First President Bush taps Law and Order District Attorney/former Tennessee Senator Fred Dalton Thompson to help shepherd his Supreme Court nominee, and now this, from the Tennessean?

Fred Thompson is on TV again, and this time he's not play-acting.

His appointment by President Bush to handle the confirmation process for a new Supreme Court justice led tongues to wag all over town about whether this was a move toward him running for governor. Could Thompson end up being Gov. Phil Bredesen's worst political nightmare come true? Or is this just a case of GOP wishful thinking?

son, speaking through a local contact person, declined to comment. But Tennessee GOP Chairman Bob Davis Jr. confirmed there has been talk about Thompson running for governor.

"We had lunch at Swett's a few weeks ago," Davis said, declining to answer whether he asked Thompson to run for governor.

"Those are the kinds of conversations between myself and others and Senator Thompson I'm not really going to talk about. He's very happy personally where he's at in life. If you're asking if he is the most formidable candidate we could have running, there's no question about it in this state. If Fred Thompson got in that race, it wouldn't be much of a race at all, in my opinion."

It might just take someone like Thompson to defeat Tennessee's wildly popular Democratic Governor, Phil Bredesen.