Rove to Thompson?

Judging Rove's history, Rick Perlstein thinks the GOP's top political operative may be headed to the Fred Thompson campaign.

In 1972 he got a job working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President's Youth Division. Which sounds pretty innocent. But the youth division, run by a guy named Ken Rietz, was actually the wheelhouse for infiltrating the Edmund Muskie campaign. (An aside: Rietz is a top advisor to Fred Thompson's imminent presidential campaign. There are whispers that Thompson might become Karl Rove's next candidate. And as we know now, Fred Thompson served as the Nixon White House's spy with the Watergate prosecution.)

Skipping Iowa

What's more interesting than Fred Thompson only raising $3 million in June is that he recently said, "August is kind of a down month, not much going on, so it wouldn't make sense to [announce my campaign] in August." Ed Kilgore observes,

That may be true in Washington, but not so much in, say, Iowa, where August features the State Republican Party's big Straw Poll (which Thompson apparently won't contest), not to mention the Iowa State Fair, where presidential candidates will be so thick on the ground that you won't be able to stir them with a stick. Indeed, Thompson's "not much going on" dismissal of the opportunity to eat corn dogs and deep-fried twinkies and admire the Butter Cow sculpture is a good sign that he has decided to skip Iowa altogether.

There have been years when a candidate doesn't have to compete in Iowa to win the nomination.; however this is not one of them.

Reaganesque

The New Republic's Jon Chait on the absolution of Fred Thompson.

The best evidence for this is the equanimity with which conservatives have accepted the news that Thompson once worked as an abortion-rights lobbyist. Milder revelations about Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney were met with howls of outrage. The news that Thompson actively lobbied to weaken abortion restrictions, on the other hand, has been met with a shrug.

The chinks in Reagan's conservative armor were similarly overlooked.