‘A Million Miles an Hour’: Interview With Herman Cain Campaign Chief of Staff

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 74 Comments

In a brief telephone interview Thursday night, Herman Cain presidential campaign chief of staff Mark Block discussed the campaign’s strategy, fund-raising and recent news developments. Block contacted me after I’d written a post about the many criticisms leveled at the campaign by conservatives, including bloggers who demanded that Block be fired from the campaign. My recording of the interview began after Block had told me he was taking a cigarette break. — RSM

Robert Stacy McCain: Hang on, hang on a second. I’ve got to step outside myself and have a smoke.
Mark Block: Smokers unite!

RSM: What happened was, I saw all the bloggers calling for your lynching and I said, look, you know, I can bitch about this campaign from a much more informed perspective than anybody else could ever bitch about this campaign. You know what I’m saying?
BLOCK: Yep.

RSM: And so these amateurs jumping in on ‘Oh, what’s wrong with the Cain campaign’ kind of pissed me off. And so I said, ‘OK, I’ll uncork one and when it’s all said and done, guess what? They just raised $9 million, they’re on top of the polls, nobody ever thought they’d ever be there — you want to recalibrate your criticism?’
BLOCK: You know, Stacy, and I’m not blowing smoke up your ass –- no pun intended — but you’re one of the few that get that this is a non-traditional campaign.
Does Block make mistakes? Of course! You know, one of the reasons is we don’t have an army of researchers and analysts telling us what we can and cannot say and how to say it, OK? I don’t have a whole slew of lawyers that I go to and say, ‘You know what, because I say this thing about this kid that works for Politico and his mother, double-check the facts.’ I get handed a piece of paper and it says that he works at Politico, they broke the story, same last name of this woman, connect the dots — I was wrong! I admitted I was wrong, all right?
Now, with all of those faults, though, Stacy, we run a million miles an hour. And you know what? We make mistakes. But they can’t catch us.

RSM: Well, you know, I defended the ‘Blame Perry’ move as strategic genius. And whether or not it was intentional or not, you know, even your mistakes help you.
BLOCK: No, no — I will not back off of the Perry thing, Stacy. I will say that I was wrong on the kid that worked for Politico, because we didn’t have our facts straight. I’m not backing off on the Perry thing. I backed off on the guy [consultant Curt Anderson], because he came out and said that it wasn’t him. But I’m still not backing off that the pot wasn’t stirred by the Perry folks.

RSM: Well, between you and me and the fencepost [discussion involving confidential sources, redacted] and we’ll never know where this shit came from, except that my hunch from the get-go was Perry. But if it was the Obama people, so what? If it was Romney, so what? You know, that doesn’t matter, really.
BLOCK: Yeah, you know what? It’ll probably be like Deep Throat. We probably won’t know for 25 years where the whole Politico thing came from.

RSM: Yeah. Well, now, $9.4 million [fundraising since Oct. 1] is the number I just heard?
BLOCK: It was over $9 million.

RSM: In 40 days?
BLOCK: Yep.

RSM: Which is $225,000 a day.
BLOCK: It doesn’t take a simple regression analysis to figure that one out, does it?

RSM: No. So, what’s your burn rate? Is it still low? I mean, are you piling this money up?
BLOCK: Yep. . . . This is something that you got, that the other ones didn’t get. We got a lot of criticism from you and others, early on — really, going into the Florida straw poll –because we didn’t have a massive staff in every state and we didn’t have a massive staff in Atlanta. And we didn’t have this and we didn’t have that and we didn’t have all this other stuff. Right?

RSM: Right.
BLOCK: Because we didn’t want to burn that cash. So we come out of the Florida straw poll with extremely low fixed costs. If I’m talking like a businessman, it’s because he runs it like a business. So our burn rate is small, compared to all of the other campaigns, because we don’t have a lot of fixed overhead. So now, as the cash comes in, right, I don’t have a lot of bills to pay, Stacy.

RSM: OK. So let me ask you something — and someone had told me about this — is that you guys sent [field director] Jamie Brazil down to Florida before that straw poll to reach out to people and, like the list of [Republican] contacts in the state would have cost $7,000, and y’all didn’t spend the $7,000, and he did it all on his own. Is that true?
BLOCK: That’s true, but you gotta remember, Stacy, how many dozens of trips that Mr. Cain made into Florida prior to the Florida straw poll and all the Tea Party groups that he spoke at their rallies, OK? We had built an infrastructure down there. When you and I were out in Maryland [in July] in the driveway of, I can’t even remember whose house it was, and I said, ‘Stacy, we built these infrastructures in these states.’

RSM: Yep.
BLOCK: Through the Tea Party movement. I remember going into, for God’s sake, Fargo, North Dakota, in February or March, freezing my butt off, and the first people we met was the Tea Party groups, the 9/12-ers, the grassroots organizations. This is why I say that we’re running a million miles an hour — they can’t catch us, Stacy, ‘cause you can’t build those infrastructures overnight.

RSM: Yeah, well, speaking of building things overnight, I got a little note back from a friend who says y’all may be rolling out your new Web site [Friday].
BLOCK: Yeah.

