With just weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses, former Godfather’s Pizza mogul Herman Cain sits atop most GOP primary polls, ahead of three former governors and a former Speaker of the House. Stranger still, a large chunk of support for the African-American Cain comes from the lily-white Tea Party movement.
Pundits from all over the political spectrum have weighed in on this bizarre development, and most (but not all) agree that Cain still has little or no chance of winning the GOP nomination. Indeed, Cain has four major obstacles to overcome:
1. Money. Despite recent surges in his fundraising, Cain still trails Rick Perry and Mitt Romney by a massive margin. It’s true that money can’t buy you the nomination — just ask Howard Dean — but a lack of money can be a big problem when your opponents bombard the airwaves with negative advertising, as Perry and Romney are likely to do. Even if the multimillionaire Cain decides to dip into his pizza fortune, both Perry and Romney have deeper pockets and more available resources.
2. Inexperience. Cain has already backtracked on most of the policy statements he’s uttered recently, from the electrified fence along the Mexican border (he claimed he was joking) to abortion (he directly contradicted himself) to his 9-9-9 tax plan (he previously said there would be no exemptions, then threw some in after receiving strong criticism). Cain has been unable to show he has more than a superficial understanding of any substantial issue presented to him in interviews or during debates. Cain was asked about the neoconservative movement and said he didn’t know what the term meant. Ouch.
3. Strategy. Cain’s campaign somehow fails to grasp the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire. The candidate has spent very little time on the ground in either state relative to his competitors, and his organizations in both appear to be just starting to ramp up from “shoestring” to “functional.” That’s not going to get the job done in Iowa, where the caucuses require enthusiasm and manpower, or in New Hampshire, where Romney has a commanding lead and some voters literally demand personal interaction with the candidates. Cain has spent precious weeks campaigning in states that have little or no say over who the nominee will be. Bizarre.
4. Scandal. The risk of a virtual unknown suddenly becoming a top tier presidential candidate is that he hasn’t been vetted yet. Indeed, Politico just uncovered two incidents of alleged sexual harassment that apparently were settled out of court. Even if baseless — and Politico seemed to have done its homework — the whiff of scandal can’t be good for Cain. His campaign was already struggling to stay on message, and under pressure it may start to crack and crumble.
For the sake of argument, let’s say Cain is able to pull everything together and miraculously win the GOP nomination. Some on the right call this Barack Obama’s worst general election nightmare: an African American opponent with the supposedly unified backing of Tea Partiers, conservatives and moderates. The New York Post’s Andrea Peyser goes as far as to say, “He is plain-spoken, articulate and a Tea Party conservative. And, in a state of affairs that drives the thought police nuts, Cain, 65, the Republican presidential front-runner, is also black. This makes him the biggest threat to the left since the fall of communism.”
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/he_won_be_stereotyped_VbAJixnU69FnOmu3N57EZO#ixzz1cFM16zlt
Oh, please. Peyser is correct: Cain is plain-spoken, articulate and black. She didn’t say “like Obama” but she certainly inferred that, as if Cain’s race alone makes him Kryptonite to counter Obama as Superman. It’s not that simple. Just ask plain-spoken, articulate and black Alan Keyes, who the GOP ran as a sacrificial lamb against Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senate race, and Obama slaughtered him 70% to 27% (yes, those numbers are correct).
As far as being a “Tea Party conservative,” I don’t think Cain even knows if he is or not based on how he’s shifted policy positions so frequently just in the last month. Not that being supported by the increasingly unpopular Tea Party is worth much nowadays. Just ask previous Tea Party darlings Donald Trump (dropped out), Michele Bachmann (Tea Party-affiliated American Majority publicly asked her to drop out) or Rick Perry (poll numbers dropped into single digits).
So far, the winner of the GOP primary race is Obama. The Tea Party has split the Republicans into two factions: 1) non-Tea Party, we think Romney is the most electable; and 2) pro-Tea Party, we’d rather have anyone but Romney. The second group is responsible for rise of Cain and the fall of Trump, Bachmann and Perry. If the anti-Romney Republicans ever settle on a candidate, whether it turns out to be Cain or Perry or even Newt Gingrich, it might be too late to stop Romney from winning the nomination, but they might damage his general election chances.
Republicans in 2011 sound a lot like Democrats in 2003, squabbling among themselves over a too-large field of candidates to face an unpopular incumbent. From what I’m reading on the blogosphere about Romney, if he’s the nominee it doesn’t sound like the party will unify behind him even though he looks like the most formidable candidate. In 2004 those of us Democrats who supported Dean or John Edwards or whoever got behind John Kerry, and he still lost.
It will be fascinating to see how this unfolds, but as a Democrat, I’m not fearing Herman Cain one bit. I’m rooting for him!
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