Posted on 10/03/2011 6:42:50 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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 on September 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 September 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 September 25–27 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 September 24–27 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 from September 22 to September 25 and Quinnipiac from September 14 to September 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 September 29 column that Cain’s success in business — he engineered turnarounds in Burger King’s Philadelphia stores and at 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 ten current or possible candidates against Obama. Rasmussen finds Romney ahead by 2 percent and Chris Christie trailing by 1 percent. The other candidate among the three 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 ten Republicans. That may be because some black voters desert Obama when Cain is the opponent.
Further support can be found in the Lowcountry 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 anytime. But he’s beginning to look like a contender.
— Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor, and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
I sure haven't seen any of that, only over the top "interpretations" of the misnomered "attack" by Perry supporters. Cain is kicking their boys butt and they don't like it. Such is the way of politics.
“How’s that workin’ out for you?”
I wake up and realize that today is another day in Obama’s America. Pretty damn lousy.
“Most of us will grumble about our constrained choice, and then select from the realistic options and Cain isn ‘t one of those options.”
Balderdash. He’s outpolling the other two nationally, and that’s bad news for them because he started way behind them.
Sure, 2 weeks ago, I could see your position, but it’s a 3 man race now. Looking at the numbers against Obama, tells me that he’s still lacking in his name recognition among independents and republicans.
So still lots of work left, but I see no reason he can’t make up the ground.
Love it! bttt
Cain just won over 48% of the vote, of the National Federation of Republican Women’s convention in Kansas City -
http://www.nfrw.org/documents/convention/2011/pollresults.pdf
He also won TeaCon (in Obama’s backyard), Dekalb GOP (GA), Orange County GOP (NC) and many other polls this week
“Well, I gotta say ... he was third on my list but now he’s off it altogether.”
Seeing as neither of your candidates are actually running, that speaks volumes.
What are you going to do when you actually have to make a choice?
Wallace Interview:
Wallace: I want to ask you, there was a troubling story on the post today, about Rick Perry, The Governor of Texas and it indicates for years his family had a hunting camp in West Texas. And the name of it, written on a stone, was “N”- head, but obviously it wasn’t just “N” head.
Cain: Right
Wallace: And he was part of that camp, even as Governor. Your reaction.
Cain: My reaction is, that’s just very insenstive. There isn’t a more vile, negative word than the “N” word, and for him to leave it there as long as he did, before, I hear, they finally painted over it, it’s just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country.
Then the interview went on about 9-9-9
Based on that Perry supporters are comparing Cain to Al Sharpton and worse.
He has had a positive intensity rating on Gallup for 18 out of the last 19 weeks. The only thing missing was name recognition, but that is increasing steadily. How is that a “fad”?
So far he is the only candidate that hasn’t dropped off in support.
He’s also picked up some endorsements like Dennis Miller, COL Michael Steele, and just added JD Gordon (Pentagon spokesperson) as his communications director.
But he can’t win! He has no organization! He is inexperienced! He is a fad...but, but, but...
“Ninety-two percent of the elected officials in Washington are sitting for their second or more term. Clearly, there’s plenty of experience in the current Congress. How’s that workin’ out for you?”
That is the exact right answer. Career politicians, those with Washington experience and knowing “how things get done” have led us to 14 TRILLION dollars in debt.
A better question to ask is why ANYONE assumes those same politicians are capable of getting us out of this mess when all evidence points to the opposite!
Outside of Newt and Huntsman, who on the Republican ballot currently has foreign policy experience?
Foreign policy is almost always a learn on the job task for a new President.
My thoughts exactly. Cain had the opportunity to be a post-racial leader on the Perry matter. Cain could have issued a cool and measured statement.
But instead Cain played the race card. His goal, obviously, was to damage Perry any way he could.
Cain is still very high on my list. But as you said, I've cooled off quite a bit.
The second he becomes a serious contender Herman will be confronted in the media with legions of former Godfathers Pizza employees, all claiming that he ran a sweatshop.
I used to be management in a retail business. We had no shortage of hourlies who would have given up sex (and possibly even drugs) for a shot at taking down the CEO.
He was until he allowed the media to bait him into playing the race card.
Illinois Tea Party poll this weekend:
10. Johnson 0%
10. Hunstman 0%
8. Obama 0.2%
7. Santorum 1.4%
6. Paul 1.8%
5. Romney 2.6%
4. Perry 3%
3. Gingrich 3.8%
2. Bachmann 9.4%
1. Cain 77.5%
That so called race card is a non-issue that will quickly be forgotten. It was an off the cuff remark and Cain never insinuated that Perry was racist.
It will only be an issue if people keep bringing it up ( like George Allen’s Macaca remark) in order to derail his candidacy. Other than that, we all know that Cain never was a Sharptonian or Jesse Jacksonian race baiter.
RE: Cain is still very high on my list. But as you said, I’ve cooled off quite a bit.
Somewhere out there, Christianne Amanpour and her CNN schemers are laughing and giving each other high fives saying to themselves — IT WORKED.
They’re probably going to work on the next GOP candidate in their next interview, knowing how people will react when they fail to give an answer to a gotcha question that they don’t like.
Of course he isn’t. But if he is naive enough to fall for that trick from the media, he is too naive to successfully run. When dealing with the media, NEVER ACCEPT THE PREMISE.
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