Posted on 10/03/2011 2:33:27 AM PDT by Kaslin
Is Herman Cain a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination? It's a question no one in the pundit world was asking until the past week.
Cain has never held public office. When he ran for the Senate in Georgia in 2004, he lost the primary by a 52 percent to 26 percent margin.
He has zero experience in foreign or defense policy, where presidents have the most leeway to set policy. When questioned about the Middle East earlier this year, he clearly had no idea what the "right of return" is.
His solid performance in the Fox News/Google debate Sept. 22 didn't get pundits to take his chances seriously.
Neither did his 37 percent to 15 percent victory over Rick Perry in the Florida straw poll on Sept. 24. That was taken as a response to Perry's weak debate performance and a tribute to Cain for showing up and speaking before the 2,657 people who voted.
But Republicans around the nation seem to have responded the same way. The Fox News poll conducted Sept. 25 to 27 showed Cain with 17 percent of the vote -- a statistically significant jump from the 5 percent he had been averaging in polls taken in previous weeks.
And a SurveyUSA poll of Florida Republicans conducted Sept. 24 to 27 showed Cain trailing Mitt Romney by only 27 percent to 25 percent -- a statistical tie. That's very different from the Florida polls conducted by Public Policy Polling Sept. 22 to 25 and Quinnipiac Sept. 14 to 19, both of which showed Cain with 7 percent.
We will see whether other national or state polls show Cain with a similar surge. If so, then there's a real possibility that Cain could win enough primaries and caucuses to be a real contender.
That possibility is already being taken seriously by The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger. Henninger argued in a Sept. 29 column that Cain's success in business -- engineering turnarounds in Burger King's Philadelphia stores and Godfather's Pizza nationally -- made him a plausible candidate.
"Unlike the incumbent," Henninger wrote, "Herman Cain has at least twice identified the causes of a large failing enterprise, designed goals, achieved them and by all accounts inspired the people he was supposed to lead."
Cain's business success, his "9-9-9" tax plan, his generally conservative stands on issues, the YouTube clip showing him debating Bill Clinton on health care in 1994 -- all of these help account for his apparent surge in the polls.
But I suspect there are a couple of other factors. One is likeability. Romney's attempts at ingratiation are awkward, and Perry's charm is lost on most non-Texans. But Cain is, as the Atlantic's liberal analyst Chris Good concedes, "undeniably likeable."
Another thing going for him is race. White conservatives like to hear black candidates who articulate their views and will vote for them: Check out Rep. Tim Scott of Charleston, S.C.
In this, white conservatives resemble white liberals, who liked hearing Barack Obama articulate their views and were ready to vote for him, too. This is what Joe Biden was getting at with his awkward 2007 comment that Obama was a "clean" black candidate.
White moderates are ready to support black candidates, too, as Obama showed in the 2008 general election.
Cain claims that he could get one-third of the black vote in a general election. There's no way to rigorously test that.
But it finds some support in Scott Rasmussen's polls, which have been regularly pitting 10 current or possible candidates against Obama. Rasmussen finds Romney ahead by 2 percent and Chris Christie trailing by 1 percent. The other candidate closest to Obama, trailing by 5 percent, is Cain.
Moreover, Cain holds Obama to the lowest share of the vote, 39 percent, of any of the 10 Republicans. That may be because some black voters desert Obama when Cain is the opponent.
Further support can be found in the Low Country of South Carolina, where Scott won with 65 percent of the vote in 2010 in a district where John McCain won just 56 percent and where 20 percent of the population is black. No other Republican freshmen in the Old South ran so far ahead of McCain.
All this speculation may be getting far ahead of the facts. Cain still has significant liabilities as a candidate and could make a disqualifying mistake any time. But he's beginning to look like a contender.
He only had a 50% name recognition until now.
Watch the polls in the next month.
I agree. I have been all for him but I didn’t like him pulling the race card over some old rock from decades ago. We can’t erase the past but we can put it in the past. Blacks use the N word all the time when talking to each other so STFU about it.
He really should have passed on the stupid rock issue. Now he can watch his poll numbers drop like a rock.
Liberals have always felt they had to destroy black conservatives. Why? Because they represent an existential treat to liberalism itself.
Cain has said that blacks have been “brainwashed”. Could any other candidate have said that, and not be shown the door? This is why Cain is so feared on the left.
It’s not just the black vote that black conservative candidates put into play, but guilt-laden whites get their get-out-of-jail card too. Oh, and did I say that he is a businessman, and thus a Washington outsider at a time when voters are fed up with politicians?
Perfect storm.
Herman Cain’s candidacy shakes the very foundation of the liberal house of cards.
Dunno about the right of return?? Mebbie because there ISNT ANY??Good one.
Still, it's not that he said "there isn't any", it's that he basically said, "never heard of it". If he was being sarcastic, in that he was consciously relegating the "big Arab issue" to a "non-issue", then it would have been Reaganesque. Unfortunately, I believe he really never heard of it.
And that's a problem.
