Robert Novak, George Will and the rest of Washington remain off the Fred Thompson bandwagaon

TIME: Washington's Trouble With Thompson


Fred Thompson was mugged last week. Worse still, the perpetrators were folks he knew, the kind of people he had reason to believe might actually love him. The lawyer-lobbyist-actor-politician from Tennessee, who played Hamlet on the Potomac all summer before finally joining the race for the Republican Party presidential nomination on Sept. 5, had imagined his arrival would be greeted with hallelujahs from both the rank and file in the party and its tastemakers in Washington. After all, with the incumbent second-term GOP president wildly unpopular, and with Republicans across the country ambivalent at best about the field of would-be successors who had been campaigning all year for their affections, Thompson supposed that he would be greeted as a savior once he made his candidacy official.

read::: Time magazine article