He hasn’t formally, formally announced his candidacy, but Republican actor-politician Fred Thompson has dropped enough hints that we’ve added him to our list of Candidates 2008.
USA Today says that Thompson will announce his run on July 4th. There’s something symbolic about that date, apparently.
Thompson has bounced back and forth between politics and Hollywood for years. He was a Senate lawyer during the Watergate hearings in 1973-74, played opposite Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner in the movies, became a senator from Tennessee (1994-2003) and then had a steady gig as a district attorney on the TV show Law & Order.
It’s hard not to compare Thompson with actor-politician Ronald Reagan, right down to what ABC News says is his “famously lax work ethic.” (And they might know: Thompson has his own radio broadcast on ABC News, the Fred Thompson Report.)
Potential trivia bonanza: at 6’6″, Thompson would be the tallest president in American history. The current champ in that department is Abraham Lincoln, who stood a mere 6’4″.