A lot of my conservative blogger friends are openly advocating Fred Thompson for the GOP nomination. Somehow Fred got the reputation as the true conservative in the race despite the fact he's clearly not. Duncan Hunter or Alan Keyes are the only 90+% conservatives in the GOP race; neither of them is going to last long but if you're going to support a candidate based on ideological purism there you go, you got your choices and Fred isn't one of them.

Thompson's voting record as a Senator from Tennessee isn't spectacularly conservative, in fact it's on par with John McCain's (at the time of Thompson's retirement from the Senate he had a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 86, McCain at the same time had a lifetime rating of 84).

A Washington Times editorial from earlier this summer also looked into the matter in more depth and came to the same conclusion:

Another conservative gauge is the annual Senate vote rating compiled by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. For the 1995-2002 period, Mr. Frist compiled an average Chamber rating of 97.5 percent, more than 10 points higher than Mr. Thompson's 86.9 lifetime Chamber rating. There was much speculation that Mr. Frist would seek the presidential nomination after leaving the Senate last year. Interestingly, the same conservative cohorts that are now encouraging Mr. Thompson showed zero enthusiasm for a Frist candidacy.

The National Journal provides another informative ideological gauge of a senator's voting record. NJ's annual scorecard selects scores of Senate votes and divides them among social, economic and foreign-policy themes. The publication ranks the entire Senate in each area, determining that each senator is "more liberal" or "more conservative" than X-percentage of the entire Senate. Then the NJ compiles composite liberal and conservative scores encompassing all three areas and ranks the Senate accordingly.

During his eight-year Senate career, Mr. Thompson displayed a relatively more conservative record on foreign-policy issues than on economic and social issues. Specifically, in the foreign-policy area for four of those years, Mr. Thompson voted identically with an average of 20 other (presumably Republican) senators, placing him at the top of the conservative continuum. On economic issues, during three of his last four years, NJ determined that Mr. Thompson was "more liberal" than 37 percent of his Senate colleagues in 1999, 35 percent in 2001 and 34 percent in 2002. On social issues, Mr. Thompson joined 21 colleagues in 2001 and 38 other senators in 2002 in compiling the most conservative voting record each of those two years. However, NJ reported that his voting record on social issues was "more liberal" than that of 26 percent of his colleagues in 1995, 28 percent in 1998 and 38 percent in both 1996 and 2000.

During his eight years in the Senate, based upon his annual composite conservative scores that encompassed all three areas, the National Journal ranked Mr. Thompson along the conservative continuum as follows: He was the 15th most conservative senator (out of 54 Republicans) in 1995, 30th in 1996, 17th (out of 55) in 1997, 16th in 1998, 20th (out of 55) in 1999 and 25th (out of 49) in 2001. In neither 2000 nor 2002 was he among the top 20. Interestingly, during Mr. Thompson's last two years, Mr. Frist was the fifth most conservative senator in 2001 and ninth most conservative in 2002.

Thompson is very comparable politically to McCain except McCain is actually electable (McCain polls better than any other Republican candidate, including Giuliani, on the national level in head to head competitions with Democratic opponents.) Supporting Thompson for the reasons I suspect most of my blogger friends do (or think they do) is irrational. Thompson is not the conservative pick in this race (among the frontrunners only Romney has a case, weak as it is, to be labeled "the more conservative option").

I wish to ask my friends what they intend to do once Thompson drops out of the race and endorses McCain. (Thompson was national co-chairman for the McCain campaign in 2000). I doubt any of them will hop on board the McCain wagon. Where then will they turn? It's frustrating for me to read these blogs as normally the authors show much more common sense than this.

Hopefully the Thompson campaign ends soon, it has turned into too large a distraction for the online pundits I normally rely upon.

Cross-posted at Martin Andrade Blogs.