Billy Boy in Trouble

Bill Frist does an awful lot of shooting himself in the foot for someone who wants to run for President in 2008. It’s almost as if the man is completely incapable of helping his own cause. First he went on national television and claimed that HIV can be spread through sweat and tears.

Then he got behind that untimely and unpopular Senate interference in the end-of-life decisions of the Schiavo family - even attempting to “diagnose” Terri Schavio as not being in a persistent vegitative state based on one videotape.

And now it looks as if our dear Billy Boy has gone and done some insider trading. I know, I know. It’s only speculation. There’s been no Grand Jury. No indictments have been handed down. But in the court of public opinion - and that’s the only one that matters for an election - Frist is as good as guilty.

Here’s why. If you want to be elected President, the American public needs a clear picture of who you are and what you stand for. It doesn’t matter whether the picture is entirely accurate, or even very issue-specific - but it must evoke the patriotic warm fuzzies. It’s called character folks, and you’re totally screwed if you don’t have it. John Kery forgot that when he left himself open to Rove’s accusations of flip-flopping.

Now Frist is falling prey to the same mistake. He’s a lifelong conservative - but he only recently jumped on the pro-life, anti-sex ed, NeoConservative bandwagon. The problem is that he picked the wrong issue to do it with. When he saw how unpopular the whole Schavio thing was becoming, he backed off and made himself look just as amorphous and flip-floppy as John Kerry ever did.

Now by selling his HCA stock a month before the price dropped nine percent, he’s added a shadow of corruption to the amorphous blob that represents him in the American psyche - whether or not anyone ever makes the charge stick. In a post Ken Lay world, the very idea of insider trading is enough to make us smell blood in the water.

Whether or not Bill Frist will be able to recover enough from his blundering in time to mount a Presidential campaign remains to be seen. But I doubt it.