I don’t know Matt Continetti at all, so maybe that’s why I shared Chotiner’s puzzlement about Continetti’s response to this episode:

Ryan Spidell, 19, who works in the kitchen at the Midtown Cafe in Newton, Iowa, asked Thompson about “Sen. Kennedy’s bill on college debt.”

Spidell was referring to Kennedy’s Student Debt Relief Act, which would cut interest rates on student loans and cap loan payments.

Thompson had never heard of it.

Continetti takes the Politico reporting as evidence that the media are now underestimating Thompson.  How you can underestimate someone who consistently underperforms all expectations is a bit of a mystery, but there it is.  Continetti then says at the conclusion:

And you gotta wonder whether elite media circles in New York and Washington are seriously underestimating the power of Thompson’s cultural appeal to Sunbelt conservatives.

But is ignorance about the relevant pending legislation actually culturally appealing to Sunbelt conservatives?  As a conservative who hails from what I suppose counts as part of “the Sunbelt” and still votes in New Mexico, I would have to say no.  The larger point is that this is how Thompson answers almost every question.  It usually goes something like this: “Well, you know, when I was driving around Tennessee during my Senate campaign, I learned that the American people love freedom and that they want the government to do good things, not bad things.  I’m not familiar with the specifics of what you’re talking about, but I am confident that we can unite as a people to handle anything that comes our way.  No, I’m not interested in talking about what my rivals have said on this subject, because I have no idea what they said, and it doesn’t matter anyway.  What matters is that we secure this country against threats, and that’s what I’ll do.” 

Politico has a quote of him actually saying much the same:

Let’s keep doing what works and quit doing what doesn’t work.

An equally telling point would be that Thompson’s answer seems to show complete tone-deafness on a topic (cost of college education).  He seems give no indication that he understands that Republicans need to try to be competitive among precisely those voters who are liable to have large amounts of student debt and limited resources with which to pay it off.  These are the folks who may be favourably inclined towards the party that works to alleviate that burden.  Thompson’s answer will be more satisfactory for those whose parents did just “write a check for college” to the extent that those people are not terribly concerned about efforts to ease student debt burdens.   

Thompson could have made the federalist case that education shouldn’t even be part of the federal government’s concern–it’s a state matter, he could have said, and just look at the godawful mess Kennedy and Bush made when they started trying to tinker with lower levels of education with NCLB!  Instead, he managed to show that he knew nothing about the current state of the policy debate while also appearing indifferent to the anxiety that lower-middle and middle-income voters have about racking up debt for their children’s education.  If that is the ticket to winning over a lot of Sunbelt conservatives, I’m still not sure that this is a good thing.