What is Fred Thompson after?

From McClatchy Newspaper:

WASHINGTON - Fred Thompson hasn't spent a dime campaigning. Hasn't participated in three nationally televised debates. He won't even declare his candidacy for another several weeks, if then.
Yet new polls in recent days show the former Tennessee senator and actor bursting into the top tier for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. For example, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll published Thursday put Thompson second, with 20 percent support among Republicans, behind only former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had 29 percent. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Arizona Sen. John McCain tied for third at 14 percent.

A Thompson juggernaut? Maybe.

But the surge of support might say as much about the state of the party as it does about the man. Because the party is restless for a new leader in the coming post-Bush era and far from ready to rally behind any of the choices it's seen so far.

"It's churning," said Maurice Carroll, the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Connecticut. "Nobody is dominating, and a number of Republicans feel they could do better and want a bigger field."

"Thompson is being touted as the new Ronald Reagan," said Susan Pinkus, the director of the Los Angeles Times poll. "All of his allure, though, is on an untested candidate who has not had to endure the rigors of a national high-profile campaign or spar with his rivals in three Republican debates."

The Times poll this week found Giuliani at 27 percent, Thompson at 21 percent, McCain slipping to 12 percent and Romney at 10 percent.

Here are some facts on Thompson:

"Thompson has acknowledged the importance of being Fred Thompson and expressed his wholehearted willingness to be the not-Bush-Bush candidate by inviting and accepting the Bush clan's help on his campaign and fundraising, by hiring all the old Bush and Cheney aides to run his campaign, by wooing all the old Bush-Cheney backers, and by carrying on Bush's talking points without allowing so much as a smidge of daylight between his stance and the presidents'," A. Alexander wrote June 7, 2007, in The Progressive Daily

During the Fox News interview, Thompson articulated several of his current political views. He reiterated his opposition to abortion rights, gun control, and gay marriage; and support for the Iraq War (with no withdrawal timeline), Bush's tax cuts, and a presidential pardon for Libby.

Here is an excerpt of Thompson on Fox News:

WALLACE: Abortion.
THOMPSON: Pro-life.
WALLACE: Would you like to overturn Roe. ...

WALLACE: Do you want to overturn Roe vs. Wade?
THOMPSON: I think Roe vs. Wade was bad law and bad medical science. And the way to address that is through good judges. I don't think the court ought to wake up one day and make new social policy for the country. It's contrary to what it's been the past 200 years.
We have a process in this country to do that. Judges shouldn't be doing that. That's what happened in that case. I think it was wrong.
WALLACE: Gay rights.
THOMPSON: Gay rights? I think that we ought to be a tolerant nation. I think we ought to be tolerant people. But we shouldn't set up special categories for anybody.
And I'm for the rights of everybody, including gays, but not any special rights.
WALLACE: So, gay marriage? You're against.
THOMPSON: Yes. You know, marriage is between a man and a woman, and I don't believe judges ought to come along and change that.
WALLACE: What about civil unions?
THOMPSON: I think that that ought to be left up to the states. I personally do not think that that is a good idea, but I believe in many of these cases where there's real dispute in the country, these things are not going to be ever resolved.
People are going to have different ideas. That's why we have states. We ought to give great leeway to states and not have the federal government and not have the Supreme Court of the United States making social policy that's contrary to the traditions of this country and changing that overnight. And that's what's happened in a lot of these areas.
WALLACE: Gun control.
THOMPSON: Well, I'm against gun control generally. You know, you check my record. You'll find I'm pretty consistent on that issue.
WALLACE: So this federal court — appeals court ruling this last week, I guess Friday, in the case of D.C. — you'd be perfectly happy to have people have handguns in their homes?
THOMPSON: Yes. Absolutely. The court basically said the Constitution means what it says, and I agree with that.

WALLACE: What would you do now in Iraq?
THOMPSON: I would do essentially what the president's doing. I know it's not popular right now, but I think we have to look down the road and consider the consequences of where we are.
We're the leader of the free world whether we like it or not. People are looking to us to test our resolve and see what we're willing to do in resolving the situation that we have there. People think that if we hadn't gone down there, things would have been lovely.
If Saddam Hussein was still around today with his sons looking at Iran developing a nuclear capability, he undoubtedly would have reconstituted his nuclear capability. Things would be worse than what they are today.
We've got to rectify the mistakes that we've made. We went in there too light, wrong rules of engagement, wrong strategy, placed too much emphasis on just holding things in place while we built up the Iraqi army, took longer than we figured.
Wars are full of mistakes. You rectify things. I think we're doing that now. We're coming in with good people. We're coming in with a lot of different people. I know General Petraeus from when he was in Tennessee at Fort Campbell. He believes in the plan. He's convinced me that they can do the job.
Why would we not take any chance, even though there's certainly no guarantees, to not be run out of that place? I mean, we've got to take that opportunity and give it a chance to work.

WALLACE: And you helped raise millions of dollars for his extraordinary legal expenses. Would President Thompson — you like the sound of that probably. Would President Thompson pardon Libby now or would you wait until all of his legal appeals are exhausted?
THOMPSON: I'd do it now.
WALLACE: Because?
THOMPSON: I'd do it now. This is a trial that never would have been brought in any other part of the world. This is a miscarriage of justice.
One man and his wife and 14-year-old and 10-year-old children are bearing the brunt of a political maelstrom here that produced something that never should have come about.
These people knew in the very beginning — the Justice Department, this Justice Department and the special counsel knew in the very beginning that the thing that was creating the controversy, who leaked Valerie Plame's name, did not constitute a violation of the law.
And then they knew that it — someone did leak the name. And it was Mr. Armitage. It wasn't Scooter Libby.
But he evidently wasn't a designated bad guy, so they passed over that and spent the next year drilling in a dry well and finally got some inconsistencies or some failure to remember out of Mr. Libby and made a prosecution out of it and went to trial on a he-said, she-said perjury case and faulty memory, when practically every witness in the trial either had inconsistent statements, told the FBI one thing, told the grand jury something else, inconsistent between the witnesses that were presented at the case, and sometimes both.
And yet at the end of the day, the only person that the jury got an opportunity to pass judgment on was Scooter Libby. It's not fair. And I would do anything that I could to alleviate that.