Stephen F. Hayes recently previewed Fred Thompson's forthcoming attack on his principal rivals for the GOP nomination:
Thompson intends to sharpen the differences he has with two of his rivals--Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani--by asking a simple question: Where were you during the 1994 Republican Revolution? Thompson, who first won election to the Senate that year, will portray himself as a "consistent conservative" who supported the small-government principles of the Contract With America then and supports them today. The obvious conclusion: While Thompson was campaigning as a proud conservative in Tennessee, Romney was running for the Senate in Massachusetts as a liberal Republican who distanced himself from Reaganomics. Giuliani was endorsing the Democratic governor of New York and liberal icon Mario Cuomo for reelection.
Just how closely will Thompson associate himself with the Republican Revolution? In this post Perry Bacon Jr. reports that the former senator will not "be borrowing from parts of the Republican agenda in 1994, such as eliminating the Department of Education and imposing term limits on members of Congress."
I doubt that dissociating himself from abolishing the Education Department and imposing congressional term limits--as sympathetic as I am to both goals--will hurt Thompson's chances of winning the GOP nomination.
However, Thompson will probably have to answer questions from reporters about why he never signed the 1994 Contract With America.
Now it's true that the Contract was primarily a vehicle by which the Republicans rallied to take the House, and that many senators did not feel compelled to join Newt Gingrich's campaign. The Thompson campaign, for its part, did not return calls on the matter by press time. I'll give you an update when they do.
UPDATE (5:45 p.m.): A Thompson spokesman just called to answer my query. He points out that the Contract was primarily a House document; the Senate version was not signed by Thompson. More important than his signature, this spokesman says, were the actions Thompson took as a senator--and on those issues where he dissented from the policies outlined in the Contract, it was because of his strong belief in federalism. The Thompson campaign clearly believes the more the conversation shifts to what the candidates were up to in 1994, the better for them.
