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If you care about the survival of the United States of America, and you’re not with Bachmann or Santorum, you had better be with Cain

Cain’s World



“Herman Cain knows too little about foreign policy to be President of the United States.” When I say that, of course, what I really mean is that I’m just a tiny bit nervous that the sexual harassment allegations against him may have some truth behind them, and I don’t want to have that blow up in my face after he wins the Republican nomination, and yet at the same time I don’t want to look like a lily-livered shrimp of a cowering weenie by appearing to bail on Cain over old, unsubstantiated claims that all seem to be traceable to David Axelrod’s apartment.
Herman Cain declared himself a presidential candidate on May 21st, 2011. Through the summer and early fall, attention to his campaign grew, as people began to take him seriously. Already gaining support in some states, his national status soared after his September 24th victory in the Florida straw poll. Over the next several weeks, everyone was listening. Then, suddenly, came the allegations of sexual harassment—“whatever that is,” one might reasonably wish to add, after hearing the actual complaints against him. Had Ms. Bialek not come along with the one and only claim of any significance, it is likely that most Republicans would have laughed off the whole thing. She did come along, however, and with liberal lawyer Gloria Allred attached. Even more conveniently, she claimed that she wasn’t in this for the money, but merely to tell the truth about a painful incident in her life—which, when played backwards, says ‘she will not file a lawsuit, so she will not have to substantiate her claims, which means that, unlike a legal scenario, in which the accused is presumed innocent, Cain is in the position of having to convince people that his accuser is lying, which is impossible.’

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Within moments, those who were opposed to Cain’s campaign anyway were jumping off straw-bandwagons. George Will warned that “where there are four, there may be twenty-four,” a remark almost as sinister in its disingenuousness as it was prompt in its delivery. (What “four” was he talking about? Does Will actually regard asking a woman for sugar in one’s tea a behavior unworthy of a president? How about remarking that someone is similar in height to one’s wife?) As the days pressed on, with no further claims of any gravity arising, and with plenty of reason to question the veracity and motivation of the one and only charge of any significance, any Republican qualms about Cain’s ethics or ‘patterns of behavior’ ought to have subsided. And, outwardly, they did—almost as quickly as the ‘stream’ of accusations did. And yet his poll numbers, which were understandably stalled momentarily during the first days of the ersatz crisis, have continued to sputter and spiral downward. What happened? In my view, what happened was that voters who harbored some residual nervousness about Cain, egged on by the Republican Party Establishment (RPE), set up a convenient euphemism to protect themselves against accusations of betrayal. Suddenly, all Republican focus on Cain was related to his supposed weakness on foreign policy. He doesn’t understand the Middle East, he doesn’t know the history of this or that region, he can’t name the leader of such-and-such nation—you get the picture. Of course, questions about his foreign policy acumen had been asked before the sexual harassment fiasco came along. Likewise, every other candidate had also been grilled and criticized about virtually every aspect of his or her platform. This is, after all, what happens during a political campaign. In Cain’s case, however, these concerns, which had certainly been noted prior to November—indeed, his unfamiliarity with some aspects of Middle East politics had been the butt of jokes a month earlier—had done little to weaken his support. That support grew quickly after the Florida result, as voters began to visualize an Obama-Cain debate. The optics alone were irresistible: the historic half-black President versus the historic all-black challenger; Obama from Hawaii/Kenya/Indonesia/The World versus Cain, born in Tennessee and raised in Georgia by poor but industrious parents; Obama, mysteriously handpicked for everything he ever accomplished versus Cain, the self-made American success story; Obama the out-of-his-depth wunderkind versus Cain the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-the-job-done man.

Cain's campaign: Republican Party Establishment, RPE, clawback and Democratic media manipulation

