Fred Thompson on why running for President is worthwhile

From David Broder’s column on Fred Thompson in the WashPo today: 

“There’s no reason for me to run just to be president,” [Thompson] said. “I don’t desire the emoluments of the office. I don’t want to live a lie and clever my way to the nomination or election. But if you can put your ideas out there — different, more far-reaching ideas — that is worth doing.”

. . .

Thompson repeatedly cites two texts as fueling his concern about the country’s future. One is “Government at the Brink,” a two-volume report he issued as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee at the start of the Bush administration in 2001 and handed to the new president’s budget director as a checklist of urgent management problems.

The difficulties outlined in federal procurement, personnel, finances and information technology remain, Thompson said, and increasingly “threaten national security.”

His second sourcebook contains the scary reports from Comptroller General David Walker, the head of the Government Accountability Office, on the long-term fiscal crisis spawned by the aging of the American population and the runaway costs of health care. Walker labels the current patterns of federal spending “unsustainable” and warns that unless action is taken soon to improve both sides of the government’s fiscal ledger — spending and revenue — the next generation will suffer.

That is putting it mildly.  That report says more than the next generation will “suffer.”  As we just wrote the other day, it is a report that essentially predicts “The Fall of the American Republic” akin to the Fall of Rome.

This just goes to show that Fred is looking at trying to do the “big things” with the presidency.  I suppose that is why I am drawn to his candidacy, just as I was to Steve Forbes in ’96.  Both men espoused a vision that would fundamentally shake-up the status quo, which of course in turn made them very, very dangerous to the people who make their living off of that.  Expect Bob Dole’s old “risky scheme” phrase that he used against Forbes to be resurrected against Thompson, perhaps by Mitt Romney who has shown himself consistent in his use of class-warfare arguments against the flat tax using left-wing rhetoric.