"Pre-impeach Thompson!"

So says a commenter at Think Progress, aptly (if unintentionally) summing up this FEC complaint filed against Fred Thompson by Lame "Lane" Hudson. Many on the left have never accepted the legitimacy of the Bush Presidency, and I suppose this is the beginnings of a move to pre-delegitimize a future Thompson Presidency should it come to pass. In any event, the more important points are whether it's meritorious and whether it'll gain traction.

On the former, Jake Tapper:

The rule is pretty simple. If you spend more than $5,000 on campaign activities, you're a candidate, whether or not you've officially declared. The question is what constitutes "testing the waters" activity, and what constitutes "candidate" activity.

. . .

But how much is ... [Thompson] truly "testing the waters"? In June Thompson signed a long-term lease on a Nashville location for his national campaign headquarters. He's been to Iowa and New Hampshire, and headlined GOP dinners.

Moreover, when Thompson filed his disclosure form with the IRS, he revealed that $72,000 of the $3.4 million raised is to be used for the general election. Former FEC General Counsel, Larry Noble told the Washington Post "I think it's problematic. Clearly it's a red flag." []

. . .

If Thompson waits until September 6 to formally declare his candidacy, he wouldn't have to disclose any of the cash given to his campaign until January 31 -- after many major contests are over, including the Iowa and Nevada Caucuses, and the New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan and Florida primaries.

The problem is that if it isn't dirty, it can be made to look dirty without much effort. Which segues nicely to the more important point, perception. As to the latter, I think we can assume without concluding that Dan Riehl is correct, that "if the Left thinks attacking a candidate is going to hurt said candidate with the Republican base during the primaries, I'd bet they are, as usual, very wrong" - but last I checked, the goal wasn't just to win the primaries. Regular readers will recall a theory I've propounded about why some scandals get off the ground and others don't. "'[T]he ability of political partisans to weaponize a given story depends far less on the actual facts of the story than it does on the extent to which the story can be made to resonate with the existing preconceptions of the electorate.'" Moreover, I posited, the factual truth of the underlying story is irrelevant: "partisans [a]re able to exploit [events] as political weapons [if] they c[an] be made to look like evidence for the conventional wisdom - even if the conventional wisdom [i]s actually wrong, and even if the events really [a]ren't evidence on sober reflection." So what you really have to ask youself is this: is the public ready to hear a story about a Republican candidate skirting the rules to gain personal advantage? Does such a narrative - honest and fair, or otherwise - "resonate with the existing preconceptions of the electorate"?

Why did we lose in 2006 again?

The extra smart thing about this move is that if Thompson now gets into the race before the FEC throws the complaint out, Lame will accuse him of getting in to avoid the complaint - but Thompson can't afford to wait for the FEC to figure it out. I disagreed (quietly) with Joe Gandelman and Reid Wilson that Thompson had waited too long and that his window was now closed, but while this move doesn't create a direct hurdle for him (pace Riehl) in the primary, it does provide handy ammunition for Hillary later in the year.