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The Spectacle Blog

As everybody here knows by now, I am not big on early horse-race analysis. And I have been a bit disdainful about what I considered to be over-analysis of the staff "turnover" in Fred Thompson's NOT-EVEN-DECLARED campaign. But the report on yet another departure, this time of Jim Mills, formerly of Fox, does bring up this common-sense response: Regardless of what all the turnover means about a candidate's organizational abilities (I say it means very little this early in the game; hence my earlier disdain for the over-analysis), there comes a point when you see so many people leave so soon after being recruited to come on board, and you start to think that somebody there must be awfully cavalier about other people's livelihoods. People aren't expendable like manufactured goods. They have lives and families and sometimes (as in Mills' case) entirely different careers that they give up only upon certain assurances. Whatever the turnover says about Thompson's campaign organization, it is perhaps starting to say that he's not as nice a guy as he has been portrayed, or else that he is oblivious to a lack of human decency of whomever is making the decisions around there. Does it mean Thompson is or isn't the best candidate for the GOP to nominate? No. But it does raise a least some little questions about his character.