It's Officially Official: Fred Is In

If you're interested you can watch his announcement video here. A pretty straight-forward rationale for running.

As I've said before, I'm an intractable fence-sitter in this race until the calendar flips to 2008. How Ol' Fred does will depend on how well he can present himself to primary voters over the next four months as something beyond "that guy on 'Law and Order'".

At the very least it should make the current field sharper and better prepared to take on "she who will not be named".

As for the debate last night, I refuse to watch that kind of format (soundbites down the line) when there are still so many candidates that have zero chance - Paul, Tancredo, Hunter, Brownback and the other Thompson. They need to follow Jim Gilmore's lead and find something else to do.

The race right now is:
Top tier: Giuliani, Thompson, Romney
Long-shots (for ballast): McCain and Huckabee

Any more than these five on a debate stage is unnecessary at this point.

Yips! from Robbo: We've had fun with the Ol' Fred bit here, of course, but I'm still not anywhere near sold on him. However, I think Gary makes an excellent point about his usefulness as a stable-pony for whoever winds up taking on SWWNBN.

UPDATE:
This is the kind of thing that makes politics interesting. Over at The Corner, they may have discovered how clever it was on the part of the Thompson campaign to declare his candidacy on Sept. 6th. Interesting stuff.