‘Fred Thompson’s Little Red Truck’

That former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) is moving forward with a presidential bid is hardly open to question anymore. Today, he hired a campaign manager (a former top aide to H.W. Bush), which is usually a reliable precursor to an announcement.

With this in mind, we can now expect the onslaught of little-red-truck stories. A few weeks ago, Noam Scheiber and Bob Somerby had a bit of a debate about how the media would cover the little red truck that helped Thompson get elected to the Senate in 1994. Scheiber argued that everyone would soon know that Thompson’s truck schtick was a fraud, little more than a phony prop. Somerby noted that everyone would not know because the media wouldn’t bother to report the story accurately.

Sorry, Noam, Somerby wins this round. Consider this gem from the new issue of Newsweek.

Folks in Franklin, Tenn., think they’ll know when Fred Thompson decides to run for president. Parked in Thompson’s mother’s driveway is the rusting red Chevy pickup that the former senator turned actor drove all over the state during his two U.S. Senate campaigns. He drove the truck to Washington in 1994 after he was elected to fill an unexpired term and used it as a populist stunt again during his re-election campaign, often giving speeches from the lowered tailgate. “People are watching that truck like hawks,” says the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land, who also lives in Franklin. “Nobody can imagine he won’t use it if he runs.” […]

Thompson, who now lives in Virginia, hasn’t driven his pickup in several years. The paint is peeling and its U.S. Senate license plates expired back in 2002. Mark Corallo, a spokesman, says Thompson “just hasn’t had the heart to sell her.”

This couldn’t be any less informative. I obviously don’t want to speak for Somerby, but this appears to be far worse than he imagined.

Way back in 1996, Michelle Cottle explained the reality.

True story: it is a warm evening in the summer of 1995. A crowd has gathered in the auditorium of a suburban high school in Knoxville, Tennessee. Seated in the audience is a childhood friend of mine who now teaches at the school. On stage is Republican Sen. Fred Dalton Thompson, the lawyer/actor elected in 1994 to serve out the remainder of Vice President Al Gore’s Senate term (when Gore’s appointed successor retired after just two years). The local TV stations are on hand as Thompson wraps up his presentation on tax reform, in the plain-spoken, down-to-earth style so familiar to those who have seen him in any of his numerous film and television performances.

Finishing his talk, Thompson shakes a few hands, then walks out with the rest of the crowd to the red pickup truck he made famous during his 1994 Senate campaign. My friend stands talking with her colleagues as the senator is driven away by a blond, all-American staffer. A few minutes later, my friend gets into her car to head home. As she pulls up to the stop sign at the parking lot exit, rolling up to the intersection is Senator Thompson, now behind the wheel of a sweet silver luxury sedan. He gives my friend a slight nod as he drives past. Turning onto the main road, my friend passes the school’s small, side parking area. Lo and behold: There sits the abandoned red pickup, along with the all-American staffer.

Thompson didn’t have an old red pickup, he leased it as a campaign prop. He didn’t even drive the thing — as Kevin Drum recently noted, “Basically, he just drove the thing the final few hundred feet before each campaign event, and then ditched it for something nicer as soon as he was out of sight of the yokels.”

Not a word of this appeared in the Newsweek piece, which suggests Thompson really did drive the red pickup “all over the state.”

Expect to hear quite a bit more of this in the coming weeks, after Thompson makes his announcement.