Posted on 10/03/2011 7:15:29 AM PDT by martosko
The man who talked Herman Cain into running for president, and plotted a strategy that has the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO surging in the GOP presidential race, knows both highs and lows.
Mark Block was the first 18-year-old ever elected to office in Wisconsin when he was voted onto the Winnebago County Board of Supervisors in 1974.
Yet he was also banned from politics in Wisconsin for three years and forced to pay a $15,000 fine after being accused by the Wisconsin State Elections Board of violating election law in 1997 as campaign manager to state Supreme Court Justice Jon P. Wilcox.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedc.com ...
good going.
Cain may have more qualification to be president then anyone.
The rest of the story...
“The Wilcox campaign was accused of illegally coordinating activities with an outside group which mounted a get-out-the-vote effort. To this day, Block denies any wrongdoing.
“Politics at times is ugly,” Block, who worked as an official at Americans for Prosperity before becoming Cain’s chief of staff and campaign manager this year, explained during an interview with The Daily Caller.
He claims the state’s attorney general only went after him because it was “decided it would be a good thing not to have Mark Block involved in the next election cycle.”
Block settled with the Wisconsin State Elections Board without admitting guilt. Broke and unable to work in politics under the settlement, he stocked shelves at Target.
His political rehabilitation includes meeting Herman Cain several years later, when Block was working as the head of the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity.
“Mark was asked to launch branches in Michigan and Ohio,” Cain recalls in his book that comes out this week, “and I was asked to help him … we ended up spending a lot of time together, much of it in a car, traveling from meeting to meeting.”
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Cain, and all the Republicans who compete for the American presidency at this critical juncture in America's history, however, should consult an excerpted portion of the 1801 Inaugural Address of Thomas Jefferson for guidance on the seriousness of the undertaking:
(Excerpt) "Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
"About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people—a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety*."
*Underlining added for emphasis)
Now, the question is: which 2012 potential candidate possesses sufficient understanding and devotion to the founding principles to enable him/her to lead us to "retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety"?
Is it Cain, or is it someone else?
Caution: candidate must provide comprehensive biographical and curriculum vitae, as private employers require for leadership positions! Hopefully, Americans learned their lesson in 2008.
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