Well, He Still Has More Money Than McCain

Hey, Fred, Where’s The Cattle?

Fred Thompson plans to announce Tuesday that his committee to test the waters for a Republican presidential campaign raised slightly more than $3 million in June, substantially less than some backers had hoped, according to Republican sources. ~The Politico

Via Jason Zengerle

The funniest part of the article comes a little later:

He attracted support from such top-shelf party figures [bold mine-DL] as Mary Matalin, Liz Cheney, George P. Bush and other GOP stalwarts who saw him as a potential Hillary Clinton slayer.

Not to be flippant, but since when have these people been “top-shelf party figures”?  (If these are top-shelf party figures in the GOP, today’s GOP really is in much worse shape than I thought.)  A Cheney loyalist and failed former campaign manager, Cheney’s daughter and the President’s nephew do not constitute a band of power brokers.  This is the quintessential band of courtiers, filled with servants and connected First and Second Family members.  These people are there to show that Bush and Cheney have been willing to give Fred their indirect backing, and bizarrely Fred, like McCain, has accepted the poisoned chalice.   These supporters have been thrown at Fred in the same way that the old Bush ’04 campaign team was thrown at McCain.  The latter really worked well, didn’t it?  Now that one of Fred’s new co-campaign managers is Spence Abraham (you all remember Spence, don’t you?) and he has Larry Lindsey as his economics advisor, it looks as if the first-term band is getting back together!