Conversations with Floridians at every Thompson stop found them coming back to the Tennessean’s down-home demeanor. “He didn’t seem like a smooth talker,” said Rex Wagner, a cabinet maker in Jacksonville. “He talks in a style that everybody can understand,” observed Phil O’Donnell, “just lays it on the line.” To these Republicans, Thompson’s syrupy stump-style is endearing. . . .
[T]here is also a difficult-to-describe comfort level that Republican voters seem to have with Thompson, even the first time they see him in person. “They think they know him from beforehand,” is how campaign adviser Rich Galen put it. In his speech in Jacksonville, Thompson portrayed it as “a special relationship with an awful lot of folks in the country.”
It came, he said, “because they look into my heart and they know that they’re looking at a fella who doesn’t have anything to lose but to tell the truth about the situation in Washington.”
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