In the Republican primary campaign for the 2008 presidential nomination, the big news for the last week or so has been that TV actor and former US Senator Fred Thompson has become the party's 11th and most recent candidate for the nomination. This delights the conservative wing of the party, for two reasons. For one, at this point they'd be delighted if almost anybody jumped in, if it meant that there would be at least one plausible alternative to having to choose between McCain and Giuliani. But the bigger reason is that something about Fred Thompson reminds them very much of their nominal figurehead, the former Republican politician that they practically worship as a god, Ronald Reagan. They're hoping that nominating a conservative Republican elderly Hollywood actor will bring back the "Reagan magic."Now, leave aside just how "magic" the Reagan years really weren't. It's no secret that I despised Ronald Reagan for the treasonous Iran/Contra scandal and for the blot on this country's economy and its soul that we call Reaganomics. But that some people want those years back isn't news, isn't interesting enough for me to think about much, let alone write about. No, the much more fascinating thing for me is that frankly, Republicans are deluding themselves if they think that there's any way that Fred Thompson could step into Reagan's shoes, that he could carry on Reagan's legacy. And I'll tell you why: he just doesn't have the necessary experience, and even more importantly, he just doesn't have the skills. Fred Thompson in 2008 isn't the Ronald Reagan of 1980 who swept the country, divided the Democratic Party, and built a national ruling coalition so durable that it took George W. Bush to dent it. He'sthe Ronald Reagan of 1952. And the Ronald Reagan of 1952 knew full well that he wasn't even really qualified to be a big-name campaigner for real politicians, let alone to run for any serious office himself. See, Reagan's career didn't jump straight from Hollywood to politics, not as such. There's an important intermediate step in his biography. And if there hadn't been, nobody alive now would remember Ronald Reagan as anything other than a 2nd-tier or 3rd-tier character actor, because it was that job that gave him the skills that made him the famously Great Communicator.If you consult any even halfway good biography of Reagan (I'm partial to Smith & Gebbe'smyself), one of the first things they'll tell you is that up until about 1949, Ronald Reagan was, like almost everybody in America at that point, a Reform Democrat: that is to say, not interested in fringe candidates like the Republicans, but deeply anti-mafia and anti-communist, so someone who considered America's most important political issues to be how to force the mafia out of politics and how to keep Russian-backed communists from taking over the Democrats. But starting in 1949 under the influence of his about-to-be 2nd wife's father, and then under the influence of his 1952 TV show's sponsor the CEO of GE, Reagan became an increasingly committed convert to what my private school teachers summed up (based on the title of a book popular with them) as the "Clichés of Socialism" world view, the one that says that anything other than totally deregulated unrestricted free market capitalismcommunism, even if you dress it up in "liberal" clothes. And as the star of GE's anthology TV series, GE also used him to give a series of public relations speeches to civic groups all up and down the west coast, then across the southwest, about the evils of communism and the need for the US to ramp up the Cold War.Frankly, they didn't expect much to come of it. And at first, nothing much did. But then he underwent this weird transformation. He got tired of being stumped when people asked him questions after he gave The Speech that GE wrote for him. So he set out to research the subjects of The Speech, and did it his own way. He spent the next decade and a half clipping every article out ofthe Boy Scouts' of America's semi-official magazine, and out ofHe taped those articles to 5"x7" index cards, labeled them by topic, and spent night after night studying them until he could give an answer, cribbed mostly out ofbut an answer nonetheless, to almost every question that a middle class audience might ask him. Since at the time that same middle class audience mostly readthemselves, his answers weren't anything they hadn't heard already. But that audience took this as confirmation, not least of which because Reagan brought theview of the world to vibrant life for his audiences. The speeches became such a hit that GE started sending him out nationwide, at a hefty increase in salary, to spend day after day talking to any non-partisan civic organization that would have him. And less because he'd been a minor and mediocre Hollywood actor than because it was a really, really entertaining speech, those groups lined up to hear it: PTA, police and firefighters' charities, Rotary, Toastmasters, Optimists, Masons, Elks, Knights of Columbus, and of course hundreds of churches.Taking his research fromgave Ronald Reagan something that Fred Thompson doesn't have, something we didn't see again until Bill Clinton ran for office in 1992. Reagan could get up there and give a barn-burner of a speech that was absolutely strewn with warnings about what mistakes America was making and what was wrong with America, withoutdoubting either of two things: that he loved America nonetheless, and that he had absolute faith that the American people would fix these problems before they became serious. And those two things are something that the American voters absolutely want to hear from their candidates. Taking thatinspired speech out on to the road forbefore he made his own first run for office in 1967 gave him several other things that Fred Thompson doesn't have, either. At the top of the list was a level of name recognition not as an actor but as an expert on a critical political issue (communism), the kind of recognition that Al Gore's similar speech on global warming has given him on that topic. But it also introduced Ronald Reagan to millions of people, and millions of people to Ronald Reagan,After fifteen years of standing face to face with small to medium groups of American people night after night, Reagan fell in love not just with America, not just withcapitalism, buteven with those who he disagreed with. According to people who knew the man, even if he felt strongly enough about an issue to send the California state National Guard out to murder them for their politics (as he did as governor in the dispute over People's Park in Berkeley), it was in no way personal to him; if he'd met those same protesters he had murdered that same morning in his office, he would have liked them as people, and weirdly, they probably would have liked him too. And finally, by the end of a decade and a half of seriously researching and studying politicalafter a decade and a half of facing questions about those topics night after night until he'd heard every possible question, unlike Fred Thompson you couldn't really stump Ronald Reagan with a question. Whatever you asked him, he had an answer prepared.You don't get those things standing in front of TV cameras on a closed studio stage reciting a script a few lines at a time. You don't even get them running a single Senate campaign, and you sure don't get them inside the mostly snobby elite millionaire's club that is the US Senate. I don't even know where youget that experience any more, since most of the civic organizations that were so eager to book Ronald Reagan (the semi-successful actor and not-yet politician) for his famous speech on the evils of communism barely exist any more. But one thing's for sure: all of the things that made ReaganFred Thompson doesn't have any of them.