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This brief essay assesses the resources and liabilities that Fred Thompson brings to 2008 Republican presidential nomination politics. It examines facets of Thompson's Senate career, as well as his work as a lobbyist and actor. Although Thompson benefits from a political context in which social and religious conservatives find flaws in the first tier candidates and from national visibility, his relatively centrist voting record among Republican senators, reputed, but largely, untested campaign skills, lobbying activities, and late entry in the contest present significant obstacles for him.

The public polling industry frequently faces the challenge of measuring & reporting opinions on topical policy issues about which the public may be uninformed or confused. These situations present a true challenge to pollsters who, through the process of polling itself, could end up manufacturing, rather than measuring, public opinion. Multiple studies have addressed the problems with manufacturing opinions on fictional issues, but none have addressed how or whether these effects occur in the real & possibly more complicated world of actual policy opinion. This paper uses multiple experiments to demonstrate how reported opinions on an actual issue on which the public is largely uninformed -- the USA Patriot Act -- vary greatly due to simple variations in question wording, content, & response options due to a lack of public knowledge about the Act. Because an uninformed public resorts to scouring questions for information cues with which they can formulate an answer, different question wordings provide different contexts & considerations for respondents & can thereby result in disparate answers to substantively similar questions. Adapted from the source document.