Fred hints at South strategy
Posted: Monday, November 19, 2007 7:08 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC/NJ’s Adam Aigner-Treworgy
KENNER, La. -- As airports and highways began filling up with people headed out of town for the holiday, Thompson made his first visit to Louisiana, talking to a small group of 75 supporters at the Airport Hilton outside of New Orleans. The room was set up to hold more than 200 Fred-heads, but it appeared that most of Thompson’s supporters in southern Louisiana had headed out of town a bit earlier than the campaign had expected.
Thompson began by saying that while other candidates pour money into early voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire, he wanted to visit the south because he’s “got a feeling before it’s over Louisiana’s going to have a big say in this” election. (Louisiana’s primary is Feb. 9th.)
He went on to talk about the importance of adhering to conservative principles in order to prevent the “keys to this country” from being turned over to the Democratic Party, who Thompson said, “are apparently planning for careers in NASCAR. It’s a turn constantly to the left. They will soon wind up back where they started. And some of them are going faster than the others, but they’re all going in same direction in a not very perfect circle.”
Speaking to reporters after the event, Thompson was hesitant to respond aggressively to Huckabee’s criticism voiced over the weekend that Thompson’s federalist approach to abortion rights stemmed from “the logic of the Civil War.”
“I don’t know about the Governor’s history,” Thompson said. All I know is that he’s talking about hypothetical situations, and I’m talking about my record. We’ll also get a chance to talk about his record in Arkansas. I have eight years dealing with every kind of abortion-related issue in the United States Senate, just about anything that would come before a Congress or a president…and for my entire career, almost a decade of public service, I’ve been 100 percent pro-life, in all of my votes.
“So you launch into these hypothetical discussions that if you do adequately it takes 30 minutes to get through, and I don’t think we’ve got it through here today. But I would refer him to my record.”
While in the New Orleans area, Thompson also took the opportunity to comment on the government’s response to hurricanes Rita and Katrina, and his suggestions for improving the government’s response.
“Katrina and Rita were devastating,” Thompson said, “every American knows that, [and] every American knows that FEMA’s response was not what it should be.” He added that he issued a report in 2001 addressing the “incompetent” areas of the federal government, including FEMA. “It’s a part of a much bigger problem…we have a government full of mismanagement, overlap, duplication, growing bureaucracy, where computers don’t talk to each other and departments and agencies can’t pass an audit. So, that’s at the root of it.”
Thompson said that he felt a lot of progress had been made on the cleanup of New Orleans, evidenced by people returning to their homes, but there “are still problems with regard to the housing market, insurance and things of that nature” that he hopes the newly elected Gov. Bobby Jindal will address.
“Leadership makes a difference,” Thompson concluded. “I think you’ve got an effective leader [in Jindal], and he’s putting together an effective team, and I’m going to see what he has to say with regard to the details of any of these proposals.”
