Posted on 12/03/2011 5:15:38 PM PST by lbryce
Former pizza magnate Herman Cain dropped out of the presidential race on Saturday after accusations of sexual misconduct overwhelmed his bid to win the Republican nomination as an anti-Washington tax reformer.
Cain's departure set off a competition among other candidates to win over his conservative supporters with voting to start next month in the race to determine the Republicans' presidential pick for 2012 to oppose President Barack Obama.
Cain, a former Godfather's Pizza chief executive, told followers in his hometown of Atlanta that "false and unproved" sexual accusations had forced him to suspend his White House bid.
He said he would endorse another candidate, effectively ending a roller-coaster campaign that saw the African-American businessman go from complete outsider to the rising star of Republican conservatives within a few weeks over the autumn.
Cain held a Friday night meeting with his wife, Gloria, who has stayed mostly silent as several women accused her husband of sexual harassment and an Atlanta businesswoman this week said she had carried out a 13-year affair with him.
Gloria Cain appeared at his side on Saturday and smiled throughout.
Cain's departure shapes the wide-open Republican race more clearly into a matchup between former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and surging rival Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives.
Reuters/Ipsos poll data released this week showed Gingrich and Romney would benefit most if Cain quit.
Support for Romney and Gingrich would rise by 3 percentage points each, against the 1- or 2-point bumps Cain's departure would give some of their rivals for the nomination.
Gingrich, a fellow Georgian, said he would meet with Cain next week.
"I don't anticipate anything," CNN reported Gingrich as saying. Cain has to "make up his own mind," Gingrich said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
It’s easy to take pot shots at Cain and say “he should have anticipated this” but perhaps the only thing that would do would be to have a repented Alinsky on your team who really does know all the dirty tricks from A to Z. As another pointed out, some of these women could have been stalking Cain. It’s unproven beyond a he said she said what Herman Cain ever consented to, let alone initiated.
Maybe the candidates could agree to share an Anti Democrat Dirty Trick squad, even if they disagree about the nuances of one another’s politics. If Mitt is last man standing, they won’t even stop at Mitt. Believe it.
Irregardless it looks like we're going to have Mitt or Newt shoved down our throat.
What's your choice? A $hit sandwich or $hit pudding?
Cain’s “suspension of his campaign” will only embolden the liberal smear machine to go out and commit similar acts of personal destruction against the other candidates. Liberals cannot just settle for defeating their opponents politically; the MUST destroy them personally.
The left cannot settle for political victory. They NEED top destroy their opponents’ lives. Otherwise, they’re never completely satisfied.
Liberalism is founded in contempt for other people, thus the need to destroy people personally if they poke their head above water. Especially minorities, whom the libs view as their property. Literally.
What do you want to bet Cain’s campaign rakes in money in large amounts over the next several days?
Get used to it. The bright side is that, unlike the Roman Empire, the political assassinations are only to someone's character. No one who is outside the political "club" will ever run for high office again. Too many people looking through your trash for that.
Doesn't matter. He was running for president and you can't spend all of your time defending yourself against all of this. Anyone still talking about 9-9-9? Didn't think so. You can't run a campaign like that. Sorry, but the smear job worked this time and he lacked the political acumen to dodge it like Bill Clinton did.
I like the South Park one better - a [bleep] sandwich or a giant douche? I’ll let you decide who’s who.
There is no way Axelrod took down Cain in the GOP primary. If the Democrat machine could take him down, they would have pumped him up to get the nomination, so he was primed for a takedown against Obama.
What good would it do the Dems to destroy Cain now? Nothing. He was a weak candidate from the start (politically, fund raising, organization, political experience) and would have had a very hard time beating Obama.
No, it was one or more of Cain’s competitors for the GOP primary that took him down. If Cain was this vulnerable on these sex related issues, Axelrod would be salivating at the thought of Obama running against him.
That is nothing new. Proof is never needed to destroy a candidate. It is always the accusation, if stated often and loud enough, that is sufficient to destroy a candidate. The left has it much easier because the MSM echo chamber resonates very loudly.
But this has always been the case and is nothing new. Where do you think the old saw came from about “when did you stop beating your wife?”
The tactic of bringing down your opponent with unsupported accusations is as old as politics itself.
That they didn't anticipate better showed his team's lack of ability to operate politically. Heck, even when I was active in college student organization, we learned about SWOT analysis. As a CEO, he surely knew it.
Again, I liked Cain. I am disappointed that he fell for stupid mistake like this. Yes, it is stupid on his part not to see and prepare that things like this would happen.
MrR and I were discussing this just a bit ago. There are a couple of legal reasons to suspend the campaign, which doesn’t mean he is really dropping out.
The most notable is under CFR he cannot hire private investigators for certain things, if he suspends his campaign, then he can prove more easily that any money used to fight these accusations has come from his personal funds and not campaign funds.
Also, with a suspension, it will be a bit easier to fight this legally as well.
If he did this (and I don’t believe for a minute he did) then he was stupid to run and think it wouldn’t come out (GWB taught candidates to hire PI’s to investigate yourself and find all the dirt). If he didn’t do it and didn’t think this kind of stuff would happen then he is naive.
Personally, I don’t think he is either stupid or naive. However, even if he decides to un-suspend (this isn’t the first suspension of the campaign IIRC) then he needs to get some serious staff help in learning how to handle these situations better because it will only get worse.
Bottom line, the libs WANT ROMNEY as our GOP nom and will stop at nothing to make sure he gets it because they know it is the only guarantee that Zero will win a second term. Only then will the attacks start on Romney and they will be far more brutal than anything we have seen on here. Can you say “vegetables have spirits?”
Somehow it didn’t succeed in taking Schwarzeneggar down politically. In fact “groping” was the least of it — he had a mistress whose family he was supporting on the side!
It’s damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. If Herman Cain had a nutsy broad chasing his pants, he is only considerate to his wife to say nothing about it, as well as to say no to the nutsy broad.
Fruitarians???
We’ll have to see how it turns out. I just found it interesting and predictable that, in their quest to lynch Cain, the Marxist propaganda organs deliberately mischaracterized what he said.
What it means is he gets to quit while still collecting federal matching funds.
“They should have looked at all possible attacks on that front, but obviously they didn’t. ..”
How did they know that women from the leftist machine would come out of the woodwork with lies?
Husbands and wives often don’t tell each other everything, but that doesn’t mean that they are cheating. I’ve done it myself but am very loyal, as is my husband.
Palin was also wrongfully accused of cheating on her husband, and she handled it with humor by saying: “Have you SEEN Todd?”
Call me crazy (some do), but I need EVIDENCE that Cain was having an affair.
Yes, husband and wife don't always tell each other all stuff, unless you are running for a president as a Republican candidate and run under the banner of moral principles. Any appearance of improper relation is enough to derail your campaign. Again, what happened in past week showed the reason. Again, it doesn't matter whether he actually committed affairs or not. It's the way he handled it that shows he's not ready for prime time.
If his team didn't know about this and didn't prepare his life to be an open book, I wish he didn't give false hope by running for the office. It's wasting everybody's time and energy since for sure the attacks from the left would end his campaign. And they did.
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