Make-Believe Reagan

It's only after you run into this lobotomy act ten or eleven times that you start to see the dark essence of Fred Thompson. He is hard to dislike on a personal level: Unlike the overconfident district attorney he plays on Law and Order, the real-life Thompson comes off as a halting, humble, accidental celebrity who's really just dern glad to be here. And his personality seems consistent with his Goldwater-era ideology: A believer in limited government, he seeks to achieve his ends by getting his frankly limited self elected to the White House.

His politics, though, are another matter. As a political animal, Thompson embodies the twisted core of the Sean Hannity/Rush Limbaugh era: He looks you right in the eye with that aw-shucks face of his and tells you shit that just isn't true about who we are as a country. In his first few days on the campaign trail, he paces back and forth in front of crowds of Iowans and assures them without blinking that "we have the best health-care system in the world" -- and you sit there wondering how the hell he can get away with saying that when America's infant mortality rate is behind fricking Slovenia's.

But by then Thompson is talking about how France and England are desperate to copy our market-based system of health care. And then he's on to Iraq, where we "went in for the right reasons" because Saddam was planning a "nuclearized Middle East" that "would have defeated all of us," assertions that leave the bad-news-weary crowd dewy-eyed with approval. Thompson represents the essential bullshit at the heart of modern conservatism: The fantasy that we are the benevolent envy of the world must be believed at all costs, no matter how much waste or mayhem or loss of young lives is suffered in deference to it.

That's what Thompson is selling: a double dose of Middle American delusion. He's a Grade A nice feller who isn't running for president, even though he is, in a country that doesn't launch unilateral and unwarranted invasions, even though it does.

In Council Bluffs, Iowa, the Thompson campaign buses stop at a neatly groomed downtown spot called Bayliss Park to give a gathering of about 300 a chance to meet the nice old actor who talks to his mama. (On health care: "I talk to my mama, who is eighty-seven years old, regularly about this.") The traveling press spills out into the crowd in search of quotes for their preconceived story theses -- Thompson as Reagan, Thompson as the Only Republican Who Can Beat Hillary, Thompson as the Too-Late Candidate.

Standing on a riser in front of his bus, Thompson lays his Goldwater rap on the Decent Folk who have come to the park, telling them that the best thing government can do for the poor is to help them help themselves. "A government big and powerful enough to give you everything," he declares, "is also powerful enough to take away anything." The crowd cheers.

A minute or two later, an announcement sounds that the campaign is moving again, and the reporters, quotes in hand, flee back to the bus. I am headed that way myself when a homeless couple named Dot and Jamie, both weatherbeaten and in ragged sweatshirts, walk up to me and explain that they live in this park, and could I ask the candidate for a favor?

"Can you ask him to get us a public toilet?" Jamie asks. "There's no place to take a fucking shit here."