The "Aw, Shucks" Candidate Ambles Along

While Giuliani, McCain and Mitt Romney race around New Hampshire trying to corral supporters, the undeclared Fred Thompson is just moseying around the bunk house, palavering with the dudes who run the Republican ranch.

He won’t be at the televised debate of Republican candidates at the Reagan Presidential Library Thursday, but the next night Thompson will be speaking to the party’s money men at the annual dinner of the Lincoln Club of Orange County nearby.

So far the actor-politician is getting applause for his Reagan impersonation. The Gipper’s deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver, thinks he could “really make a difference” and “turn this primary system upside down.”

Meanwhile Thompson has been lining up his ducks for the shootout, getting his cancer announcement out of the way and pre-empting possible questions about his morality by admitting at a meeting with House Republicans that, as a bachelor, he was less than celibate.

"I was single for a long time, and, yep, I chased a lot of women," he is reported to have told them, "and a lot of women chased me. And those that chased me tended to catch me."

If voters want to see him auditioning for the Oval Office, they can watch him later this month playing President Ulysses S. Grant in the HBO film, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”

After that, he will most likely be taking on the role of trying to bury the hopes of the current ’08 Republican front runners.