Want to be Freddy's girl...

By Libby

I suppose I really have to say something about Sarah Baxter's piece on Fred Thompson's ex-lovers. According to Sarah his "legions" of ex'es still adore him and want him to be president. Well, at least three of them do. You can't buy an endorsement like this from "Lorrie Morgan, a country singer who dated Thompson and considered marrying him in the mid1990s."

“I think he has a great chance of capturing the women’s vote. He’s majestic. He’s a soft, safe place to be and that could be Fred’s ticket. Women love a soft place to lay and a strong pair of hands to hold us,” she said.

Supply your own snark on that quote -- it's really too easy. Morgan also found him to be the very soul of chivalry. He lights your cigs, he opens doors and buys wonderful gifts. A genuine ladies man all right.

Another ex, "Georgette Mosbacher, a leading Republican fundraiser who dated Thompson after Morgan" and is good friends with current wife Jeri, says he can appeal to “traditional women" and can charm the pants off "professional women" too. In fact according to Fred, he can charm the pants off any old kind of woman.

“I was single for a long time and yep I chased a lot of women,” Thompson told them with a grin. “And a lot of women chased me. And those who chased me tended to catch me.”

According to Jeri, he was charming them all, even while they were together.

When she was dating Thompson, Kehn complained that she had to chase other women away. “They just won’t leave him alone,” she told a gossip columnist. “I can’t get up to get a cocktail at a party without coming back and finding some girl sitting in my chair.”

Why Mr. Chivalry wasn't graciously fetching her cocktail is unclear but you can add to the Greek Chorus of praise for Freddy's charm, one of Jeri's rivals, who apparently doesn't hold a grudge. Margaret Carlson, now a columnist for Bloomberg News, is no sore loser.

“He’s handsome, he’s charming, he sounds like a president,” Carlson gushed recently. “He’s smart, he’s articulate, he knows his line, he can hit his mark.”

Cool. Maybe he can play the next president on that TV show everyone but me has seen.

Fred also claims that his ex-wife is going to campaign for him. I can see it now. Fred standing at the podium with his young wife and their babies and his old wife with his grown children, who are older than the new wife and maybe a couple of former lovers adoringly gazing at the candidate. It might get a little crowded though if they let all his former conquests on the stage.

I think we can safely assume that Fred makes a great date and is probably good in bed but I think I'll hold my retraction on whether he's a cad or not until after his ex-wife speaks for herself and we've heard from a few more of the legion of ex'es. And nobody doubts that he's a good enough actor to play a president on TV but running a country is more than delivering prepared remarks and charming the "wimmen."

The real criteria is, how does he do when he doesn't have a memorized script and has to relate to other men? Does he study the issues and have a command of the knowledge necessary to effectively govern and repair the damage Bush has done to our foreign policy? Well, judge for yourself.

Here's some video that says it's of the prepared remarks he made in England during his trip to "woo Baroness Thatcher" in an attempt to establish his foreign policy cred. I think it might be really be of a Q&A afterwards. It looks to me, without a script or a pretty face to play to, he pretty much comes off as rather evasive, somewhat bumbling and uniformed. Judging from the audience response, I'd say that the men didn't find him all that charming either.