There’s something hilarious about the staff shakeup at the Fred Thompson campaign, considering that it isn’t an actual presidential campaign yet.
Today comes news (via Marc Ambinder) that the campaign’s opposition-research director has quit (maybe he wanted to spend more time investigating someone’s family) following yesterday’s dumping of the campaign manager and the hiring of Spence Abraham to run the not-yet-extant presidential bid. (Thompson partisans should feel good about the Abraham appointment: He has one of the sharpest minds in politics, and was a key figure in the successful effort to revitalize and redirect the Michigan Republican party in the 1980s.)
All of this puts me in mind of a great running joke in the 1998 end-of-high-school movie Can’t Hardly Wait, which is set almost entirely at a house party on the night following graduation. At the beginning of the movie, a rock band forms in the living room to play at the party. As the party goes on, the band begins to squabble about the direction it is taking. The band breaks up around midnight — this is, remember, about three hours from when the band formed — and its members are full of acrimony and bitter feeling. Finally, at the end of the movie as the sun begins to rise, the band wistfully reunites for one more number.
If Thompson doesn’t get into the race pretty soon, all this instability in his ranks is going to turn him into a laughingstock.