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Cain can win straw polls and score high in national polls for weeks. It won't give him any prospect of winning the nomination, but it will be a nice boost for his post-campaign media career. That's about it.

Ron Paul wins straw polls all the time. He's never going to be President. Michelle Bachmann won the Ames poll by a wide margin, and promply dropped from view. Lots of candidates have done well in polls for a while but failed to sustain a competitive campaign. Cain is fated to be one of them.

Candidates don't win nominations any more than quarterbacks win conference titles. It takes takes a team to win a title and it takes an elaborate campaign apparatus to win a major party nomination. Cain hasn't got one and can't get one. To build the requisite apparatus you need to be a major political player for years. Cain doesn't qualify. Game Over.

That's why nobody remotely comparable to Herman Cain has ever been either the Republican or Democrat nominee for President in anything resembling modern times. Every nominee has been a major political player before they ran for President. Even Wendell Wilke was a prominent Roosevelt critic before 1940. Besides, he only got the GOP nod because, with war breaking out, the Republican establishment wouldn't put forward an isolationist which ruled out Senators Vandenburg and Taft. The only other candidate, 38 year old Manhattan DA Thomas E. Dewey, was even less established as a political player than Wilke. Wendell Wilke was a last resort. With Romney and Perry in the race, Cain won't have that advantage and without that advantage his campaign is going nowhere.

I realize this is a bitter truth. Cain makes an attractive political fantasy, but it is just a fantasy. Have your fun for a little while, but we have to return to reality soon.

Romney or Perry, take your pick.

“I realize this is a bitter truth. Cain makes an attractive political fantasy, but it is just a fantasy. Have your fun for a little while, but we have to return to reality soon.”

You aren’t concerned about the fact that Perry himself said that his wife convinced him to run against his better wishes?

That doesn’t sound like a particularly attractive candidate to me.