To big for presidential boots

Oh, my, talk about the star making the late entrance.
Fred Thompson has finally declared his intention to run as a candidate in the Republican presidential primary.
Surprise it is not, since he has been campaigning for months. No, it's a big yawn.
What is surprising, however, is the aggressively bad taste of his choice of time and place.
With things coming down to the bone in Iowa, the other candidates were hammering it out in the fiestiest CNN GOP debate yet.
Fred chose to hang back from lining up on a stage with them.
Those politicians are not really his own kind.
Fred is a better kind.
He is a showbiz star. He can rub shoulders with the popular boys.
And so he chose to declare his intention to run as a candidate for president to Jay Leno.
Jay is his kind.
After all, more people would be watching the Tonight Show than the debate, surely.
I am not sure what are the ethics of this sort of manipulation of the media. Jay may think it is a bit of a scoop to have that second-rate actor making his declaration on his show but, truth is, the second-rate actor with presidential ambitions was using Jay and Jay's popularity for his own ends.
It is sleazy.
But the star has shown his hand. He has shown that he believes the voters will be more swayed by his celebrity than by the political positions of his rivals.
He patronises the public with this assumption - the assumption that they are all shallow idiots blinded by fame and oblivious to national priorities.

One can only hope that he is wrong.