Bill Hobbs over at Elephant Biz has a nice write up on why Fred Thompson is just so damn popular.  Is it because he is the “real conservative” and everyone else is just a poser?  I highly doubt that.  While it is correct that Fred is a true conservative that doesn’t seem to be the real source of his appeal to the average American.

Fred Thompson is keepin it real and that is why they love Fred.  If he doesn’t know the answer to a question he doesn’t spew jargon out of his mouth to cover his ignorance, instead (in a truly novel approach) he simply admits that he isn’t educated on the issue at hand.  If he doesn’t believe in something, like tort reform for example, he simply says so even though he knows it will cost him conservative votes.  Fred Thompson is honest and has credibility, something that virtually no one in politics today has.  The GOP is so lost they don’t even seem to understand that they lack credibility with voters (both conservative and independent) and are making no effort to regain the trust they have managed to shatter over the last ten years.

Fred Thompson is doing something much more important that running for president, he is showing America how the political process can work again and what a true leader looks like.

For those of you who don’t work in the biz, so to speak, you may not have heard of TechPresident but it is a website run by the Personal Democracy Forum that focuses on the intersection of technology and politics.
The Personal Democracy Forum runs a website, TechPresident, that has become the focal point for a lot of chatter lately about the intersection of the internet and politics. It has been mostly a place to follow the sort of “inside baseball” chatter about how the business works. But since their conference last weekend they have launched a new project calling on the presidential candidates to be “Tech Presidents.” Their proposal encompasses six different proposals, which they say will bring technology into government and help the country. A thorough examination finds that they reflect a sort of big government thinking that one would have thought the decentralized world of the internet would naturally reject. The truth is we don’t need a “Tech President.” Technology will flourish when government stays out, not when it gets involved. I am sure that these were all very well intentioned, but each of these proposals would set the way for stagnation of ingenuity and freedom. Their proposals and my comments are below: Click to continue »