By Gail Collins
August. Everybody but you is out of town. Congress is in recess. The Iraqi Parliament, of course, is long gone. You-know-who is in Texas. It’s 107 degrees in Crawford, but that brush wants cutting.
Karl Rove is going on hiatus forever. . . Meanwhile in Iowa, the vacation capital of ... Iowa, everyone is waiting for Fred.
Fred Thompson is coming! Now Republicans won’t have to feel shortchanged because Tommy Thompson dropped out of the race, leaving them with only eight candidates to choose from. (Oh Tommy, we hardly knew ye.) The networks will not even have to change the name cards at the debates.
Now let us be clear, Fred Thompson is not a candidate yet. True, he has a Web site and he raised almost $3.5 million last month and he is scheduled to be in Iowa Friday to meet with state legislators and go to the state fair. But nothing is official. And who wouldn’t like to spend the hottest weeks in August chatting up state legislators and fighting with the crowds at a very large fair in a state where they do not reside? . . .
What does Fred Thompson stand for?
Exactly what George Bush stands for, except that Thompson intends to be as dogmatic and inflexible on illegal immigrants as Bush already is on other domestic issues, making real change on immigration as impossible as it currently is on health care, tax reform or Social Security. By coincidence, Romney and Giuliani have arrived at this very same position.
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Gail Collins Fred Thompson Iowa Politics Republican News 2008 Bush
