Fred Thompson Addresses Students

The College Republicans await former presidential candidate Fred Thompson’s speech

The Boston College Republicans (CR) invited former presidential candidate and Law and Order star Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) to speak to the student body on Tuesday, February 16, 2010.

Despite arriving 90 minutes late due to a snowstorm, Thompson entered the Irish Room and quickly began his speech right after CR President Michael Reer introduced Thompson by stating that “if you waited this long to see him, you probably already know who Fred Thompson is.”

Elected to the U.S. Senate from Tennessee in 1994, Thompson served in this capacity until 2002 when he retired and accepted a role on Law and Order as Manhattan District Attorney Arthur Branch. He remained in this role until 2007 when he left the show to seek the GOP presidential nomination.

After discussing his tumultuous trip to Boston, Thompson praised recent GOP election victories by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown. He attributed these losses in part to Obama’s inability to judge his mandate from the 2008 election.

Noting that the United States is still a center-right country, Thompson said that Obama’s approval ratings have fallen faster than any president in history because he decided to push “Obamacare” instead of focusing on jobs and the economy.

However, he also warned the GOP not to misread its own mandate from recent election victories in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts.

Thompson also criticized Obama’s national security policies, particularly the decision to read the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights fifty minutes after his arrest, instead of using the opportunity to extract information on his involvement in Yemenis terror cells.

Thompson also rejected the notion that terrorism is a criminal matter, and asserted that gathering intelligence is more important than prosecuting terrorists. He was also not concerned with the rest of the world’s reaction, noting that few countries denounced China for imprisoning a protester for eleven years after a ten minute trial.

The rest of his talk focused on federalism and the increasing size and cost of government. Thompson told the audience that the United States has recently become less economically free, falling to 11^th place on a Heritage Foundation annual survey. He encouraged the GOP to consider the principle of limited government established by the Founding Fathers when drafting policy.

“Freedom is how men ought to live,” Thompson said. “This is how you bring about prosperity.”

He was also critical of the extent to which the federal government has grown in size and scope since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, lambasting the federal government’s efforts to bribe states to establish programs that they cannot afford to sustain.

Thompson said that states are individual “laboratories for democracy” that come up with their own solutions to federal problems, citing Texas’ successful tort reform laws that brought down the cost of insurance.

“You just can’t keep milking the cow and expect it to stay around,” Thompson said in criticism of the government’s efforts to create new entitlement programs in order to save money.

CR Treasurer Matthew Vigliotta agreed with Thompson’s position: “I have been a fan of Fred Thompson since his run for president. I think he is an honest man who shares my belief in limited government. That is why the speech was focused on federalism, because federalism is a way of checking the power of the central government and preserving liberty for all.”

Vigliotta was pleased with the talk, and also saw inspiration in Thompson’s life story: “I thought Thompson was authentic and I enjoyed his speech. What I really enjoyed is how truly American his story is. Only in America could a kid who was the first person in his family to go to high school get a scholarship to Vanderbilt Law School and become a U.S. Senator.”

BC junior Billy Cody also enjoyed the speech, stating that he “liked how honestly and candidly he spoke about a wide range of political matters. I’m especially glad he talked about the principles, such as limited government, that specific issues derive from. There needs to be an understanding of those underlying principles before making decisions about specific issues and Sen. Thompson spoke very wisely about that.”

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