And then, not so mysteriously, the wheels came off. Aside from the politically-motivated scandal, nothing significant had changed. And yet, apparently, voters were running—or rather, skulking—away from Cain in droves. What has happened is that a subtle combination of RPE clawback and Democratic media manipulation have carefully stoked the unsubstantiated fears about Cain’s past, while simultaneously giving Nervous Nellies a convenient excuse for their abandonment of one of the only candidates in this primary process whose very existence constitutes a clear and present danger to the Obama team. Consider again the threat that Cain represents. He is a successful businessman, of the non-Wall Street variety. He speaks (sans teleprompter) with all the charm, civility, and ‘real-person-ness’ that Obama lacks. He has a natural and easy humor that not only endears him to voters, but has also allowed him, on occasion, to flay debate opponents so deftly that they don’t even feel the pain—as seen in his turkey-carving of Newt Gingrich during the Thanksgiving Forum. He is a complete Washington outsider, and hence more insulated than any other candidate against today’s general voter disdain for the political establishment. (He has never signed an earmarked bill; he has never sounded off against something and then voted for it, or vice versa; and he has never referred to a despised liberal icon as “my good friend so-and-so.”) And he has a platform that soundly attacks—and substantively addresses—two of the things conservatives and independents hate the most: the tax code and Obamacare. Cain’s rise was a surprise, and yet it took only a few weeks to dig/cook up some ominous-sounding accusations against him. The one and only beneficiary of Cain’s slide has been Newt Gingrich. Gingrich has been on the Washington scene for decades, has suffered major scandals, both political and personal, and has an impressive array of opportunistic flip-flops on his resume, even by Washington standards. Interestingly, the liberal machine that took out Cain has not tried to lay a glove on Newt yet. Anyone want to take a guess why not? Let me save you the trouble. Cain is Obama’s worst nightmare. Gingrich is his most comforting dream. All the speculations from RPE pundits (and of course from Gingrich) about the delicious prospect of a Gingrich-Obama match-up are absurd fantasies. Gingrich is the only one of this year’s prospects who has a past that can be culled for months without ever running out of question marks, contradictions, or (from the liberal point of view) ‘dangerous’ ideas. The man now singing “drill baby drill” was pitching “green conservatism” for Al Gore a few years back. The deficit hawk of today was calling Paul Ryan’s budget proposal “right-wing social engineering” yesterday. On Occupy Wall Street, he has swung from almost-Ron Paul-ish apologies to tougher-than-Cain applause lines about “taking a bath” in just a few short weeks. Throw in a few wing-ding gaffes, such as his recent defense of illegal immigrants who have been in the country for a while as “law-abiding citizens,” and the term ‘sitting duck’ quickly comes to mind. A slickster can get away with it for a season or two. Eventually, however, the phoney lines you’ve launched at so many different audiences start to collide with one another. In this collision, it is the United States of America that stands to get hurt, in the way of four more years of Obama Destruction. And we haven’t even touched the personal attacks and skeleton-hunting to which the Speaker is exceedingly susceptible. The assault on Newt will come, and come in a convoy of Mack trucks—after he gets the nomination. But let’s step back for a moment, and pretend that the euphemism against Cain—‘weak on foreign policy’—is the real concern of all those people bailing out on his campaign. What does the charge mean? True, Cain sometimes sounds less versed than some of the other candidates on the details of the internal politics of other nations, details which, as President, he would need to know more about. It is also true that he sometimes answers foreign policy questions by saying that he would convene a panel of experts on the subject in question and make the best decision based on their collected information and suggestions. In itself, this is in fact what any President must do; but in a debate, it tends to sound like avoiding the question. Do any of the Tea Party conservatives who were considering Cain a month ago happen to remember one Sarah Palin? That’s right, the one who said “you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska,” in answer to a question about any insights into Russian actions that can be gleaned from Alaska’s proximity to that country. For that matter, can you think of a single Republican President after Nixon who was not regarded as either naive or uninformed on foreign policy details, and in support of which proposition his opponents were not able to supply examples? (George H.W. Bush might be named as an exception; does any Tea Party conservative want another one of those?) But let’s stick to the issue of Herman Cain. Does not knowing specific details about certain foreign policy matters make one ‘uninformed’ or ‘incurious’, in a manner that should disqualify one for the role of presidential candidate? Or are some of the “details” in question merely part of the kabuki play of electoral politics, a play for which Cain has not bothered—or has not had time—to rehearse? When Mitt Romney goes on a foreign policy run, naming names, citing examples, distinguishing subgroups, and so on, does anyone who is not already lost to the post-modern deconstruction of politics that passes for debating really believe that he is doing more than reciting memorized lists of facts in order to impress his listeners? In this age of twenty-four hour sports talk shows, I have known young men who could banter about the latest sports news with all the insouciant swagger and lingo of a professional sportscaster, but who almost never actually sat down and watched an entire game of anything. Romney has been campaigning for President for at least six years, the first couple of those up against a rival with serious foreign policy credentials (McCain). Of course he has felt the need to bone up on his Pashtun trivia, and has had the time to do so. The same goes for the Washington insider-types, most notably Gingrich, and the elected officials who have actually served on congressional committees related to foreign policy, such as Bachmann. Do these people have a present advantage over Cain when specific policy questions are asked during a debate? Yes. Is this advantage enough to prove him incompetent to lead? That depends, in part, on whether Cain makes matters worse by trying to fake it until he sounds ignorant, or whether he takes the proper approach, which is to say what reasonable people say when asked what they would do about an issue upon which they are not prepared to pass final judgment: ‘I will not rush to judgment here and now; I would, were that circumstance to arise, gather all the information I could from all the best sources at my disposal, and then make the best rational decision at that time.’ For the most part, this is the sensible approach that Cain has taken when confronted with foreign policy issues with which he is not sufficiently familiar. Recall, once again, that one of the special appeals of Cain and his candidacy was, until so recently, the very fact that he was not a card-carrying member of the RPE, or a Washington insider, but rather a man from the very real world who talks pointedly, rather than merely spouting talking points. Frankly, a little outsider’s confusion a year away from the actual presidential election should worry Tea Partiers less than the typical insider’s confusion proffered some of the other candidates, such as Gingrich’s bloviating about the Founding Fathers’ understanding of the “pursuit of happiness,” or Romney’s threats to engage China in a trade war, blissfully ignoring the fact that China has its hands on the entire bottom layer of the house of cards that is the U.S. economy, in the form of interest payments due. Herman Cain was a worthwhile candidate before he was accused of making a few women “uncomfortable.” Nothing that has happened over the past month has substantially altered that fact. It is high time to take another look out over the presidential horizon. Gingrich, the walking contradiction, is a Johnny-come-lately (or Johnny-come-again) to almost every conservative posture he is presently claiming as his own, and the most flagrant opportunist in the field; Romney and Perry are merely men who promised their moms they would run for President some day (while Jon Huntsman promised his mom he would run for Vice President); Paul has Ayn Rand’s domestic policy but Michael Moore’s foreign policy. If you care about the survival of the United States of America, and you’re not with Bachmann or Santorum, you had better be with Cain.


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Daren Jonescu -- Bio and Archives

Daren Jonescu has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He currently teaches English language and philosophy at Changwon National University in South Korea.


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