While a great number of Republicans already seem content labeling uber-lobbyist and actor Fred Thompson as their savior for 2008 before he has even formally announced his campaign, it's not taking a great deal of time for folks to start finding a number of major chinks in Thompson's armor. For one, Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press has penned a blistering piece of analysis on Thompson under the headline "Thompson strong on style, not substance", which gets to the heart of one of the major problems with Thompson as a candidate -- there's very little there there. Robert Novak (via email; link not yet available as best I can tell) relays a related concern from Republicans in his column this week.

Far more troubling are the fears among Republicans that there is less to Thompson than meets the eye. He could still seize the nomination and prove a disappointing candidate in the general election. In appearances across the country, from New Hampshire to South Carolina, his speeches have ranged from "pretty decent" to "quite underwhelming." He has not yet had the knock-out performance he will need in order to prove that he is worthy of frontrunner status.

But perhaps an even greater concern for Republicans about Fred Thompson is not "that there is less to [him] than meets the eye" but rather that there is more to him than meets the eye. While Thompson's name recognition has been on the rise for some time, most Americans don't know too much about his record -- like the fact that as a career lobbyist he lobbied on behalf of folks like the now deposed Haitian ruler Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And digging further into Thompson's record, The Boston Globe's Michael Kranish finds that during Senate's investigation into the Watergate scandal Thompson apparently used his position as minority counsel to serve as a rat for the Nixon White House. The details are rather stunning and could be quite problematic for Thompson's candidacy.

The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

"Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong said in an interview. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."

Thompson's Southern accent and tenure on NBC's "Law & Order" may lead some to believe that he is an outsider, but he is as establishment a Republican as they come -- so wedded to the establishment, in fact, that he was willing to work to try (however unsuccessfully) to torpedo the Senate's Watergate investigation by leaking like a sieve to the Nixon administration. Thompson is a Beltway insider whose presidency would be inimical to the type of change so needed and so wanted today. His role as a fundraising and flack for the "Scooter" Libby defense fund indicates as much. And according to Marc Ambinder, he as all but admitted as much.

Also, Thompson, a former lobbyist, Senate and Washington lawyer, admitted that he's no outsider. "I've never used the word 'outsider," he said.

This is all not to say that Thompson would necessarily be a pushover in a general election. But at the same time, it's not clear to me that Americans are particularly clamoring for their next President to be a lobbyist who actively sought to protect Richard Nixon from an investigation into the latter's improprieties. So perhaps Democrats don't have quite as much to fear from a Thompson candidacy as some now do.