It appears that the Republicans continue with their primary campaigns for President with essentially four candidates of any significance. They are Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain and coming up on the outside - Fred Thompson. Let's look at them one at a time.
Rudy Giuliani
Rudy has one real basis for the office of President. He was Mayor of New York on 9/11, thereby making him an expert on terrorism. Of course, the manner in which he developed any anti-terrorism skills is not known, while he decisions to place the New York emergency operations center inside the World Trade Center, a known and anticipated terrorist target, and his decision to let the first responders work on the site of the WTC, telling them it was safe when it was known that breathing the air their was dangerous to their health tends to make his "credentials" suspicious to say the least. Then there is his habit of surrounding himself with unethical people closely associated with criminals, such as Bernie Kerik, makes one wonder if he is running for office to escape his own enemies in New York. He does have one other positive facet - he is not and never has been a U.S. Senator. As an ex-mayor of the largest city in the U.S. he can be presumed to have some executive experience. Rumors of his mental instability and his inability to make considered rational decisions are rife, and should sink his candidacy, as should his inability to choose competent subordinates who have avoided problems with the law. Apparently Rudi's two divorces and the refusal of his children to communicate with him is sufficient to convince Republican voters that even though he professes to be Catholic, he doesn't really mean it, so he is a viable candidate. He has no policy initiatives, as he is instead running as "the proven executive who can best deal with terrorism." How he would achieve that is carefully never stated, making him a policy "Blank Slate." The leader of the New York City firefighters has promised to kill his candidacy for the nomination for President, and it looks like he has a lot to work with.
Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney has a few more qualifications, not the least being that he could probably write a personal check to fund a run for the Presidency. He is also good looking on TV and handles himself well in public, certainly a lot better than Rudy Giuliani does. He is also an ex-governor of a state with a strong-Governor office. Unfortunately, that state was Massachusetts. To win that office he had to win over what the Republicans would call the most liberal state-wide electorate in the U.S., and the positions he had to take there on social issues like abortion are completely contrary to those he needs to take to win the Republican nomination for the Presidency. No problem, though. He has simply reversed himself, telling the Republicans he never meant what he was promising the Massachusetts voters. This is not a one time flip-flop, either. He has been campaigning as tough-on-crime, bragging that in his four years as Governor he never approved a Pardon. This has not stopped him from applauding President Bush's Clemency for "Scooter" Libby in which Libby's 30 month prison sentence has been canceled as being "excessive." In short, Mitt Romney has no problem at all expressing totally inconsistent positions without acknowledging or attempting to reconcile and explain the inconsistencies. What he says depends on who he is speaking to and what he wants from them. He is truly this seasons Republican "Panderbear", and competes strongly with Rudy for winner of the untrustworthiness championship. In addition to all this, Romney's non-Christian Mormonism should be enough to sink him with the largely Fundamentalist and Evangelist social conservatives of the Republican Right. Since the Republican Party is America's Christian Evangelical Party, for a non-Christian Mormon like Romney to run is a lot like an African-American candidate running for nomination in the political party of the Ku Klux Klan. as far as I have seen, he is not associated with any specific policy recommendations. He seems to be looking for something acceptable to the Republican electorate, and is ready to change to whatever seems workable. Although he has stood for certain policies in the past, they are counter to those of the national Republican Party and he has fully demonstrated that he is ready to erase anything he has stood for in the past if it will get him elected. Like Rudy Giuliani, he is really a policy "Blank-Slate."Romney's success seems unlikely at best.
John McCain
Which brings me to the third of the big three, Senator John McCain. His history as a naval aviator and his five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi give his personal story great power, and suggests that he is the only Republican running who has any respect for and knowledge of the military. His long history as a Senator has kept him in the national spotlight, which fits him well for a run for the Presidency. His acceptance of money from the S&L swindler, Charles Keating, and his efforts to protect Keating from federal regulators is a major negative (See The Keating Five) but that was long enough ago that Sen. McCain seems to be "immunized" to the fallout. His efforts to pass the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law was clearly designed to counter the negative effects of the Keating Five scandal, and seems to have worked. His candidacy for the nomination in 2000 was destroyed by Karl Rove's effective use of lies and smears and by Bush's coopting the social conservative (read that as political religious fundamentalists)voters, leading to McCain's very angry statements against the Republican religious right. McCain belongs to the Episcopal Church. He has worked very hard since 2001 to get the support of the Republican religious Barons like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and James Dobson. His efforts to pass a rational and workable immigration bill (rather than one that punishes foreigners and outsiders as the isolationist wing of the Republican Party wants) appears to have severely damaged his fund-raising efforts, and may have torpedoed his candidacy for the Republican nomination. That's not too surprising, since even in spite of his advanced age, the unfortunate fact that he is a U.S, Senator with no executive experience outside flying an aircraft and sitting in a Vietnamese POW cell and his occasional very intemperate remarks he is probably the best candidate the Republicans have running. His handlers will never make him into the ideal public relations driven "Blank Slate" candidate that the Republican primary voters can endow with their own desires and demands.
