Don Vito Corleone
Elite
1) Cain has never held elected office, and thus seems to be having severe difficulty understanding the culture of government.
2) Cain seems to lack an interest and curiosity regarding matters of international relations, hence the fact that he is joking about not knowing the name of the President of Uzbekistan (a nation with great potential strategic importance to the US), and doesn't know that China has been a nuclear power for nearly 50 years.
3) Cain seems to lack an interest and curiosity regarding domestic matters, hence the fact that he doesn't seem to know where he stands on some important domestic issues (the most notable example was his crazy quilt of different positions on abortion). This suggests he either doesn't know what he's saying or he is trying to modulate it to suit his audience - either interpretation is troubling. His only concrete domestic policy idea, 9-9-9, has been thoroughly discredited by people all over the political spectrum and he had to fundamentally change it within days of its announcement.
4) He doesn't strike me as even moderately bright, nor has he chosen to surround himself with bright people. He seems to be like the Emperor Who Wore No Clothes in his hostility to new ideas from his staff, as evidenced by the fact that his campaign workers in Iowa were told not to speak to him unless spoken to first.
5) His handling of the sexual harassment allegations has been laughable. He is blaming everyone (the media, Rick Perry, white Democrats, his accusers) but himself and, despite having ten days to craft a response, managed to lie, and change his story repeatedly within a single day once the story was actually released.
6) He is willing to play the race card when faced with a difficult situation. Even Condoleezza Rice has been critical of him for this. The irony is that if he were white, he'd have been torn from neck to nuts by now by Romney and the media, but since he's black, people have been hesitant to be openly critical of him.
7) He has more interest in conducting a book tour than running a campaign, which causes me to earnestly question whether he ever intended to be taken seriously as a candidate. The fact that this idea (that his campaign may never have been seriously intended to succeed) is being openly discussed, even by members of Cain's own party, speaks volumes about the quality of this candidate and his campaign.
Ultimately, Cain appears to me to be the least qualified Presidential candidate in my lifetime ever to be considered a front runner this soon (1 year) before the election. The fact that he continues to poll reasonably well reflects more on the fractured state of the GOP and the party's hesitancy about Romney than it does on Cain himself, who deserves to be riding the pine with Pawlenty or, at best, to be polling in single digits like Bachmann and Huntsman. The problem for the GOP is that the same could be said for any of its candidates with the exception of Romney.
I would guess that within two weeks, Gingrich will be enjoying a bubble and Cain will have retreated back to ~8-10% support. Gingrich always does well in the debates, and tomorrow's debate is timed such that there WILL be questions about harassment that will make Cain look foolish. But hey, I hope I'm wrong. If the GOP is really misguided enough to make Herman Cain its candidate, he will lose by a significant margin and the GOP will have carried off one of the biggest failures in Presidential political history. Kind of like the Red Sox late-season skid, but by tens of millions of people rather than one MLB roster.
Last edited:
