Those reports of a staff shake-up and disarray in the Fred Thompson pre-campaign? Don't believe 'em.
ABC News, CNN and others are reporting that campaign manager Tom Collamore has been replaced by the duo of former senator and energy secretary Spencer Abraham and Florida GOP strategist Randy Enright. The MSM is depicting it as a sign of trouble inthe Thompson camp.
My source inside Team Thompson tells a different stor. Collamore was brought in to help put the Fred Thompson team together, not to run the political campaign. He's done his job, says my source. "Nobody has resigned or been "fired." Collamore is still a member of the team, but now that we've reached a new organizational point, Spencer Abraham and Randy Enwright are the people to lead the Thompson team into the next stage."
The source notes that the Thompson campaign is going through its start-up phase with much more publicity and media attention than did the candidates who put their teams together last year "when nobody cared, and there weren't roving bands of reporters who had to file (X) inches of copy a day about campaign details."
Being a journalist myself I can tell you how the media got the tone of this story wrong. They had just recently covered the staff changes within the John McCain campaign - a campaign that IS in trouble - and were primed to view any staff changes in other campaigns as a possible sign of trouble in those campaigns.
Any campaign should always consider the media backdrop and story environment into which they will drop news, and make the announcment in a way that ensures the media won't lapse into the wrong template and tone.
In this case, the Thompson camp should have issued a press release from Collamore announcing that the campaign team structure was completed and that Collamore and Fred had selected Thompson and Enright to run the campaign on a permanent basis.
More on the Thompson campaign staff changes here from Jim Geraghty at National Review Online.
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