Thompson hammers home his conservative bona fides
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By Tom Saul | Friday, December 21, 2007 |
Just 15 days shy of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, Fred Thompson hammered home his “constant, consistent conservative” record and values to a crowd of about 150 in Davenport on Wednesday.
With time growing short and Thompson trailing far behind Republican front runners Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, according to a Quad-City Times-Lee Enterprises newspaper poll published over the weekend, Thompson said it was no time to elect a novice to the nation’s most important job at such a crucial juncture in its history.
“It is not time for on-the-job training, it’s time for proven leadership,” Thompson said in a 45 minute speech that touched on hot button issues such as illegal immigration, the future of Social Security and the United State’s role in an increasingly dangerous world.
On immigration, Thompson said the country should secure its borders, send back those who are here illegally regardless of whether they have children here and penalize so-called “sanctuary cities” by withholding federal money from them.
“We should be a nation with high fences and wide gates and we should decide how long they are open,” Thompson told the mostly male partisan crowd. “It’s like our home. We get to decide who comes in our home.”
On the third day of a bus tour that will take him to 50 cities and towns in Iowa, Thompson said he would simplify the nation’s income tax code and flatten tax rates and reform Social Security to save it. Those were all issues he tackled during two terms in the U.S. Senate from 1994 through 2002 when he won a seat in Tennessee formerly held by Democrat Al Gore, he said.
On strengthening the military and battling terrorism, Thompson said, “You don’t go looking for a fight if you’re the United States of America, but if you find yourself in one, you win it.”
David Moeller, 41, of Davenport was an early backer of ex-Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, who dropped out of the race for the Republican nod in August. He now leans toward Thompson and attended the event at the Radisson Quad-City Plaza “to see if he backs up what I think he stands for.” He had his 14-year-old son Michael in tow.
The verdict?
“I didn’t disagree with a single thing he said,” Moeller said. “I hope he can be a candidate and a president who brings back conservative values to the White House. I hope the road he was talking about going down does something to shine a light on the fact that the Republican Party is for the little guy, and not just for big business like some people think, because that’s what the party really is about.”
Tom Saul can be contacted at (563) 383-2453 or tsaul@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.
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