Jon’s with Fred
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James Joyner | Thursday, June 7, 2007 |
After being hired on to the George Allen campaign too late to help clean up the post-Macaca mess and six months as the new media rep for the Republican minority in the Senate, Jon Henke is back to blogging at Q and O and on board the Fred Thompson campaign bandwagon.
I’m not sure what to make of Thompson’s candidacy. He’s a likable, smart, and charismatic fellow. Still, I’m not sure that his public policy resume shows adequate preparation for the presidency. Certainly, during the brief time he was my Senator (I lived in Tennessee during the 1995-96 academic year) he was more a show horse than a work horse.
The Henke hire is a good one, presuming they’ll actually listen to him. Allen’s staff didn’t and while Mitch McConnell did plenty of blog outreach through Henke, they mostly used him as a press flack sending out far too many emails against his own judgment.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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Henke was an interesting writer, but he's pretty dull as a campaign hack. I don't think that's unique to him, but once you take a job that involves "sending out far too many emails against [your] own judgment" it becomes impossible to read anything you write as an argument from conviction.
Henke was an interesting writer, but he's pretty dull as a campaign hack.
Sometimes dull can be good. No serious campaign wants to go through their own Amanda Marcotte episode...
Dull is good for campaigns, but bad for bloggers and their readers. The Marcotte case makes that clear. Had Marcotte "behaved," the campaign would have been happy, but Pandagon's readers would have felt short-changed.
It's hard to know what to make of Thompson's candidacy, since he's only 'kind of' a candidate at this point, which allows him to avoid answering any of the tough questions and only do things that he wants to do.
What I want to know about is his foreign policy. What does he think about China? What does he think about aid? Does he think that we should do anything about people starving around the world and dying of diseases (such as AIDS and malaria) that we can help prevent? Those are questions he doesn't have to answer right now, he can just sit back and criticize everyone else (just like Gore does with the Democrats).
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