Longtime Tennessee journalist and political commentator Frank Cagle profiles Fred Thompson for Knoxville's Metro Pulse weekly. Don't miss it. Here are a few parts of it:
The myth has arisen that Thompson has never had a hard political race. At the beginning of the 1994 Senate campaign he was down 20 points to Cooper, and East Tennessee conservatives were just not that impressed. Tennessee had had two Democratic senators in Al Gore and Jim Sasser; it appeared that would not change...
...Thompson had entered the race as a conventional candidate, doing what conventional candidates do, and he hated it. He also wasn't making any progress in catching Cooper.
Somewhere in the course of the conversation Thompson became "Fred" and it got down to candid talk. Someone at the table offered the opinion that people didn't really want those long-winded answers. They just wanted to know one thing: “Are you one of us, or are you one of them?” Thompson threw back his head and laughed at that.
He reminisced about his first job out of high school, the night shift at the Maury Bicycle plant in his home town of Lawrenceburg. Lawrenceburg is a typical small town in Tennessee, a backwater too far from an interstate. Despite the growth in Middle Tennessee in recent years the town still numbers about 10,000 people. It didn't take Thompson long at the bike plant to decide to go to the University of Memphis and Vanderbilt Law School and get on with a career.
As the campaign wore on that spring and summer Thompson seemed to begin to remember that bike plant and the people he worked with and grew up with. He began to set aside the lawyer and Senate staffer persona he had taken on over the years. His speeches became shorter. More to the point. He started to connect with people.
Read the whole thing.
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