After holding his first campaign stop at 10 a.m. Thursday in Carroll, Iowa, Fred Thompson, the hang-dog countenanced former senator dogged with something of a lazy tag, told Iowa Independent one of his major problems with the last 90-minute GOP presidential debate is that he didn’t get any breaks.

“They wouldn’t even give a break in the middle of that hour-and-a-half debate. Any other debate we’ve had there’s been a break or two, usually two little breaks along the way,” Thompson said in a 15-minute interview with me on his campaign bus.

Later, in this session, Thompson sought to explain his 10 a.m. public start here, suggesting that he wisely used the hours before the 2-mile drive from the Super 8 to the Carroll Country Club where about 30 citizens showed up to hear him make a pitch for the presidency.

Here is Thompson:

First of all we had telephone interviews this morning in our room. We had briefings in our room. We got in last night from over in east Iowa. I don’t know what time we finally got to bed but it was late last night. We’ve been doing I don’t know how many events. We’re going to do 50 towns and communities. You can catch us sometimes where there is a gap there. But if you look at the overall schedule you’ll find it to be a very, very active one.

I don’t have anything to prove to anybody.

I mean, you know, I actually like to read a little bit along the way. The first thing I do when I walk out is get asked about the president’s news conference that he had this morning that I saw, and what’s happened with the other candidates and comments that they’ve made, and sometimes disasters that have happened in various communities and shootings and so forth. I read and talk to people about that. Talk to them in the home office. Get my plan for the day and the information I need for the day.

At another point in the interview, when he was asked to reflect on the bitter battle between Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, Thompson for some reason again sought to make his lemonade-on-the-porch personality into a selling point.

“Some people say I’m not a Type A personality and they’re right.” Thompson told me. “They want examples of me clicking my heels and things like that. That ain’t me. It wasn’t me in Tennessee when I got more votes than anybody in the history of Tennessee politics.”

In previous interviews, I have asked Thompson’s friend and fellow GOP presidential contender U.S. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former colleague U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, about this “Lazy Fred” business.

Harkin said Thompson appeared to be “bored” during his time in the Senate and earned a reputation for being lazy.

“That’s sort of the inside word,” Harkin said. “That’s what people are saying. I mean, people who know him better than I are saying that.”

Here the Q&A with McCain:

Iowa Independent: Just about every profile I’ve read on him says he’s lazy. That’s the knock on him. Is he lazy?

McCain: No. We’re very close friends. You know we sat next to other in the Senate. No, I certainly would not say that.

In a piece in The Politico, Roger Simon observed Thompson being, shall we say, less than eager, to engage in basic retails politics In Waverly the other day.

Anelia Dimitrova, the executive regional editor of The Waverly Democrat, told Simon that Thompson couldn’t even muster the ambition to make news in a town of 9,000 people.

Here is Simon in The Politico:

I sent an e-mail to Anelia Dimitrova, asking her about the private meeting she had with Thompson at the newspaper office. She e-mailed me back that Thompson “was so vague that I would be hard-pressed to write a story. Simply put, there is no news peg other than he came to the newsroom with his model wife and a beehive of staffers. When I asked him specifically what he would do as prez for farmers in Bremer County, he resorted to glittering generalities.”

During a blunt line of questioning in Carroll (but one that should hardly have been unexpected) Thompson seemed genuinely annoyed with me for bringing up the question about his reported overly easy-going ways — and he bordered on making the matter personal.

“You can’t put yourself in another man’s shoes, figure out well he got in this time that night so he ought to start this time the next morning in order to prove he’s more energetic,” Thompson told me. “That’s the kind of thing they used to say about Ronald Reagan and he always said, `They say hard work never hurt anybody but why take a chance?’”