Last Friday night, I went to Fred Thompson’s final campaign rally, in Greenville, S.C.

You’ve read the stories about Thompson’s lackluster performances, about his seeming lack of interest in the stuff of everyday campaigning.

It’s true; a lot of the time he didn’t seem terribly engaged. But on Friday night in Greenville, he was all there, and he was terrific.

Thompson walked into the ballroom of the Embassy Suites Hotel — jammed with between 300 and 400 people — and delivered a stirring defense of basic conservative principles: limited government, free markets, fiscal responsibility and a strong defense.

“The Founding Fathers had it right from the very beginning,” Thompson said. “The wisdom of the ages; the fact that our basic rights come from God and not from government; the notion that a government big enough and powerful enough to give you anything is big enough and powerful enough to take anything away from you …”

The crowd ate it up. But there was an undercurrent to their enthusiasm. Yes, this was exactly what they wanted to hear from Fred Thompson. But many of them believed they had not heard it often enough, or loudly enough, from the Thompson campaign.

I was standing near the front of the room, by the loudspeaker, and I heard a woman holding a FRED ’08 sign standing near me say, “Where was this six months ago?”

Another supporter told me, “My only disappointment with Fred is that he didn’t come out early and build up his momentum. He kind of lay in the background, waiting and waiting and waiting. We’re afraid he may have waited too long.”

The next night, Saturday, I went to Charleston to cover what became John McCain’s victory party.

The crowd at the Citadel was, of course, jazzed for McCain, but there was a telling moment before the race was called and the celebration began.

When Fox News put up a big screen showing the neck-and-neck battle for third place between Thompson and Mitt Romney, the crowd spontaneously erupted into a cheer.

“Go, Fred, go!” they shouted. “Go, Fred, go! Go, Fred, go!”

Now, there’s no doubt that some of them wanted Thompson to do some damage to Romney, who is probably the strongest of McCain’s adversaries.

But these were conservatives, many of them Southerners, and they knew Thompson probably wouldn’t be around much longer. Their cheers were a sign of the fact that they just liked Fred. (Conversely, they didn’t like Mitt.)

Earlier in the evening, I ran into Cyndi Mosteller, a social conservative who until last year was chairman of the Charleston County Republican Party. She supports McCain, but after we talked about his big win, I asked her about Thompson. Why hadn’t it worked, in South Carolina of all places?

“He was the most anticipated candidate that I have ever seen,” Mosteller told me. “So many people on the ground were ready to run the ball for him, and they showed up in strength, but he didn’t really show up in strength.

“I think that probably Thompson is more of a private person,” she continued. “I don’t really think he’s cut out for the public run required of public office. I think it’s almost a personality thing; it’s certainly not an ideological thing. It’s like the public energy and the will to run are a little bit lacking there.”

A couple of days later, Thompson was out. His withdrawal statement was brief, with the discussion of his campaign’s value covered in a single sentence: “I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort.”

How can you not like a candidate whose final words are so brief and self-effacing?

In the end, Thompson fell victim to his own distaste for all the (sometimes ridiculous) things candidates have to do to be elected president.

His campaign was originally conceived to be different from anything that had come before, relying heavily on the Internet, on video, on buzz.

Sure, he would do conventional campaigning, but not like the Energizer Bunny candidates who are seemingly everywhere, all the time.

But it turns out the system demands a lot of campaigning. You just have to do it.

As John Dickerson of Slate wrote, “A loss for Thompson’s campaign is a victory for conventional wisdom.”
It is. There are simply rules that no campaign, no matter how good the candidate, can break.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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