The Thompson campaign concludes

It’s Thursday evening and I’m sitting at a Panera bread in Columbia, South Carolina. Today, we finished cleaning out the Thompson SC campaign office and packed everything up and shipped it back to McLean.

Even though I probably should keep away, I’ve been unable to resist reading the various Thompson campaign postmortems that have been published on the web. There have been some insightful ones, and some that - in my opinion anyway - totally missed the mark.

There’s a lot I could write about about why I think we didn’t win. I think I’ll shy away from being critical of anyone on the campaign. There were certainly institutional issues, but for the most part the people who worked for the Thompson campaign were dedicated, hard-working, and committed to the candidate. It is a testament to the kind of man Senator Thompson is that the people who he surrounded himself with were as professional and as talented as they were. And remember, this was a campaign that began long after all the other campaigns had supposedly snatched up all the top political talent in the Republican party.

Most of all I was impressed by the utter humility of everyone involved. For each person who I got to know in this campaign, from the senior staff all the way on down, it was clear from day one that this was not about them. This wasn’t a campaign that people joined up with thinking they were going to use it to further their own ambitions. It was about believing in Fred, and believing in his message. It was about believing that he was the best candidate in the field and that the country would be safe in his hands.

As far as reasons we didn’t win, I have a lot of thoughts. Some of them I may post in the next few weeks. But for now, more than anything, I am incredibly proud to have been a part of this campaign, regardless of the result.