The "Law and Order" factor: Arthur Branch now running for the Republican nomination

"Law and Order" appears to be a biggest advantage for Fred Thompson than I had foreseen. Thompson has been one of the TV show's stars for the past five seasons (and starred in about 100 episods), and many speculated that he was postponing declaring his candidacy to make TNT continue running reruns of Law and Order throughout the summer. The thinking was that TNT would stop airing the reruns once Thompson entered the race to conform to "equal time" laws.

Well think again. While the new season on NBC will no longer feature Republican District Attorney Arthur Branch (Thompson's character), TNT has no plans to stop airing reruns in which Thompson appears. Equal time provisions are stunningly weak:

Equal time rules require TV stations to provide the same airtime to opponents when a candidate appears on the air. The many exceptions -- news shows, talk shows, interviews, documentaries -- essentially mean the rules apply to entertainment programming. [But] the equal time rules were written when cable was in its infancy, and it has never been clear whether or not they apply only to broadcast stations.

This is very different than in many other democracies. The French media, for example, is bound by very strict equal time rules. The last month of campaigning requires a TV station to give exactly the same amount of airtime, calculated to the minute, to every single candidate. And this applies to entertainment as much as to interviews, news shows and talk shows. But the weak American provisions will result in round-the-clock reruns of "Law and Order." This week alone, TNT is showing 23 episodes in which Thompson appears.

And how big of an advantage are these reruns? If we are to believe this disturbing report from the Polico, Thompson is benefiting a great deal from his acting career. The article's most revealing passage sums up just about everything you need to know:

Sandra Stone, a cafeteria worker at a local elementary school, stands on her tiptoes. I ask what brought her to Thompson’s speech. “I liked a lot of his positions on ‘Law & Order,’ a lot of his positions come through,” she replies. She doesn’t mention his years in the Senate, nor his time as the Senate Watergate committee minority counsel. Stone’s eyes tilt upward as she recalls what she liked about Thompson on the show. “There was a guy who got off because of some of the stupid laws we got.” And Thompson, she says, “took care of that.”

Thompson's character, Arthur Branch, is a tough-on-crime Republican DA. GOP primary voters would love to vote for someone like Arthur Branch. And in today's world, with its blurred frontier between fiction and reality, Arthur Branch's positions and personality appear to some to be Thompson's positions and personality... As strange as that may seem, what else can something like, "“I liked a lot of his positions on Law & Order" possibly mean? The "his" clearly refers to Thompson, but the positions she is referring to are those of Arthur Branch!

The Politico's Kuhr confirms: "Thompson says one can’t predict all the issues a president will face, so voters have to trust the candidate’s character. In fact, they seem to trust the man based on the surreal relationship they have with his character on television." And Thompson plays along, campaigning as the conserative alternative to the other Republican candidates, seen by some in the base as weak-on-principle, far from conservative ideals, and flip-flopping. Kuhr describes that when an Iowa farmer stood up to say “Kill the terrorists, secure the border, and give me back my freedom,” Thompson said, “You just summed up my whole speech.”

We waited for months for Thompson to jump in the race, and it looks like we got Arthur Branch instead. And as crazy as Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger's political success might look, at least voters in those cases didn't think they were voting for a football player named the Gipper or for a robot named Terminator.