Grin and Bear It

Fred Thompson does not want to meet the Butter Princess. Everywhere he turns at this morning’s meet-and-greet at the Minnesota State Fair, he is surrounded by hundreds of star-struck onlookers, many of them “Law & Order” fans who line up three-dozen deep for a close-up with the actor who would be president. Thompson, a sometimes reluctant campaigner, is in full movie-star mode, and has his good-ole-boy charm set on high. All the women he meets are “honey” and the men “buddy.” Even dressed down in khakis and a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he is hard to miss. At 6 feet 6, he is head-and-shoulders taller than anyone around him. Posing for picture after picture, he reflexively stoops to fit in the frame. Some fans ask him to autograph DVDs of “The Hunt for Red October” and “In the Line of Fire,” movies in which he had small but memorable parts playing powerful, world-weary men. “Run, Fred, run!” comes a shout from the crowd. Thompson lets out a long, low chuckle. All in all,

he looks downright thrilled to be here.

Yet even on the best of days, there are limits to how far he is willing to go to please the people. As Thompson and his wandering retinue near the booth where the Butter Princess is holding court, most of his followers peel off to get a look at her. She is one of the fair’s main attractions, and it’s easy to see why. She is blonde and beautiful and all of 90 pounds—of butter. Carved that morning from a solid block, she smiles vacantly through the glass of her 38-degree display case. Inside, the sculptor, a woman bundled in a coat and gloves, is at work on another dairy masterpiece. Each day she creates a new bust, modeled after the real young women voted to the fair’s royal court. The windows are crowded with people trying to get a look. Thompson hangs back; he clearly wants to move on. This is the second dairy statue he’s had to endure this month—a couple of weeks earlier, he grudgingly posed next to a two-ton butter cow in Iowa—and he has lost any interest he may have had in the genre. He does his best to muster some enthusiasm. “Oh, she’s got a wand,” he says weakly. “That’s somethin’.”

A Minnesota politician offers to introduce him to the sculptor. “No, no,” he demurs, trying to look disappointed. “I wouldn’t want to get in the way.” At the moment, Thompson is interested in only one thing—the giant strawberry milkshakes being sold a few yards away. He starts to walk off, but the locals aren’t having any of it. Fred Thompson has come all this way, and he’s going to get the full VIP treatment. Emissaries are dispatched. Hushed conversations are had. Thompson is ushered to the booth where the artist is hard at work in her icy cell. He plasters on an aw-shucks grin and sticks his head in the door for the briefest of hellos. When he comes back out, an aide rewards him with a milkshake.

It was a small but telling moment. Like all politicians, presidential candidates are expected, reasonably or not, to be tireless schmoozers of butter sovereigns, Iowa farmers, New Hampshire townsfolk, South Carolina churchgoers and so on. If you are going to run, you have to run, and that means practicing retail politics even when it is the last thing on earth you want to do.

There’s no doubt Thompson looks the part; there’s a reason Hollywood directors have sought him out to play wise Washington hands in the movies. His deeply lined, gently scowling face exudes authority, and he knows how to use his LBJ-size frame to impress and intimidate. And there is that disarming rumble when he speaks, a voice so grand that John McCain jokes he would be president if only he had Thompson’s vocal cords. But as he prepares to formally begin his campaign for the White House this week, after months of “testing the waters,” the conventional wisdom in Washington is that Thompson doesn’t want it badly enough, isn’t willing to work hard enough—put bluntly, that he is lazy. “He needs to show he has the appetite for a presidential campaign, and he hasn’t shown that yet,” says a top White House official who did not want to be named sticking a knife in the back of a fellow Republican. “It’s the hardest work in the world. I’m not sure he wants to work that hard.”