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[Tyrone Slothrop]

• The success or failure of Fred Dalton Thompson's campaign for president will depend ultimately on the cornpone novelization of him that's already under way. (Chris Matthews has grown quite damp.) The guy was a not-very-distinguished senator, who quit because senatorin' was too damn hard, a skirt-chasing Washington lawyer, and a movie actor. Period. His resumé makes him out to be approximately as macho a figure as Clark Clifford or Alger Hiss. His politics, where they can be puzzled out at all, are almost resolutely More Of The Same, The Same being those policies rejected (in one obvious case) by up to 70 percent of the American people.
  
  Therefore, all of the earnest speculation about his manly-man appeal to the base is based on how much utter bulls**t the man can sling between now and the first primary. He's a performance piece, nothing more. There isn't an ounce of authenticity to him that isn't storebought. He actually is the complete fake that the Cool Kids pretended Al Gore was in 2000. He's even from Tennessee and, it is said, he once dated cute li'l Maggie Carlson, the chipmunk-cheeked lightweight in the moonman glasses who once famously thought Gore was talkin' too smart for the likes of her vaporous self.
  
  Ain't got to worry about none of that with ol' Fred, missy. He talks to you straight -- at $700 an hour. He can speak to The Base? Wonderful. Speaking To The Base is what sent this party up on the rocks in the first place. The best chance he has is if the elite political media will create for him a character he can play on the national stage, the way Dick Wolf let him nearly ruin Law and Order over the past three years. I can't think of a presidential candidate in recent years whose actual life and career is so far removed from the stage-managed image his handlers and their enablers will project on a country they firmly believe is too stupid to know that it's being played.
  
  Oh, wait.
  
  Yes I can.
  
  p.s. -- And here is Exhibit A already. Note that the artful fakery begins right there after ol' Cornpone's name. He "will offer himself as a down-home antidote to Washington politics." (Hey, Michael and Dan, whose home is Fred "down"? Yours?) Ah, to look at the country and see such a nation of suckers. The guy was a lobbyist for 18 years. He'll be a lobbyist again five seconds after either his campaign or (god forbid) his administration ends. If it weren't for "Washington politics," he'd be hustling the Oak Ridge Boys for their representation. If A Face In The Crowd isn't already in every reporter's NetFlix queue, it ought to be.
  
  p.p.s. -- Oh, if you're planning on being a down-home antidote to Washington politics, your first move probably shouldn't be hiring a corruptly appointed U.S. Attorney whose only real talent appears to be in oppo research and vote suppression. Just sayin'.
  
  p.p.p.s -- How easy will it be for Cornpone to dazzle the rubes? Read this transcript and gaze in awe as Howie Fineman tells Alison Stewart how he can read John McCain's "secret language" as to how terrible it is that McCain was forced to whore himself out to the part of his party that thinks Bill O'Reilly is a public intellectual. I swear, you could make a fortune selling these guys bagsful of magic beans.

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