Others
None of the other active candidates for the republican nomination for President have in any way stood out, with the exception of the entirely unelectable crackpot and Libertarian Ron Paul. [Personal bias - I lived in his district when his district included the Johnson Space Center. He invariably voted against the space program, considering it a waste of taxpayer money. I consider the space program also with study of the human genome and genetics generally to be the two major long-range scientific explorations being carried on by the U.S. government. They are also two scientific programs which must be financed and run by the government, since there is no possible profit from either within the short-term profit window that drives private enterprise that would ever be sufficient to drive the science. The third such program was the Super-Conducting Super-Collider of which half the budgeted $5 billion was already spent when Congress in it's unutterable stupidity canceled the program! Ron Paul's government no-nothing positions make him remarkable unsuited to high political office.]
Fred Thompson
But this brings us to the new entry. Reflecting general Republican dissatisfaction with the existing field of candidates for the nomination, Fred Thompson is jumping into the race. Fred entered politics as the Republican attorney (working for Howard Baker) on the Senate Committee investigating Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. His claim to fame was his booming voice as he asked questions and his authorship of the single most significant question to come out of the hearings, "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" However, he made his bones with the republican conservatives as Nixon's mole on the committee by providing Nixon with warning of what the Committee knew and advance warning of what the Committee intended to do. Needless to say, he did not tell the Committee members what he was doing. I guess this experience as a spy is what gives him credibility to research national security and intelligence for the American Enterprise Institute. He worked as a Lobbyist from 1975 until he was elected to the Senate in 1994 to the two remaining years of the Tennessee Senate seat previously held by Al Gore when Gore became Vice President. His election was part of the Republican sweep in 1994, so required little effort on Thompson's part. He was reelected as the incumbent in 1996, and did not run for reelection in 2002. His Senate career is not notable for any special effort or projects. After 2002 he returned to his lucrative gig as lobbyist, and continued getting "face time" playing the DA Arthur Branch on the very popular TV show "Law and Order." His physical bulk and his booming voice very much suits him for such roles on TV and in the movies. He belongs to the Church of Christ. As a lawyer, a lobbyist, an Actor and a Senator Fred Thompson has never done anything except talk for a living. He has no known executive experience and except for the one line the Watergate hearings he is credited as authoring, has no known major accomplishments. Like all the other candidates, he is a "Blank Slate" for policy positions, and looking hard for something that might connect with Republican voters while not being too repugnant for independent voters to vote for in the General Election. His apparent qualifications for the office of President consist of being well-known (more as an actor than as a Senator) and as resembling Ronald Reagan in being an Actor.[*] That gets him into the primary nomination race. Then his other qualification is that he is not Giuliani, Romney, or McCain. Unsurprisingly, Fred Dalton Thompson is currently the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President.
Evaluation
The four leading Republican candidates seem to all be trying hard to stretch really slender resumes to cover their qualifications to be President. McCain has the best resume, and the least acceptance by the Republican Party, while Thompson has the skimpiest resume and the most acceptance within the party - at the moment, anyway. That suggests to me that the Republicans are not really happy with any of their apparent candidates. Thompson is mostly popular because he is recognizable and hasn't built up a number of enemies within the party by actually attempting to do anything.
That is not a really exciting slate of potential candidates, if you ask me.
[*] Of course, Reagan had been the President of the Screen Actor's Guild, Governor of California and was only barely beat out for the 1976 Republican nomination for President by the incumbent President, Gerald Ford. Fred Thompson, as I have written above, has no executive experience at all and has never run a strongly contested election.
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