Posted on 01/15/2011 11:51:26 AM PST by justsaynomore
Interview: Herman Cain seeks to be a people’s president January 14th, 2011
Dan Calabrese There’s no way I can publish an interview with Herman Cain without putting this on the record: I absolutely love the guy.
I have known Herman personally for five years, ever since he first signed on to write a column for this syndicate. We’ve only met in person once – in Atlanta in 2007 – but we know each other well through five years of telephone and e-mail dialogue.
Meet the new boss? He has been helpful both with advice and encouragement as I’ve worked to succeed at this and other business ventures, and he has stuck with us through thick and thin, when I’m sure bigger and more established syndicates would have been happy to snatch him away from us.
I also have no doubt in my mind that he would be a phenomenal president - an alter-the-course-of-history type president. I put all this on the record because it wouldn’t be honest to publish this interview if I didn’t.
That said – and I told him this before we started – I wanted to pay him and our readers the respect of taking this seriously, and of asking him the kinds of tough questions someone should face if he wants to be president. If I just lobbed him a bunch of friendly softballs because we are friends, what value would there be for anyone in reading it?
To go through his personal and professional background here would make this piece longer than it is already going to be, so enjoy getting to know him (as well as links to nearly four years’ worth of columns for us) here.
Here is the dialogue we had yesterday:
DC: You were one of those who made an issue of President Obama’s lack of executive decision-making experience, and we’ve seen some of the problems he’s had because of this. With you, it’s the other side of the coin. Aside from your run for the Senate in 2004, you have no political experience. How would you overcome that for the purposes of governing effectively?
HC: Most of the people in Washington have political experience. How’s that working out for us? Not too well. What I bring to the table is more important than political experience, and it’s leadership experience and problem-solving experience. I happen to believe that my approach to problem-solving is a big plus.
You know and you’ve seen me write about the importance of working on the right problems. You’ve heard me talk about setting the proper priorities. And you’ve heard me talk about plans. I call it the three Ps – the problems, the priorities and the plans.
DC: OK, but you’ve solved problems in a corporate setting. You didn’t have to deal with Congress, and you didn’t have to operate in an atmosphere in which everything is demagogued, and in which people obsess over irrelevant nonsense. How do you intend to overcome that?
HC: My leverage is that I’m going to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to make sure the American people know what these priorities are, and I’m writing a little booklet that lists those top 10 priorities and the common-sense solutions that I’m going to share with the public – stuff they can understand. Now here’s how the way I execute the office is going to be different. I’m going to make sure that the public understands what those priorities are, understands what the problem and the priorities are, and our plans for dealing with them. I will leverage the public’s understanding of what those are, and what the solutions are, such that they will demand it from their representatives. One of my guiding principles is that, if the public understands it, they will demand it. So while the presidential bully pulpit has been used to talk about problems and issues and all that kind of stuff – crises, you name it – I would also use the bully pulpit to educate the public, keep the public focused and promote the priorities and issues that I would be pushing.
If you use the bully pulpit effectively, the public is your cavalry. The public is your ace in the hole.
DC: Let’s put some definition to those priorities. What would be at the top of the list?
HC: The first question I often get asked is what am I going to do about the economy? The first thing I’m going to do is propose making the tax rates permanent. Why? Because extending them two years is to extend the uncertainty for two years, and the American people can understand that because I’ve explained it. Secondly, I would ask Congress to lower the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, because we are the only industrialized country that has not lowered its top corporate tax rate. You hear liberals say why don’t need to be giving tax cuts to the rich and all that stuff. What no one has ever said is, “Here’s why we need to lower that tax rate.”
I would also lower the capital gains tax rate. The capital gains tax punishes risk. It’s lower now than it’s been – it’s at 15 percent – but I would lower that rate even more. I would like it to be zero. Also, no tax on repatriated profits.
So my approach would be to take those four easy-to-understand ideas, ask Congress to put it in a bill, and I would promote the hell out of it. And that’s how we stay focused on a real direct stimulus to the economy, instead of trying to tickle the economy back to prosperity as I wrote about this past weekend.
DC: We’ve got unemployment bouncing between 9 and 10 percent right now, and the focus is usually on what government is going to do about this. But what about what people can do for themselves? What would you say to that person who seems to constantly struggle to remain employed? What do they need to do to help themselves?
