‘A Lackluster Candidate’

Thompson also refused to read his prepared remarks, straying into rambling discourses on the stump that drove his staff crazy. "Stick to the text. Please stick to the text!" another aide, who declined to be named discussing private conversations with the candidate, recalls telling Thompson.

Thompson faced questions from the start about whether he had the necessary fire in the belly. But he did little to try to rebut that notion, keeping a loose, light schedule even in the waning weeks of his campaign. He did issue aggressive policy pronouncements—on health care and how to save Social Security, to name two. But voters just didn't bite. In spite of a last-ditch push in Iowa, Thompson placed a distant third, barely besting McCain, who had hardly bothered to campaign in the state. Thompson skipped New Hampshire to concentrate on South Carolina. But he failed to make serious inroads among evangelicals there; in spite of the endorsement of the National Right to Life, he lost to Mike Huckabee.

What happens now is a mystery. Thompson, who headed to Tennessee after South Carolina to care for his ailing mother, has privately told associates that he will not endorse another candidate, at least not immediately. It has long been expected that Thompson would endorse McCain, a close friend and former Senate ally. Thompson chaired McCain's 2000 campaign and had been making calls on behalf of the Arizona senator's presidential campaign before he decided to launch his own bid.

Yet it's unclear if Thompson's endorsement would make a huge difference in the race. According to exit polls in Iowa and South Carolina, Thompson's biggest appeal was among voters who described themselves as "very conservative." More than half of his supporters described themselves as evangelicals; they split their vote between Thompson and Huckabee. For his part, Huckabee told MSNBC that he likely would have won South Carolina had Thompson not been in the race. "The votes that he took were essentially the votes I would have most likely had," Huckabee said Tuesday.

Now Huckabee and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney are scrambling to pick up what support Thompson had in Florida; the two are locked in a close contest with front runners McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Within an hour of Thompson's announcement Tuesday, Romney issued a statement praising Thompson, an unusual move for a candidate who has clashed often with the former Tennessee senator. "He stood for strong conservative ideas and believed strongly in the need to keep our conservative coalition together," Romney said in the statement.

Thompson associates refused to predict whether the former Tennessee senator would change his mind and throw his support behind a rival, and declined to speculate on who benefits most from his departure. Instead, one outgoing Thompson aide told NEWSWEEK, staffers were mourning a "lost opportunity."