The Sioux City Journal’s Bret Heyworth notices that former Sen. Fred Thompson’s daughter may be playing the role of a prop on the former actor’s nascent-but-long-awaited presidential campaign:
Forty minutes into the event, Thompson’s 3-year-old daughter, Hayden, ran onto the convention center stage. Some in the crowd let out a heartfelt ‘aawwww.’ Thompson told Hayden, “Bless your heart, I’ll be done in a second.”
With this being a major event as Thompson kicked off his candidacy yesterday and today, there was a huge national press crew along. I heard that Thompson’s daughter had similarly come onto the stage near the end of both Iowa campaign stops yesterday.
That brings up an interesting point, how to bring a campaign event to a conclusion. Most I’ve covered this year, both Republican and Democrat candidates stops, have been roughly 45 to 60 minutes in length, and typically a question/answer session ends it. How to wrap up and get away varies, but generally a campaign staffer is the ‘bad guy,’ the one who motions or sometimes visibly states, “This is the last question.” I saw Mitt Romney in Onawa, Iowa, earlier this year make what some would see as a mistake — he himself looked at his watch, and said, I’m done. That can be construed as rude, so it’s better to have the staffer be the one concerned with timing (i.e. getting to the next event), methinks.
So if Thompson had his cute 3-year-old handle that “it’s-time-to-quit” bit, so what? But the “bless your heart, I’ll be done in a minute,” to me, indicated it was the impromptu running onto the stage by the youngster. “I’ll be done in a minute,” without the “bless your heart,” doesn’t raise the question of staging it. I interviewed a few people after the Thompson appearance for react to the speech, and one man brought up that he thought the daughter coming onto the stage was, well, staged.
This isn’t an obvious no-no, but it raises some questions about the role Thompson’s family will play in his presidential campaign. In the long run-up to Thompson’s candidacy, many pundits claimed that Thompson’s private life was a threat to his credibility as a social conservative, but the “Iowa Hearts Jeri” signs the campaign hand-painted and his daughter’s cameo-turned-recurring role seem to ignore that conventional wisdom. It’s also rumored that this might have been a cause of Thompson’s staffing issues.
The first question to ask, which isn’t very interesting if you ask me, is whether it’s OK or not OK for Thompson to parade his daughter on stage. But the second, more important question, in my mind, is who is making the call to position Thompson’s family life front-and-center like this. Is it Thompson himself, ignoring advice of the staff who think it’s a bad idea? Or are his consultants simply telling him that the best defense is a good offense?
Cross-posted to Chase Martyn On Display.
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November 18, 2007 at 9:00pm