HC: I love it. One of my budgeting principles, and I’ve got about 10 of them, is that government assistance will be structured to help people to help themselves. It’s not going to be structured to just continue to give you a handout. For example, when they were debating the whole issue of extending unemployment benefits, well, we should have established way back when that once you get 26 weeks, if you have to apply for a second round, your second round would be 13 weeks. Your benefits would diminish over time, because people you can’t pay people unemployment benefits indefinitely, which is what some liberals want you to believe.
And you have to have some hard-core proof that you are seriously looking for a job, or you’re in school trying to improve yourself. This model of providing an incentive to people to help themselves was used in Wisconsin when Gov. Tommy Thompson was trying to get people off welfare. It worked. And then when Tommy Thompson went to Washington D.C. as a cabinet member, it worked there also. Now, they didn’t continue as much as they would have liked, but providing an incentive to help people help themselves is a key to my strategy.
DC: All right, tell me what you would do to get federal spending under control.
HC: First, you do an across-the-board cut, if they have not done it already by the time I get to the White House. For example, you say that we’re going to cut the spending of every federal agency across the board. Then you do your vertical cuts. This is where I would sit with each of my cabinet secretaries, who will have to be approved by the Senate, and do a deep dive into every agency looking for whole programs to eliminate. We’re not going to be able to cut federal spending seriously, and make a dent in the national debt, if we don’t cut whole programs.
And I believe those programs are there. A guy we met in Iowa studied federal grants, and he says that coming out of Washington’s 1,000 federal grant programs, only 19 of them are block grants. Nineteen! Are you going to tell me we can’t find some programs in there that ought to be terminated? I think we can, but the only way we get to that point is to do what we call vertical budget cutting.
It can’t be that you let the permanent bureaucratic staff bring you all of these hurt old people and puppy dog programs and say we can’t cut them, and then you’ve got all the other programs that should have been gone a long time ago, and they hide in the budgets. I did the same thing when I went to Godfather’s. I did the same thing when I went to Burger King. It’s called active budget-cutting, not just passive budget-cutting.
I will allow no earmarks in any bill that comes across my desk. And if they think I’m kidding, try me. Earmarks set the wrong tone in Washington.
DC: That’s what they always do, of course. They attach something you don’t want to something you feel you really have to have, and then they dare you to veto it.
HC: You got it. And I’m gonna veto it. I’m going to explain to the public what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to lump in a military appropriation with food stamps. That’s the kind of crap in Washington D.C. that people are sick of.
It takes a lot of energy to be able to explain it to the public, and I’ve got to tell you that two of the things that have helped me in the last few years have been writing a weekly commentary every week and being on the radio. That has been an unexpected learning experience. How do you communicate clearly your ideas – either written in a 500- or 600-word commentary, or when you get callers?
Now the mainstream media’s going to do their normal routine of this-is-gonna-hurt-this-this-and-this, but you know what I’m going to do? I’m just gonna turn it up a notch. Every time they try to demagogue the idea, I’m just going to the public to let the people know. I’m going to be a people’s president, not the politicians’, not a Congress’s president, not the bureaucracy. The people’s president.
DC: You recall, of course, that when the Republicans had the majority in Congress the last time, they fell away pretty quickly from their commitment to reduce the size of government. Instead of cutting spending, they just shifted the spending to Republican-friendly constituencies, especially in the business community. In your view, what is the business establishment seeking from government that it needs to be told it will have to do without?
HC: Most of the business establishment just wants to be able to navigate around all the rules and regulations and still make money. But special subsidies – nope, we’re not going to be in that business. If it was a good idea from a business standpoint, the government wouldn’t need to subsidize it. Now I’m not saying we’re to cut all subsidies overnight. But there are some subsidies and some programs that have a sunset clause on them, and by the time they get rid of the sunset, somebody goes back in and lobbies to extend it.
DC: OK, now when I asked about getting federal spending under control, you made no mention of entitlements, of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That’s more than half the budget right there.
HC: That’s because you didn’t let me get to it.
DC: Oh, OK, well don’t let me stop you.
