NASHUA, N.H. — On the first trip of his campaign for president, Fred Thompson told a crowd here this week that as a young lawyer, he had prosecuted bank robbers and bootleggers.
"I had to kind of apologize to my granddaddy about prosecuting those moonshiners," the former Republican senator from Tennessee said with a twang.
"We don't have moonshiners in New Hampshire," Mayor Bernie Streeter told him.
Maybe not. But Thompson's talk about moonshine and his granddaddy captured the Southern informality at the core of his personality. And if his travels since announcing his candidacy have made one thing clear, it is this: Personality is what his White House run is all about.
"Buy this guy a round!" Thompson hollered to scores of beer-swilling New England Patriots fans at P.J. O'Sullivan's bar in Manchester on Sunday after singing "Happy Birthday" to 47-year-old Scott Lavalley.
Whether he plays well outside the South remains to be seen. But lackluster crowds at Thompson's rallies offered one sign of the limitations of his appeal: Only a few dozen showed up on a rainy day in Nashua, and barely 100 under sunny skies in Davenport, Iowa.
As the only Southerner in the top tier of Republicans in the race, Thompson, 65, offers a sharp contrast to former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
He's a Johnny Cash fan who likes to quote 19th century Tennessee frontiersman David Crockett. His idea of lunch is "a regular burger with everything on it -- including onions, if you got raw onions."
Thompson's manner of speaking stands out. In tough times, he says, Americans "hitch up our britches." The U.S. must not leave Iraq "with our tail between our legs." When it comes to illegal immigration, beware of politicians "trying to sell the same horse twice" -- an allusion to an amnesty provision passed in the 1980s and the current push to overhaul the nation's immigration laws. As for schools, he says, let "local mamas and daddies" keep control.
Thompson's strategists say the constant reminders of his small-town roots in Alabama, where he was born, and Tennessee, where he was raised and began his legal career, are central to his candidacy.
"The way he delivers his message is in language at a pace, and at a cadence, that strikes a chord, and I think that's crucial," said Rich Galen, a senior advisor.
