Fred Thompson’s “Hands Down” thing

Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson is a bit low on campaign cash, so filling up his campaign bus with gas and traveling around Iowa is much cheaper than air fare to ferry between Iowa and New Hampshire in the closing days before both states host contests.

Thompson’s bus tour theme is  "The Clear Conservative Choice:  Hands Down."  It’s meant to remind Iowa Republicans of Thompson’s refusal at this month’s The Des Moines Register debate to participate in a "show of hands" when the moderator asked the candidates whether they believed there was such a thing as global warning.

"You know, tell us about the future of the world, you know, in 30 second kind of things and then when 30 seconds gets to be even too long, they just want…a show of hands and I could see what was comin’, you know, they’re going to run issue by issue by issue with ambiguous, you know, kinds of questions that nobody can say an absolute yes or no on some of them and I could see that comin’ and I just wasn’t playin’ that game," Thompson said during a telephone interview with Radio Iowa this past week.  "There’s no way I could have anticipated that but my natural instinct was to say, ‘Wait a minute.  This isn’t right.  I ain’t doin’ it." 

Thompson suggested his competitors who shared that debate stage were all ready to dance to the moderator’s tune until he, rhetorically, put his foot down. "And then of course when I did that everybody else jerked their hands down right quick," Thompson said. "…If you want to talk about a serious issue, then let’s talk about it, but none of this lookin’ like a bunch of trained seals there waitin’ for the next fish to be thrown to us." 

I gave Thompson an unlimited amount of time to express his views on global warming.  He talked for 90 seconds.  The story on that is coming on Radio Iowa on Tuesday.