HC: With Medicare and Medicaid, I would do them as block grants. I want the Medicare rules and the Medicaid rules to change such that if they’re getting a certain amount of money – we start with what they’re getting now – we’re going to block-grant that program to the states and let the states establish their own rules about what works and what doesn’t work. One size, one set of rules, does not work. Now Medicaid would be easier to do than Medicare, but block-granting it allows the states to decide how to use the money.
On Social Security, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has talked about going back to personal retirement accounts. I totally support that idea. The reason Bush wasn’t able to get this passed is that Bush wasn’t articulate enough in spelling it out to the American people, and his fellow Republicans didn’t do a darn thing to help him.
DC: I’ve been saying that for six years!
HC: I know you have! And you’re right. You’re right.
It was a great idea, but they let him go out on that limb, and they just sat back and said, Mr. President, you use up all your political capital, OK? That goes back to my point about using the bully pulpit. I’m not going to let the Democrats scare the hell out of old people.
DC: Let’s turn to some foreign policy questions. We haven’t done a lot of looking back in this conversation so far, but I want to ask you, in retrospect, should we have invaded Iraq in 2003?
HC: We should have, for several reasons, not just the single-minded issue of WMD. But the thing is, Saddam Hussein did have WMDs. They may not have been nuclear missiles, but he did have weapons of mass destruction and he used them on his own people.
How could we not intervene with such a brutal dictator? When he invaded Kuwait, that told me that this was one of the most dangerous figures on the planet. So I can come up with a lot of reasons why this was the right thing to do, and I do believe Bush did the right thing.
DC: President Bush’s premise was always that, by transforming Iraq and introducing freedom there, it would begin the process of transforming that region, and that this would be the most enduring strategy for fighting terrorism. Do you embrace that thinking?
HC: First of all, no matter how much the world criticized him, we didn’t have another attack. Now, I agree with that vision, but it’s going to take a long time, because what we see now in Iraq is that the insurgents haven’t given up. But as the will of the Iraqi people gets stronger, and as the Iraqi security forces get stronger over time, they will gradually be able to hang onto the form of government they’ve created.
DC: OK, but would you reaffirm that commitment and see it through to success?
HC: I would reaffirm it, but I would redefine what level of resources we provide. I think right now, the level of resources that we ought to be providing going forward is not putting our men and women in harm’s way. We continue to be supportive. We apply our technologies. We provide our planning. I think at this point what we should do is redefine what our level of support is, just like we should do in Afghanistan after I get the generals and the experts in to answer a very difficult question: Can we win in Afghanistan?
I don’t know the answer to that. If the answer is no, then give me an exit strategy. And I’m not going to be like Barack Obama, take it and turn it to some sort of hybrid that doesn’t make any sense. If they say we can win in Afghanistan, I want to hear what the strategy is going to be, and then as president, I’m going to make the decision whether I want to execute that strategy.
We cannot win a war trying to be politically correct, and we have too many members of Congress going over to Afghanistan for photo-ops. You cannot run a war with a committee of 535 people. I would limit the amount of media presence over there. And I wouldn’t share our plans with the enemy. I would never have given a pullout date to the enemy. This administration’s kumbaya strategy on national security is wrong, and the American people believe it’s wrong. But the Democratic leaders are tone-deaf to the American people.
DC: How far would you go to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons?
HC: I don’t know how many nuclear submarines we have, but I would park them off the shores of Iran and monitor their activity 24/7. I would also make sure all of our nuclear-detection capabilities were up to speed and up to par, and make sure we were within striking distance of Iran if they did something stupid, like launching a missile at Israel, at the United States or at one of our vessels. We’ve got the technology, and I know that from way back when I worked on ballistics for ships and aircraft. A couple of years ago, you may remember there was a runaway satellite falling back into the Earth’s atmosphere, and one of our ships took that sucker out of the air.
That was like trying to hit a golf ball that’s being fired at you, and you’re standing on a skateboard with a golf club in your hand. But they did it! They knocked it out of there. That’s how capable they are. Another example was during the Gulf War, the work of our ballistics was phenomenal.
We’re not going to talk Iran into not developing nuclear missiles, so we should stop wasting our breath. I believe in the Reagan model – peace through strength. I would park those nuclear submarines over there, with detection capabilities on those ships, and I would do the same thing for Kim Jong Il, that other sick little potentate in North Korea. The only thing they understand is the threat of force and retaliation. I wouldn’t make the first move. I would just make sure our warriors are in place.
