Thompson's Waterloo (Iowa)

Waterloo, Iowa

Forty-five minutes before Fred Thompson spoke here last Tuesday night, young volunteers greeted reporters and potential Iowa voters just inside the front door of the Waterloo Center for the Arts. A thermometer down the street reported the temperature as 22 degrees, and the wind made it colder. Even inside, the frigid air gave those manning the registration table an icy blast every time anyone opened the door.

A young man with a "Fred Thompson" button stood by a table with coffee and hot tea. He introduced himself to another volunteer, and they chatted about their reasons for supporting the former senator from Tennessee. It was a ritual that has played out countless times across Iowa--something Mitt Romney's volunteers were probably doing more than a year ago.

After the candidate and his wife, Jeri, arrived and were introduced, Thompson took the stage. He warmed up his audience with a joke about the weather. It's freezing back in Washington, too, he assured them.

"It was cold--it got so cold that the politicians had their hands in their own pockets," he said. People laughed out loud. Over the next 25 minutes, Thompson portrayed himself as a limited-government conservative whose values are in line with Iowa Republicans. He boasted about his endorsement the day before by Steve King, the conservative Republican who represents Iowa's Fifth District. He pointed to a column by the Des Moines Register's David Yepsen, the state's most influential columnist, saying Thompson could still excite conservatives. And he delivered the kind of conservative message many in the crowd said they'd been waiting for since the campaign began.

Much of the speech was the political equivalent of chum. On national security: "The best way out of the fight is to be stronger than your adversary." On the Democrats: "the left-wing, big government, high taxing, weak-on-national security Democratic party." On his Republican opponents: "You're not electing a set of plans, you're electing a leader."

Thompson made much of his strong showing at the last Republican debate, when he refused the moderator's request for a show of hands on global warming. The other candidates, he reminded the crowd, followed his lead. "I don't know how you're going to stand up to leaders of Iran and North Korea if you can't stand up to an overbearing moderator." More applause.

After taking several questions from the audience, Thompson asks the crowd for its support on caucus night, then makes his way into the crowd to shake hands. As he chats with voters, Dierks Bentley's "Free and Easy Down the Road I Go" comes blaring from the sound system.

Ain't no tellin' where the wind might blow

Free and easy down the road I go

Livin' life like a Sunday stroll

Free and easy down the road I go

Free and easy down the road I go

If you only get to go around one time

I'm gonna sit back and try to enjoy the ride

If the Republican nomination were decided only by performances like this, Fred Thompson--whose policy views make him the most mainstream conservative in the race--would be on a glide-path to the Republican nomination.

It's not. And it is Thompson's lackluster effort in all of those other areas of a campaign that has him running a distant third in most polls less than two weeks from the Iowa caucuses. But a strange set of circumstances--the two current Iowa frontrunners cutting each other apart and two former national frontrunners essentially skipping the caucuses--means that despite his late start Thompson may still have a chance to emerge from Iowa as one of three or four candidates with a real shot at the nomination.

"Iowa is critical to our campaign, and it may in fact be everything to our campaign," says a Thompson official. "If we don't do what we need to do in Iowa, it will be tough to compete effectively down the road."

From the beginning, Thompson said he would run a different kind of campaign. He shared his philosophy about the process in an interview at his McLean home shortly after he first acknowledged publicly that he was considering a bid.

"The world changes so rapidly and politics do too," he said. "And not only has technology changed, but now a lot of the primaries have changed, and the question is whether the old way of looking at things still applies to these new sets of circumstances in all cases. I don't think they do."

You mean in terms of timing?

"Well, in terms of everything. In terms of timing, in terms of the role of money, in terms of the timing of the money, in terms of all the steps that you traditionally need to make and when you need to make them. The conventional wisdom, from all I can tell, is that you need years of preparation. And if that's the case, I'm already out."