Former senator and lobbyist, Joe Don Thompson, with friend

The presidential campaign team of former lobbyist Fred Thompson is either unaware — or does not care — that the Tennessee-born candidate’s bio contains an error about an important historical figure in his home state.

The mistake, which I saw at TBogg’s place and reported on yesterday, is a mix up of the identities of Davy Crockett, a native son and hero of Tennessee, and Daniel Boone, who was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in North Carolina. The Thompson bio reads, in part:

In the tradition of Daniel Boone of Tennessee and President George Washington, citizen-legislators and leaders Thompson had admired growing up, he walked away from an easy reelection victory to seek new challenges.

As of 8 a.m., Pacific, the error had not been corrected. Republicans who cling to Thompson as their last best chance for keeping the White House had better hope his campaign’s rapid response team gets its act in order before he enters the race next month.

We speculated that the source of the confusion is, first, the lack of Tennesseans on the campaign team, which is dominated by non-Southern elites like Mary Matalan, Larry Lindsey, Ken Khachigian and Victoria Toensing. Secondly, like Thompson, these folks are all Boomers, and probably confused Crockett and Boone because the actor Fess Parker established himself as an icon 40 years ago by playing both men.

Our friends at BuzzFlash.com, in effort to help Team Thompson keep straight which frontier hero is which, posted a link to the lyrics to the Davy Crockett theme song. Buzz said:

To Assist the Fred Thompson “Hollywood Light” Campaign, We are Posting the Lyrics to the Davy Crockett Song. We Saw Davy Crockett on TV, and Fred Thompson is No Davy Crockett.

We also had a couple of comments yesterday that were interesting.

Stephen Crockett — co-host of Democratic Talk Radio — who should know from Davy Crockett, agreed with BuzzFlash:

Fred Thompson is no Davy Crockett. My ancestor was a strong defender of the poor and powerless. Thompson is an enemy of the poor and powerless.

While a Senator, Thompson represented the interests of Wall Street. He spent a third of his professional life as a corporate lobbyist.

Davy Crockett would have been a campaigning actively against any elected office for Fred Thompson. This Crockett will do the same!

And from Ricardo, who wrote:

That’s OK. I confuse Fred Thompson with Joe Don Baker. Another actor that played dumb hicks in movies.

Thanks, Ricardo — you inspired our choice of photos to go with this story.

Update: 11:25 a.m., Pacific: Had a nice note from the Thompson campaign website developers who said the text of the site had been corrected. The bio now reads, “In the tradition of Daniel Boone and President George Washington.” Not “Davy Crockett of Tennessee.”