Say Anything - Fred Thompson On Change

Interview

Say Anything - Fred Thompson On Change

The buzzword of the debates tonight seemed to be "change." Everyone seemed to think it was a good thing, but they all seemed to have differing opinions on what it means.

Personally, I thought Fred Thompson had a pretty good response on the issue:

FDT: Well, you know, we're all talking about change now, we had a-- some folks vote in Iowa and everybody came out of there talking about change. Change has been a part of every election since the dawn of elections, if you weren't an incumbent. I think that what is more important is leadership and what is more important, as a part of leadership is telling the American people the truth and having the courage to do that. Telling the American people, for example, we were talking about social security. Something everybody knows, nobody wants to talk about. That the war is going to be protracted, probably, it's going it take some time and more resources than we've been devoting as a percentage of our economy, that we're not going to be energy independent in a few years, it's going to take a longer time and we're going to have to move that big battleship as much as we can in had a short period of time as we can, but it's not around the corner, that we're spending our next generation's money. And we're bankrupting them in many respects as far as our entitlement programs are concerned. Those are true and we are going to have to go to the American people and say, here is the deal, here is what we need to do. Let's do what generations have done in times past, come together and do the right thing and that's the change that we need. I wish we could change to that.

Fred's willingness to talk about the tough issues nobody else wants to talk about has been both a curse and a blessing. A curse because talking about serious and complicated issues like Social Security does lend itself well to the five or ten second sound bites the media likes. A blessing because it shows us that Thompson doesn't give a damn his his answers are good sound bites, he cares about policy.

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