Cain's Cigarette-Puffing Aide Has Checkered Past

Fox News ^ | Published October 28, 2011 | AP via FOX

[marty60]

He is the man with the mustache who takes a rebellious drag on a cigarette in the Herman Cain Internet ad gone viral.

"We've run a campaign like nobody's ever seen," he says before taking a puff. "But then America's never seen a candidate like Herman Cain."

Meet Mark Block, Cain's unorthodox campaign manager. Perhaps no one is more responsible for the Georgia businessman's meteoric rise in the presidential polls than Block, a Republican strategist and tea party leader who's left a trail of questionable campaign work behind him.

Block has been accused of voter suppression and was banned from running Wisconsin political campaigns for three years to settle accusations he coordinated a judge's re-election campaign with a special interest group.

Records show Block has faced foreclosure on his home, a tax warrant by the Internal Revenue Service and a lawsuit for an unpaid bill. He also acknowledges he was arrested twice for drunken driving.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/10/28/cains-cigarette-puffing-aide-has-checkered-past/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fpolitics+%28Internal+-+Politics+-+Text%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo#ixzz1c5nPhl8q

[beckett]

The second I heard Mark Block steal the “Let Reagan be Reagan” line and apply it to himself, I knew he was a Class A jackass. Anybody who’d let this bozo represent him doesn’t know how to judge character.

[rogue yam]

Yours is an idiotic post.

Did you also flip out in 2008 when people suggested that the McCain campaign should “let Palin be Palin”?

[beckett]

If you don’t know the difference between a no-name campaign staffer and Sarah Palin, that’s your prerogative, I guess. It does seem to indicate you don’t know much about politics, however.

When a no-name campaign staffer compares himself to Reagan on national television with the words, “Let Mark be Mark,” and fails to keep the focus on his principal, Herman Cain, he proves himself to be a liability to his principal, and he shows himself, to anyone who knows politics and political campaigns, to be a Class A jackass who should be fired immediately.

Anyone who’d hire a jackass like this guy lacks judgment. Period.

[rogue yam]

You are a lying idiot. Nobody compared himself to Reagan and you know it. It is a common expression, one not exclusively associated with RWR. You are making up nasty nonsense in service to some other candidate and are just too corrupt to campaign honestly. Given your underhanded nature I suspect there’s magic underwear involved.

[beckett]

I see you really don’t know very much about politics and recent American history.

I challenge you to find the quote, “Let so-and-so be so-and-so” prior to Michael Deaver saying “Let Reagan be Reagan” in connection to Deaver’s public relations strategy for the Reagan White House. You won’t find it, because Deaver coined the phrase.

Reagan, of course, would never have been so arrogant as to use the phrase on himself, unlike Herman Cain’s no-name staffer, who clearly exhibits a surfeit of arrogance and stupidity both in the dumb commercial he starred in, and in everything he has said subsequently.

He should be fired immediately, and every day Cain fails to fire him shows a lack of judgment on Cain’s part.

[rogue yam]

You are failing to understand how language works. Even if no one ever used the phrase prior to Deaver, that was thirty years ago. What matters today is how the expression is used today.