A crowd of about 200 people waited for more than an hour and a half to hear actor, former presidential candidate and former Sen. Fred Thompson lecture on the current state of American politics at Boston College Tuesday night.
Thompson served as a Republican senator from Tennessee from 1994 to 2003 and ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Today Thompson also hosts his own daily political radio show.
After arriving late because of the snow, Thompson addressed many issues, ranging from the current health care situation, to national security, to the recession, to the current administration.
“We were looking for someone to come in and talk about fiscal responsibility and to talk about different constitutional interpretations,” said organizer and Boston College Republicans President Michael Reer. “So we [were] hoping that it would be both academic and at the same time very relevant to the political situation that is going on.”
In his discussion, Thompson stressed the conservative ideal of a need to get back to “first principles.”
“It means limited government, it means the system that our founding fathers had,” he said. “The founding fathers did what they did based on checks and balances and federalism, not based on matters of today but based on their knowledge and understanding of history.”
Thompson explained the need for fewer decisions to be made by the central government and for more decisions to be made at a state level.
“Let states do what they can do . . . states need to compete with each other, ” he said. “It’s good for the country and of course freedom and federalism, the idea that too much power in one place is just not a good idea.”
Thompson shared his theories on some of the contributing factors to the recession.
“I think close to half of the people now are becoming dependent on the government, and the other part of the people are paying the tariff for that,” Thomson said. “About five percent of the people now are paying over half of the taxes and 60 percent of the people are paying none or very small in terms of income tax.”
Both Republican and Democrat attendees said they enjoyed Thompson’s lecture.
“Some very good things were said and it was good to have a perspective from someone that was a former senator, someone who was in government, someone who ran for president,” said BC graduate student Darien Benya.
“It was very off-the-cuff, though still very prepared with his details with the issues in Washington,” said BC freshman Alber Starsheck. “He’s a very interesting figure in the Republican Party . . . I enjoyed his statements on policy.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
