Thompson digs into policy, likes to delegate
— -- What makes a leader?
We examine this year's leading presidential candidates through that prism.
Our leadership categories are adapted from standards developed by Fred Greenstein, a Princeton scholar and author of "The Presidential Difference."
Greenstein says the modern presidency is so powerful, voters should take careful stock of the strengths and weaknesses candidates might bring to the job — from their psychology, emotional maturity and vision to the way they process information, manage and communicate.
Using Greenstein's work as a jumping-off point, we assess candidates in the following areas: political skills, communication skills, policy vision, decision-making style and management skills.
The eight profiled candidates have double-digit support in the latest national USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.
Political skills
Fred Thompson is an accomplished politician who has played a variety of roles for the Republican Party:
• He helped run former Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker's campaign.
• He served as a congressional committee staff lawyer, including his famous stint as Baker's chief minority counsel for the Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal.
• He has helped raise money for Republicans in Tennessee and around the country and served on government advisory committees.
He also was chairman of the State Department's International Security Advisory Board.
"He was and is a strong partisan," says Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. But he says Thompson is politically savvy enough to know when to put partisanship aside and work with Democrats.
His political skills are reflected in a successful Washington lobbying career that he pursued before running for the U.S. Senate and afterward. Among his high-profile lobbying clients were Westinghouse Electric Corp., the Teamsters and Toyota Motor Corp.
A sign of how he is regarded was President Bush's selection of him to shepherd the nomination of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts through the confirmation process. With a closely divided Senate and a highly charged partisan atmosphere, Roberts' confirmation was expected to be a tough fight. But careful cultivation of key senators — combined with Roberts' impressive resume and even-keeled performance during his Senate committee hearing — led to a surprisingly easy confirmation.
In his first Senate campaign, his first bid for public office, Thompson went from 20 points down to then-Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., to a 20-point win. His campaign — for the remaining two years of then-Vice President Al Gore's unexpired Senate seat — turned around when he changed to jeans and work shirt from suits and toured the state in a red pickup.
