Fred -- or' Freddie' -- files in NH
Posted: Monday, October 29, 2007 4:56 PM by Mark Murray
From NBC/NJ's Adam Aigner-TreworgyCONCORD, NH -- On the same day he holds a grand opening for his campaign’s New Hampshire headquarters this evening,
Thompson sat at the historic filing desk here and added his name to the nation’s first primary ballot. Yet because his name is legally Freddie Dalton Thompson, his first name will appear in quotations as is the procedure with nicknames.
Along with the official filing form, all of the candidates who file in New Hampshire are traditionally asked to add their autograph to a sheet that commemorates the particular election cycle. Thompson’s signature took up the bottom left corner of the page, and next to it he wrote, “New Hampshire 1st in the nation, forever!”
After leaving the filing desk Thompson took questions from members of the New Hampshire media, who immediately began grilling him on why he’d waited so long to come back to their state. One reporter asked how Thompson expected to do well in the nation’s first primary without “face to face contact with voters.”
“The election’s not today,” Thompson responded. “The real issue is what’s the situation on Election Day. By that time I will have been in New Hampshire a lot. I will have shown New Hampshire the same respect that I’m showing these other states. "But" -- channeling Yogi Berra, as we noted earlier -- "every time you’re somewhere that means you’re not somewhere else.”
Another reporter, who had covered Romney’s filing here earlier in the day, asked what Thompson thought about the governor calling him a “Freddie-come-lately” to the immigration issue, and if he had cast any votes in the Senate that may be contradictory to his current stance against illegal immigration.
“The only votes that I’ve heard them criticize me for are some votes cast back in the ‘90s, where when I went and looked, the overwhelming majority of Republicans voted the same way,” Thompson replied. “Governor Romney, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember him supporting President Bush’s immigration plan when it came out. Now, surprisingly, he’s changed his position on that and I understand that he now is against the final version of that bill, but the final version was better than the original version. So, if we’re going to talk about Johnny-come-lately’s, you know I believe the governor is going to have to address that little point.”