RSM: Which was my big beef.
BLOCK: Yeah.

RSM: So, you’re re-launching the site tomorrow with a new design?
BLOCK: Yes, and you know, I have been so busy the last 10 days that I’m 99.9 percent sure that we’re rolling it out tomorrow, because we’re rolling it out on Veteran’s Day — tomorrow’s Veteran’s Day — but I haven’t had even a chance to call the developers and say, ‘What time are you flipping the switch?’

RSM: Yeah.
BLOCK: And I’ll try to do that tonight and send you a text message.

* * * * * *

UPDATE: Linked by Rio Norte Line, Matt Lewis, Hot Air Headlines, and by Bryan Preston at PJ Tatler. Now a Memeorandum thread.

Everybody seems so judgmental today, eh? People don’t pay me to teach campaign ethics. They pay me to get the story. I’m like the sportswriter in the press box. And like Al Davis said, “Just win, baby.”

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain

Comments

74 Responses to “‘A Million Miles an Hour’: Interview With Herman Cain Campaign Chief of Staff”

Joe
November 10th, 2011 @ 11:46 pm

Well how cool is that…they listen to Robert Stacy McCain.
Joe
November 10th, 2011 @ 11:48 pm

Congratulations Stacy!
richard mcenroe
November 10th, 2011 @ 11:52 pm

Dammit, Stacy you’re taking all the fun out of this! Don’t you know it’s more fun blindly poking the Cain campaign with a stick and then complaining when it doesn’t jump the way we want it to?
Bob Belvedere
November 10th, 2011 @ 11:53 pm

Bravo, Stacy.

I feel better hearing him being interviewed by someone who is not playing ‘gotcha’.

This will be interesting.
Adjoran
November 10th, 2011 @ 11:57 pm

Breaking from The Hill: the big joint presser of accusers is off because the other two (unnamed) accusers either haven’t agreed or haven’t been contacted: http://tinyurl.com/cmjdzhr

So from a practical standpoint, that stalls the story.

Also somewhat OT – Jay Nordlinger’s favorite line from the debate was Cain’s answer on the three things he objects to about Dodd-Frank; “… and the other two are Dodd, and Frank!”
ThePaganTemple
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:06 am

Damn dude, this is your chance. With your credentials you might be able to get a paid staffers position. Press liaison or something. Ask him to send you to Iowa to work on his campaign there. He might make you the head of his Iowa staff. All five or six of them.
poljunkie
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:12 am

Block’s hard on for Perrys people is a little juvenille in my view, and without “real evidence” lacks integrity. Aren’t they doing just what Cains accusers are doing?
The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : Herman Cain Campaign Chief: 'They Can't Catch Us'
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:18 am

[…] "We run a million miles an hour. And you know what? We make mistakes. But they can't catch us," Mark Block told me in a telephone interview. […]
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:19 am

Or, they will wait until Monday….I think, for this campaign season (for all campaigns)….fear Monday.
richard mcenroe
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:22 am

The Perry camp is at least as valid a suspect as either Obama or Romney since they all three benefit by taking Cain down to one extent or another.

There are also logical reasons it couldn’t be each of them.

The part of this that baffles me is the whole Gloria Allred angle. Where the freak did THAT come from. Bialek is not just a bad “victim”, she’s such a poor “victim” that her involvement actually delegitimizes the OTHER alleged victims.
Adjoran
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:25 am

Allred is a master of free publicity. She feels compelled to keep her name in the news on some high-profile case. If she had some other big newsworthy case going she wouldn’t give Bialek a second thought, but Gloria needs her fix of TV time.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:26 am

You realize that Perry hired 2 people with ties to Herman Cain and/or the NRA a week before the story dropped?

That is why they are suspicious.

Chances are, everybody was in on this leak(s). The Perry people may have floated the story to Politico who ran a story with no facts (because they may have had very little in facts…well…they still don’t)…then, the Obama connected Chicago crew from the IRA may have gone into the NRA records and found a few more details such as names and what not. I’m not saying that is exactly what happened, but it may not have been just one camp.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:28 am

Excellent job Stacy!
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:28 am

Congrats to RSM for the scoop!
Adjoran
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:34 am

Worse – at least we do know two Cain accusers received payments larger than a “usual severance package.” So those charges aren’t “baseless” – they may turn out to be insignificant, but not baseless.

Perry is a good target because of apparent motive. He’s been tanking as Cain rises, and they are competing for the same segment of the base, so it’s logical. But Perry has basically the same team he’s had over ten years, and it’s not his MO to dish dirt, so it’s just speculation.

Romney has no motive. Cain was in the middle of taking down the biggest threat, Perry, who has the money to compete with Romney and a network to raise more. Why mess that up? Romney’s whole strategy is to stay out of trouble and organize so he’s the last man standing. It would make no sense to take a crazy risk like this for questionable gain.

