pickup during his 1994 U.S. Senate race, his résumé is that of a longtime Washington operative who has crossed ideological lines to represent corporate and foreign clients.
Before he was elected to the Senate, Thompson spent nearly two decades in Washington as a lawyer-lobbyist, representing such entities as Westinghouse, the deposed leader of Haiti, the Teamsters Union pension fund and the Tennessee Savings and Loan Association, according to Senate records and published accounts.
According to the report, and earlier reports from his senatorial campaigns, Thompson made over $500,000 as a lobbyist from 1975 to 1993 and $760,000 from 2002 to 2006.
Thompson likes to play the populist card — ever see his red campaign truck? — but Democrat Jim Cooper tried unsuccessfully to expose Thompson’s true nature.
Thompson’s opponent in his 1994 Senate race, Democrat Jim Cooper, sought to make an issue of the advocacy. He labeled Thompson a “Gucci-wearing, Lincoln-driving, Perrier-drinking, Grey Poupon- spreading millionaire Washington special-interest lobbyist.” It didn’t work. Speaking of Congress, Thompson told one crowd he could not wait “to go up there and grab that place by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shake.” He beat Cooper by 20 percentage points.
Thompson is to a country boy what George W. Bush is to a cowboy. That is to say, he isn’t one at all.
Political analyst Stuart Rothenberg said it could be a plus that Thompson “can wear the plaid shirt and drive the pickup and sound like a good ol’ boy, and 20 minutes later, in a beautiful suit with polished shoes, sound like a guy who is an insider who knows about policy. But there is always the potential that voters will see that contradiction and wonder which one is the real one.”
USA Today also jumped all over Thompson’s hypocritical positions on things such as “corporate welfare.”
On occasion, Thompson lobbied for causes he would later criticize as a senator. For example, Thompson led a Senate effort against “corporate welfare.” As a lobbyist in the 1980s, he represented Westinghouse in its failed bid to win billions in subsidies for a nuclear reactor project in Tennessee, which the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, called “a multibillion-dollar folly.” Corallo said the project was “aimed at helping to alleviate the energy crunch the country was suffering through.”
It should be interesting to see what, if any, news outlets follow suit and talk about Thompson’s lobbying days.
Something to say?