Not that I give a sh*t about that POS phony "issue" (in my mind, there IS no "right of return") but it's disturbing to wonder that if he never heard of that one, what other big bad gotcha is out there waiting for Cain, that he never heard of, that will come up to bite him in a future debate against Obama, assuming that he gets that far?
In 1976 Ford was clearly damaged by a debate remark in which he said something about the Poles not being under the thumb of the soviets. Of course he knew better. It was probably just some kind of rhetorical error. But it hurt him. Debates matter.
I worry about Cain and what he knows and doesn't know and his inability to restrain what he says when he doesn't know. Like on the rock issue against Perry.
It is very telltale in romney's case. Where perry has made some really bad moves, romney hasn't truly been challenged on his terrible history. Yet his support is still completely flat in the polls and when perry dropped, romney saw nothing of the shift in support. He was completely repudiated by the voters.
Romney's support is all from the left and diseased RINOs.
I won't say that perry's a racist or anything, but really...what idiot on his staff booked this campsite without doing due diligence in research?!? It makes him look like a complete idiot and yes... certainly insensitive.
This was a BIG goof. Maybe not directly his fault, but certainly a massive failure on the part of his campaign staff.
VERY embarrassing for his supporters.
No, I don't think he's a racist, just woefully unprepared.
I agree. Apparently leaving the rock there and legible for years after painting it over was stupid and insensitive. But the facts in the story are in dispute, based mostly contradictory off-the-record recollections.
Cain would have served himself, Perry and the party better if he’d given a conditional pass: “Sure if the worst claimed were true, that would be stupid and insensitive of him, but I don’t know all the facts, Perry claims otherwise, and I’ve not seen anything else to suggest a shred of racism from the man.”
I’m skeptical that someone with ZERO experience in elected office, at any level, can 1) effectively campaign against a ruthless political opponent, and 2) navigate Washington politics and influence congress to get his agenda through.
I prefer a candidate with successful experience in elected office, preferably a governor.
And like Herman Cain said “Look what that got us into”
Bump
And he is right. They have been brainwashed
Oh gosh, I agree with you all the way. I would love to have a candidate that not only knows how to get ideas through the system, but has a track record of doing just that. I’m just not impressed by a clever speaker. We have that, and look where we are. Ok, Cain has business experience and success, but as someone has said previously, as head of a corporation, you can hire and fire whomever you want, not so in government.
Nope not on the Cain bandwagon, sorry. I really don’t support his 999 plan, not like it would have a snowball chance of getting passed in the first place, but why would anyone ever want ANOTHER tax? I already have am 8% sales tax, do I really want 17%?
I like Cain, I was excited, untill I was reminded of his ties to the Fed reserve. How does one get the *honor* of being *one of them?* Raiseseyebrows.
http://www.allamericanblogger.com/15837/herman-cains-achilles-heel/
Hoping someone can change my mind! He makes sense, has the charisma that bo had too, which should be a red flag?
The ridiculously slanted article points only to things Herman Cain has not done in his life, and completely ignores all the things he has done. His education and practical business experience has far more going for him than if he spent his adult life in politics like the rest in the field.
He graduated from Morehouse College in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and received a Master of Science degree in computer from Purdue University in 1971, while he was also working full-time in ballistics for the U.S. Department of the Navy.
Cain has authored four books: Leadership is Common Sense (1997), Speak as a Leader (1999), CEO of SELF (October 2001), and They Think Youre Stupid (May 2005).
After completing his masters degree from Purdue, Cain left the Department of the Navy and began working for The Coca-Cola Company as a business analyst. In 1977, he joined Pillsbury where he rose to the position of Vice President by the early 1980s. He left his executive post to work for Burger King a Pillsbury subsidiary at the time managing 400 stores in the Philadelphia area. Under Cains leadership, his region went from the least profitable for Burger King to the most profitable in three years. This prompted Pillsbury to appoint him President and CEO of Godfathers Pizza, another of their then-subsidiaries. Within 14 months, Cain had taken Godfathers Pizza from 911 stores down to 420 stores and reduced costs significantly. As a result of his efforts Godfathers Pizza finally became profitable.
Cain became a member of the board of directors to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in 1992 and served as its chairman from January 1995 to August 1996. Cain was a 1996 recipient of the Horatio Alger Award.
Cain was on the board of directors of Aquila, Inc. from 1992 to 2008, and also served as a board member for Nabisco, Whirlpool, Readers Digest, and AGCO, Inc.
:::rolls eyes::: & :::shakes head::: that some here speak loudly and often while being so uninformed.
Yep, all true.
Cain’s supporters want the right things, and I expect they’ll be good conservative voters long after the Cain boomlet has run its course.
It was named for a flower that grows in the west and was always known by that name because those flowers bloomed like crazy there. It was undoubtedly a way of identifying where to send the cattle during rotations (Texas has very sparce vegetation). There was never, even by the people who originally painted the rock somewhere back in time, a racial taint. It's what the flower was called....go look up the spanish word for black and you'll see where it comes from.
I found his critisms rather mooted. If indeed there were such a rock as reported in the story, it would be insensitive. What was Cain suppose to do? “Sorry, Chris, I can’t answer your question until I take a trip to Texas and investigate the rock for myself.”
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