Turk on Thompson

One of the highlights for me at Politics Online a few weeks back was meeting Michael Turk. Turk was the eCampaign chair for the Bush/Cheney ’04 campaign, and held a similar role at the GOP. In a panel discussing online campaign tactics, Turk consistently made sharp points, showed a depth of understanding of the need to integrate online tactics with offline tactics to have an effective campaign strategy, and clearly enjoyed what he did.

We ended up talking for 15 minutes or so after the panel, and my impressions during the panel held up: great guy. Since then, I’ve been enjoying reading his blog and his posts at TechPresident. Tonight’s post about Fred Thompson tells me that my instincts last night about Thompson being a formidable potential candidate aren’t that far off the mark. As more conservatives get increasingly frustrated with the top tier, Thompson will look more and more attractive. In a week when Gingrich insults Hispanics (“Spanish is a ghetto language”), Rudy says that public funding of abortions is a Constitutional right, Mitt claims he’s a life-long hunter (where “life-long” means once when he was 15, and last year), it’s clear (to me, anyway) that the Republican field isn’t exactly scaring away other potential entrants…

Oh, and one other reason (for me) to be intrigued by Thompson: his wife’s from Naperville. For those who forgot, Naperville’s last contribution to Presidential campaign trivia is that the Bush/Cheney major league asshole gaffe happened at Naperville North High School.

OK, back to praising the Democrats. I was fortunate to spend a couple hours with the tech team at Obama’s campaign HQ yesterday, and will report back shortly on my impressions. Lots to be excited about.