Nightmares for White House dreamers

By MARSHA MERCER
Media General News Service
Friday, September 14, 2007

You say your job is hard, nobody appreciates you and everybody's out to get you? Well, it could be worse. You could be running for president.

Imagine opening the morning paper to find columnist George Will is likening you to New Coke (younger readers, that means you are a Flop with a capital F) while Robert Novak tells the world that Republicans privately say your campaign "crashed and burned on takeoff."

Former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., thought he would stride into the role of savior for the GOP's conservative base. Instead, his long-awaited campaign has been days of stumbles and gaffes. Fred Heads are looking like Dead (Fred) Heads.

Reviews of Thompson's debut on the trail describe him as rambling, waffling and unfamiliar with legislation he helped pass as senator. Evangelicals are waiting for him to land in the debate over an amendment to ban gay marriage nationwide. He has been on both sides, they say. And they want a fuller explanation of his lobbying for an abortion rights group.

Thompson was expected to soothe nerves in the Bible Belt -- but then he announced that he doesn't belong to a church where he lives in Virginia and doesn't attend church regularly.

Thompson, 65, said he goes to church when he's visiting his mom in Tennessee, Bloomberg News Service reported, and, "I know that I'm right with God and the people I love."

The TV actor also said he won't talk about religion on the campaign trail. It's "just the way I am not to talk about some of these things," he said.

Give that man a script, please.

Thompson's not the only presidential candidate who looks almost as awkward and uncertain as Britney on the MTV Awards show. I said almost.

Democrats don't need enemies when an ally, MoveOn.org, buys a full-page newspaper ad calling Army Gen. David Petraeus "General Betray Us." That was a gift to the Republicans.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., found she didn't need friends like Norman Hsu, after she had to return $850,000 he raised from 260 donors amid questions about his "bundling" efforts.

Hsu, 56, had raised something like a million dollars for Democratic candidates on the local, state and federal level over the last four years. He was a "HillRaiser," committed to raising more than $100,000 from various sources for the Clinton campaign. But he had been also been hiding in plain sight for 15 years after failing to show up for sentencing in 1992 in a grand larceny plea deal.

While returning the questionable contributions, Clinton invited the donors to re-send the money from their own bank accounts. Her campaign promises to vet donors better, although it's not clear how.

The last thing Hillary needed was to remind voters of the skunk-smell of sleaze that wafted over the last Clinton White House. Remember Johnny Chung? He was a fund-raiser in a scandal involving illegal contributions from "straw donors" to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. He once reportedly brought $50,000 to the White House.

Chung told the Los Angeles Times in a 1997 interview, "I see the White House is like a subway: You have to put in coins to open the gates."

Campaign finance is the sausage nobody wants to see made, of course, but every presidential candidate lives or dies by the purse. Barack Obama and John Edwards have their own fund-raisers to watch.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was thought to be dead because of his support of the Iraq war, but he has gone back on the trail in a campaign bus. He renamed the "Straight Talk Express" "No Surrender." He's drawing sympathetic crowds in key states. But he knows the real test will be his next fundraising report in October.

So McCain, who wrote the campaign finance reform law many Republicans despise, tells his supporters, "All we need is a little money, friends."

He admires the way Clinton has handled her campaign, although he said the other day, "I don't know if I could take an $850,000 hit."

It was all in a day's work for a presidential candidate.

(Marsha Mercer is Washington bureau chief of Media General News Service. E-mail mmercer(at)mediageneral.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com)