DC: It sounds like you’d be committed to a pretty widespread presence of U.S. forces all across the globe.
HC: Only around rogue states. We don’t need to be in Germany. Why are we still there? Why are we in some of the other countries where the government is stable? We can’t police the world. But I want to position our military in some parts.
DC: Name me two current justices of the Supreme Court that you would have appointed.
HC: Clarence Thomas and John Roberts. Those would be my top two.
DC: One last question: Tell me one thing about which you would level with the American people, where those in office today are not doing so.
HC: Level with the American people? Fellow patriots, we are bankrupt as a nation. We’re not almost bankrupt. We are bankrupt, but we have not declared bankruptcy because we’re living on eggshells with all the schemes to try to avoid the inevitable. Now with that being said, it’s not too late to prevent us going over the financial cliff, where we have another financial meltdown, where the value of our currency is going to be almost worthless. We can stop this, but it’s going to require some very hard decisions, and it’s going to require everybody understanding why we have to do what we have to do.
We are broke. B-R-O-K-E. Broke. And here’s how we get out of this mess. You haven’t heard Obama say that, have you? And you won’t. So that would be the one thing that I would level with the people about, that our total financial condition is broke – not legally bankrupt, but we are technically bankrupt, and Congress and the administration are trying to do a bankruptcy on the fly. That’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That’s all they’ve been doing.
We’ve known that Medicaid and Social Security were going to have a problem for decades. What has been done? Nothing. We knew there was a crisis, and they haven’t even been working on the right problem.
DC: Oh, that reminds me, I forgot to even ask if you would sign the repeal of ObamaCare because I guess I just sort of assumed that.
HC: I would repeal ObamaCare in an absolute heartbeat.
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I’m with him on his run at the presidency. However, I’m not looking forward to seeing the beating, lynching and trashing he is going to take from the commie libs in the state run “media” once they begin their Palinization of him. Hang tough Herman. It’s going to get ugly once Olbermann and Chrissy Tinglebell start their commie, anti-American crap.
Wouldn’t a Palin/Cain ticket just drive them outta their minds?!
.....plus he’s a Boilermaker alumnus, M.A. Computer Science- Heck ya!
It looks to me that Cain is angling for the top half of the ticket and not the bottom half. I don't see how being vice-president would be attactive to anyone used to running the show as he is.
I love this guy. He is on Fox Business all the time. He is wonderfully articulate and loves America.
How ‘bout Cain/West?
;-p
“He is wonderfully articulate and loves America.”
And he is the anti-Obama!
One has 0 experience in office and the other about two weeks as a congressman. Didn’t we already do that two years ago?
That ticket should be reversed and it would be good. This guy is definitely qualified and more qualified than anyone who has had an interest in running so far from the right.
He has jumped to the top of my list...for now.
Man! Thanks for posting this. I’ve been wonderin’ about this guy. Hopefully more FReepers will read this. Me? I’d post it again when there are more people on board here. Kinda slow today.
Bogie
Good idea. Herman is a treasure - I hope everyone reads it. This is not a departure for Herman either, he has held and “preached” these values 3 hours/night for years, as long as I have followed him.
LOL. But Zero fit both of your descriptors. Biden is just a goof with a LOT of political experience.
Zero is just, well, a radical zero, with Manchurian puppet strings.
Col West *IS* currently unproven as a political animal. but I like his resume and his style.
I have actually met Herman Cain AND heard him speak. Amazing. And NO teleprompters.
Actually Cain + Palin + West would be an amazing campaigning group. We can slice and dice the ticket as best fits the nation.
Unlike many here, I don’t have a problem with officers running for president. I think Grant wasn’t as bad as history paints him, Ike was good for the period he was in there, Washington was of course phenomenal and Andrew Jackson had some good traits to balance his bad ones. Truman was a National Guard company commander in WWI and for a Democrats wasn’t half bad, and of course JFK and PT109....
I just saw on facebook where Herman announced that Royal on Neal’s show passed away this morning. Is there a thread on FR about it and if not would someone mind posting one? I am on my phone and it makes it hard to post a thread. Thanks!
Yes, someone’s already posted a thread - here it is:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2657465/posts
Just heartbreaking :(
Count the beltway GOP in on that too, Cain is not an insider. I do like him though.
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