I think he would have done the proper research and been fine in a debate.
If you remember.. the debates are separated by policy.
One night was the economy night. Which was Cains specialty. Another was foreign policy. He’d just need to brush up on foreign policy a little and he would have been fine.
Plus if you remember at that time.. the economy was the number 1 issue.
“Plus if you remember at that time.. the economy was the number 1 issue.”
True, but as a candidate for the top job, you can’t be single-issue. At the very least you need to be following current events, and he was not on that issue (and even if he wasn’t, the issue had been in the news on-and-off for at least a decade, maybe much longer). It was not a “gotcha” question like asking for the 4th smallest lake in Pakistan and then deriding the guy for not knowing it off the top of his head. I suspect the reporter was surprised that he simply couldn’t answer it - I think the reporter was genuinely interested on his thoughts.