Thompson obit

Joe Klein makes a good observation on the demise of Tommy Thompson's presidential bid.

The other factor is that Thompson, much as he tried to pretend otherwise, simply wasn't as conservative as the Republican base. Unlike Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (and now Mitt Romney), who act as if Washington, D.C. were the capital of France, Thompson actually believes in government and practiced his beliefs in a creative, humane but highly efficient way, especially when it came to welfare reform in the early 1990s. That seems a terrible liability for a GOP candidate these days.