Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

Welcome to the March 15 edition of The Daily Fred, a festival of Fred Thompson news and blog coverage and commentary that starts right now... 

...New York political consultant and blogger Karol Sheinin says that when it comes to the eventual Republican presidential nominee, "I want to fall in love, not in line." She likes Fred.

...Radio talker Sean Hannity's website has one of those online polls, this one asking, "What GOP candidate are you most likely to vote for even if they have not announced yet?"

The results as of around midnight Thursday: Thompson leading the field with nearly 44 percent of the votes, followed by Newt Gingrich with almost 23 percent and Rudy Giuliani with nearly 15 percent. No one else had cracked double digits. Mitt Romney? 7 percent. John McCain? 1.7 percent - barely ahead of Mike Huckabee and well behind Condi Rice (5 percent) and Sam Brownback (3 percent). (Click here for the latest numbers.)

Click "continue reading" for the rest of today's Daily Fred.

...There's a Draft Fred Thompson 2008 blog. In this post, the blogger compares Thompson's marriage history with those of Gingrich and Giuliani.

With Newt and Rudy's personal lives coming front and center, many are wondering if Thompson could be looking at the same judgments. In many of the posts I've read on various sites/blogs, Thompson's second wife is referred to as his "trophy wife". From what I can find, this woman is hardly just an arm piece.

Jeri Kehn was a political media consultant at the Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, and McPherson law firm in Washington, D.C. She also worked for the Senate Republican Conference and the Republican National Committee.

Unlike Newt and Rudy, Thompson's second marriage did not overlap with his first wife. Thompson and Sara Lindsey divorced in 1985. He didn't meet Jeri Kehn until 1996 and they married in 2002.

Back in 1994 when Thompson was running toward a landslide victory over Democrat Jim Cooper to fill the remaining years of Al Gore's Senate term, I recall that the press reported Sara Lindsey had nothing but good things to say about Thompson even though they had divorced nearly a decade before.

...Clarice Feldman, writing at the American Thinker, explains why she loves Fred Thompson.

...Thompson wrote a book, At That Point In Time: The inside story of the Senate Watergate Committee. Thompson served as legal counsel to the Republicans on that committee. Amazon has a handful of used copies of the book for sale for $7 to $40 dollars. Alibris.com has about 15 used copies available with a similar price range.

...NBC News political director Chuck Todd steals my headline, and echoes what I said from the get-go: that Thompson's announced possible candidacy is bad news for McCain, Giuliani and Romney.

...Fred Dalton Thompson himself weighs in on the "scandal" over the eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush Justice Department. It's a non-scandal, actually...

...Former U.S. J.C. Watts, an Oklahoma Republican, backs Thompson. (Can you imagine a Thompson-Watts ticket?)

...Dick Morris thinks the field is too crowded for a conservative - Thompson or Huckabee or Brownback or someone else - to consolidate conservative support to challenge Giuliani for the nomination. Morris, who has been wrong before, says Romney "can't get nominated or even become the consensus candidate of the right wing" because he's "too Mormon" and "flip-flop-flipped from pro-life to pro-choice and back again" and also flip-flopped on gay rights and stem cell research.

Newt Gingrich still sends thrills down Republican spines but won't say whether or not he's running until the fall of 2007. By that time, Rudy will probably have $40 million or $50 million in the bank and will be en route to triple digits. Newt is a bright guy who must know that the convergence of primaries on Feb. 5 makes a late entry politically unfeasible. So I don't think he's running.

But neither McCain, as he fades, nor Romney, as he sputters, nor Gingrich, as he waits, are getting out of the way to let right-wingers attract support. These three well-known candidates are standing in the way, blocking one of the lesser-known candidates from emerging.

So far so good, but then Morris lumps Thompson in with the bloc of "lesser-known candidates." He isn't "lesser-known." He's much better known among Republicans nationally than Huckabee or Brownback or any of the others. That's why the next polls to come out will show Thompson vaulting over most of the field and transforming the race into a three-way contest between himself, Romney and Giuliani.

...Little Miss Chatterbox at Astute Bloggers links to a video of the Wall Street Journal's John Fund discussing Thompson.