Five decades after the Nixon-Kennedy debates, three decades after an actor and former TV host was elected president and a good decade and a half after Bill Clinton blew sax on the Arsenio Hall show, the perception still persists that anytime a candidate uses TV strategically, it’s a sign that he or she is a new kind of media-savvy politician. Thus the hullaballoo over Fred Thompson’s choosing his old network NBC to announce his candidacy for President, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
But really, was there a more (strategically) conservative and old-fashioned move Thompson could have made? In an age of niche media, he chose to debut on one of the flagship shows of the ever-shrinking mass media. He even chose network over cable, opting out of the New Hampshire Republican debate on Fox News, dissing the multi-candidate debate format to Leno in the process: “I don’t think much of ’em,” he drawled. “I don’t think it’s a very enlightening forum, to tell the truth.”
So how did Thompson enlighten his audience about his candidacy? Well, he’s running for “our kids and grandkids.” And there’s a red pickup truck involved. Leno did engage Thompson with a few foreign-policy questions–Iran, Thompson said, has “a guy who’s not put together well upstairs running the country.” (You make the Bush joke–it’s too easy.) But Thompson’s loudest message was stylistic, casting himself as a homespun guy, who likes drivin’ his trucks and droppin’ his g’s and who just put together his campaign with some fellas “around the kitchen table.” (An expensive kitchen table I’m sure that was.)
Polls? “Well, you can’t tell too much about polls nowadays…” Campaigning? Shucks. He just likes “to get out with the folks. Sometimes I’ll communicate with ’em over the airwaves.” Everything about his manner suggested he was going to offer the viewer a steaming cup of Folger’s coffee. Even his position on the couch seemed cannily casual–slumped slightly back, as if he were kicking back in the living room, while also accentuating that vaunted electoral height advantage by leaning over to get down to Leno’s level.
In the pre-Reagan era, Thompson’s media strategy might have seemed like brave new politicking. But today, just as he’s presenting himself as a politically conservative option for Republican voters, he’s also presenting himself as a stylistically conservative choice (even as he offhandedly plugged his campaign website), a scripted-drama candidate compared with, say, Rudy Giuliani’s pugnacious, reality-TV persona or Mitt Romney’s game-show-host slickness. (In this sense, Law & Order, the most stylistically retro of today’s TV franchises, with its barely updated take on Dragnet, was perfect training for Thompson.) Whether that manner will serve him in other formats, and whether it’s really suited to campaigning in 2008, will be among the more interesting media questions of this election. But for now, Fred Thompson is officially tryin’.