He may not be as big as Robertson or Dobson but it’s a start:

The top rung of Republican presidential candidates has too many flaws for social conservatives to offer any candidate their full support, but former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) could be just the man to fill that hole, according to evangelical leader Richard Land.

The president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Religious and Ethics Liberty Commission, Land said Thompson would be a formidable candidate and more likely to shake up the top tier than an entry by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

Thompson, the former senator-cum-television star who is considering a bid, is “a masterful retail politician” who could appeal to a wide swath of voters, including a currently dissatisfied group of social conservatives, Land said.

“Fred Thompson reminds me of a Southern-fried Reagan,” Land said. “To see Fred work a crowd must be what it was like to watch Rembrandt paint.”

Thompson is inching up in the polls:

A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows Fred Thompson’s poll numbers continuing to climb. The poll, released this morning, has former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani at 26 percent, down 9 points from last week’s survey, which didn’t include Thompson.
Arizona Sen. John McCain was in second at 16 percent, with Thompson nipping at his heels at 14 percent, comfortably ahead of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 8 percent.

Not bad for someone who hasn’t declared or spent a dime on his campaign.
The N.Y. Observer has an article on the Thompson phenomenon. Standard stuff: is he conservative enough, the other candidates have more money, he starting late, yada, yada. Here’s an excerpt:

And in terms of his actual policy positions, Mr. Thompson is hard to identify. He has supported drilling for oil in the Arctic, and is a supporter of gun-owners’ rights. But in other ways, he takes after moderate Republican Howard Baker, his old boss on the Congressional committee that investigated Watergate.
He supported campaign-finance reform and opposed tort reform. He doesn’t support gay marriage, but would still leave the issue up to the states rather than banning it outright. His position on abortion, while officially pro-life, can best be described as a work in progress.
And he supports some immigrant guest-worker programs.
It’s too soon to know whether his ideological squishiness will be a problem. But given the irrelevance of actual details this far into Mr. Thompson’s cinematic Presidential bid, maybe it won’t matter.

Not surprising that he opposed tort reform, he’s a lawyer after all. And he has a solid abortion voting record while in the Senate which is more than can be said about Giuliani or Romney. And who among the top tier candidates isn’t for the guest-worker programs?
The article provided insight into why Thompson retired from the Senate and turned his back on politics:

Five years ago, former Senator Fred Thompson seemed ready to say goodbye to White House dreams for good. He’d announced his re-election campaign in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, but seemed to lose steam after the death of his daughter a few months later, ultimately abandoning the run in the spring of 2002.

“At the funeral, I went over to him, and he was obviously just drained,” recalled Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee. “And he said to me, ‘I’ve just lost my heart for [public] service. I’ve lost my heart.'”

I hadn’t seen this in the other articles about a Thompson run. It makes sense that he would drop out late (he has been criticized for this) since he was devastated by the death of his daughter.