OPPONENTS TREATING THOMPSON CAMPAIGN AS THREAT

As Little Miss Chatterbox more or less said said this morning, TAB is pretty much Fred country. One way to gauge Thompsons's potential run is to look at what his opponents are doing. According to Melanie Morgan, they're taking him quite seriously:

In the June 13 edition of The Politico, Kenneth P. Vogel writes about the efforts of potential GOP rivals to "deflate" the Thompson campaign before it is even launched. Vogel's column in The Politico should be the canary in the coalmine for Republicans...[It] demonstrates the current crop of Republican presidential candidates haven't figured out that their problem is not Fred Thompson's potential candidacy. The problem they should be addressing is the failure of the current candidates to connect with the American electorate. Columbia University journalism professor and Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has demonstrated the media establishment's discomfort with the Thompson boomlet as well.

It's also obvious that more and more people are talking about Thompson's wife - not all of them positively. . You'll remember her from when we predicted she'd become a target of sexism from ostensible anti-sexists. Then when she did become a target of sexism from ostensible anti-sexists, NPR went into rock-back-and-forth-in-the-corner denial. Some of the interest in her is just plain old curiosity. Some more of it is coming from conservatives looking for whatever they can find about a Republican candidate that they can get excited about. But not a little is oppo research - from other GOP people, from a very few Dem campaigns, and from whatever passes as "flexing their muscles" for the netroots. Really - that's how they talk.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]