The Tennessee State Senate finally passed the resolution to honor Fred Thompson by naming a state road after him. Unfortunately, it looks like a tit-for-tat deal in which a resolution honoring Al Gore is to pass later this week. (This is not a deal I would have made. Mental note: write my senator.)

RedState thinks Fred will run and be a top-tier candidate because:

1) There is no MAJOR issue where he is at odds with any conservative wing of the party. And Thompson is not a recent convert for political reasons on any major issue.

2) Thompson was outside politics from 2002-2008 when Republican stock went downhill. As a corollary, Thompson is not tied to President Bush or the current Senate in any way.

3) Thompson’s ability to communicate ideas clearly and earnestly makes many think of Reagan’s ability to win over people to ideas that are not necessarily popular (say seeing Iraq through until victory)

4) Most people like a person who is not a career politician but is an educated and active citizen to be President

5) Thompson is probably the most conservative electable candidate.

A nice summation of things as they now stand. You can add his wife’s support (and her numerous political contacts), the support of Senate minority leader Bill Frist, and the fact that the Democrats are in as bad a spot as Republicans are at the moment. (I mean, com’ on, a choice between Hillary and Obama isn’t really one you want to make, is it?)

Michael Stickings, however, believes otherwise (ht to Moderate Voice):

That says it all. Republicans are desperately searching for a celebrity candidate to run in ’08 — they won’t be able to run on their record, which has been horrendous, so they’ll have to run on the personality of their nominee — and Fred seems to fit the mold perfectly.

Or, rather, his character does, the on-screen version of the man.

In a literal case of politics as popular entertainment, Republicans could soon find themselves supporting, and eventually voting for, a fiction.

I’m seeing entirely too much of this kind of thinking. The man was a senator for eight years (one of my senators, as a matter of fact) and a spokesman for the party several times thereafter. He has a well-documented record — a well-documented conservative record.

Perhaps Michael was trying to say that most people don’t know the candidate. This may be true, and is perhaps better vocalized by Outside the Beltway:

But vague voter perceptions based on gravitas on the silver screen or a particularly stirring convention speech may prove ephemeral.

But does anyone with any familiarity with politics, American or otherwise, really think that the vast majority of voters make decisions on anything other than vague perceptions? Please.

This is exacerbated by the shallowness of our media, as explained by Reason’s David Weigel:

I don’t expect Huckabee to stick in the presidential race past August or so, but the attention he’s garnering for his bid is representative of a bizarre metric political journalists use for gauging “serious candidates.” Huckabee does not win headlines because he’s a former governor: He wins them because he used to be obese but he lost over 100 pounds. This is is vaguely interesting if you’re interested in celebrity/human interest stories, completely uninteresting if you’re interested in policy. But the human interest stories matter more than the policies. Thus, “former fatty Mike Huckabee” is a more buzzed-about candidate than “massively influential Gov. Tommy Thompson.” John Edwards, the crusading trial lawyer with a sick wife, laps most of the Democratic field even though you could fit a list of his political achievements on a post-it note.

All this is to say that a conservative record and a screen presence is the right formula for a dream candidate.

As to whether or not Fred Thompson is a conservative I will tell you this: I hardly ever wrote Sen. Thompson to scold him, if at all. I wrote to thank him for voting the way that I would have voted on issue after issue after issue.

The man is as conservative as the groundwater that feeds our farms in the heartland of America.