Editorial: Same thing, different package

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 | 6:58 a.m.

Fred Thompson portrays himself as a good ol' boy from Tennessee, just the kind of outsider who, if elected president, would be a breath of fresh air in Washington.

Thompson has yet to formally declare his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, but the strong poll numbers for the former U.S. senator and actor, who until recently played the folksy district attorney on the television show "Law & Order," already are impressive. There are even pundits making comparisons of the socially conservative Thompson to a Republican icon - Ronald Reagan.

The image Thompson is selling doesn't exactly match the reality of his life in politics, though, and a much less flattering picture is emerging as the public gets to better know Thompson. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1994 to fill an unexpired term, and he left the Senate in 2002 after serving eight mostly uneventful years.

The Associated Press has reported that this is the same Fred Thompson who, when he wasn't a U.S. senator, was paid in excess of $1 million for lobbying the federal government for more than 20 years. His clients weren't exactly the kind that will elicit warm and fuzzy feelings from voters. As AP reminds us, "he lobbied for a savings-and-loan deregulation bill that helped hasten the industry's collapse and a failed nuclear energy project that cost taxpayers more than $1 billion."

A part of Thompson's past that has been lionized over the years was his work as the minority counsel on the Senate Watergate Committee, whose investigation has been credited in large part with helping bring about Richard Nixon's downfall , which ended with his resignation in 1974.

Indeed, Thompson's presidential exploratory committee Web site plays up his role in the Senate committee's investigation, saying he "gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White House Oval Office."

What the Web site doesn't say is that it was someone else on the committee's staff who actually uncovered the taping system. And although Thompson is the one who did ask a Nixon administration official whether there was a taping system in the White House, Thompson tipped off Nixon's lawyer the day before that the committee knew about the existence of the taping system.

A former investigator for the Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong, told the Boston Globe that it was just one of a number of leaks to the White House. "Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong told the Globe. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."

Maybe now it's not so puzzling why Thompson so early on was calling for President Bush to pardon Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the CIA leak case. Thompson was simply being a team player, just as he was during the Watergate scandal.

Thompson does come across as a regular guy, one you might like to hang out with at a picnic, but so did George Bush in 2000 - and look where that got us. He may be quite an actor, but even Thompson can't reinvent himself to the point that he can erase his past, a past that will be relevant for voters to consider as he seeks the highest office in the land.