It’s just paranoia. The simplest explanation is probably correct: the leftist propagandists at Politico would try to take down any Republican to help Obama. Cain had the bad luck to be surging when they got a whiff of this. But it’s clearly Beltway-oriented.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:45 am

I think the big takeaway is Block’s discussion of how, when he was telling me in July about their building “infrastructures” in states, he wasn’t just talking out the side of his head. What happened in the Florida straw poll wasn’t a fluke, but rather the result of a long-term strategy. And people couldn’t see how the strategy worked until — bam! — breakthrough.

People have been underestimating Cain from the beginning and, as I said many weeks ago, the experts will keep saying he can’t win until he does win — at which point they’ll claim they knew it all along.
Charles
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:48 am

I think that the old boyfriend (the doctor from Chicago?) brought Gloria Allred in. Who he is and whether he has any political connections is still a secret, although Allred has been waiving his affidavit (also secret) as collaboration.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 12:57 am

Good that they finally gave you an interview a little more of that could go a long way. Not sure about the Perry angle, I smell demonrats.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 1:02 am

“If I’m talking like a businessman, it’s because he runs [the campaign] like a business.”

That explains a lot right there.

A campaign is not a business.

It’s not even especially like a business.

It’s more like a war, or an Ocean’s 11 style caper.

A business is something built for the long term, which makes efficiency of operations an important point.

A campaign is a short-term, win-or-lose proposition that you throw everything you’ve got into and that you come out of with everything, or with nothing.
Adjoran
November 11th, 2011 @ 1:10 am

Not likely. Politico gave Cain a ten-day heads-up on the story coming out. They knew what they had and that they didn’t have enough to unseal the records, so they baited him with the trap.

And if Perry hired people a week before the story, that was three days after they had notified Cain of it, meaning they had already been working on it for some time.
Adjoran
November 11th, 2011 @ 1:11 am

That smell could just be Politico, the press service for the Democratic Party.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 1:20 am

You read too much into things. Block is merely getting at the fact they aren’t trying to spend all their money on a bunch of advisors and TV ads at the moment.

Unlike somebody like Tim Pawlenty (who spent all his money and more and couldn’t make it past a hyped, but rather insignificant straw poll), the Herman Cain campaign is built to last throughout the primary schedule. That means they are conserving SOME of their money at the moment.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 1:38 am

“You read too much into things.”

You may be right.

One thing’s for certain: Cain’s campaign is always interesting. Every time I decide it’s a sideshow and its 15 minutes are up, there’s a surprise.
The Mandingo Strategy « The Rio Norte Line
November 11th, 2011 @ 1:39 am

[…] Stacy McCain has an interview with Mark Block, Cain’s campaign manager here. […]
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 2:14 am

Using Politico has it’s own dangers as a vehicle the odds of them leaking which candidate gave them the story are pretty high.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 2:17 am

All one big hive.

OT: My isn’t this cheerful.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 2:42 am

Didn’t pretty much the same thing happen to Reagan?
Adjoran
November 11th, 2011 @ 2:57 am

Yeah, no Republican would trust them with the tip.

And it’s odd to believe Perry or Romney would bother doing any oppo research on Cain, who had been in single digits until late September or early October. Politico gave Cain ten days notice, so they had the story at least by October 20 and were convinced they had gotten everything they could by tracking down former employees by then, meaning they had to have worked on it a week or more at least.

So any opposing campaign would only have had Cain on their radar for oppo research for a week or two. If it was that easy to track down, why wouldn’t Politico be able to get it on their own? Obviously there was a tip, but the NRA wasn’t all-Republican or conservative by any stretch.
Adjoran
November 11th, 2011 @ 3:01 am

No, they didn’t stop hating Reagan until after he died.

They then stopped hating on him and started lying about him.
Adjoran
November 11th, 2011 @ 3:06 am

I don’t see any evidence of much at all being spent, little more than he was spending before, judging from bloggers in the early states and my own eyes in my own. My guess is he is going to try to conserve the cash and go with volunteers on the ground, and spend it on television advertising as the contests get closer.

It is certainly unconventional, in that after the first few states the primaries start coming hot and heavy, and there won’t be time to build organizations in the later states. So Cain must be planning on relying heavily on broadcast media throughout. That’s never been done successfully that I can recall.
Joe
November 11th, 2011 @ 3:29 am

They will be back, Axelrod never sleeps.
omega_six
November 11th, 2011 @ 3:41 am

gotta say, Colorado is going to be a HUGE surprise for some people. This was done completely on the grassroots side just as an example: http://www.ColoradoForCain.com
Jorge Emilio Emrys Landivar
November 11th, 2011 @ 4:07 am

Block is a genius. Furthermore he has learned what every study about politics has shown. Campaign money isn’t what wins campaigns, its a symptom of popular candidates.
Joe
November 11th, 2011 @ 4:23 am

<a href="http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/221341/mitt-romney-is-the-only-adult-in-the-room/"Holey Moley, guess who just got the kiss of death!

How did Block manage this!
Joe
November 11th, 2011 @ 4:24 am

I mean, holey moley, that is the kiss of death!
Adjoran
November 11th, 2011 @ 5:50 am

Not while there is evil yet undone.
Zilla of the Resistance
November 11th, 2011 @ 6:44 am

I just woke up & of course the first thing I did was come to The Other McCain, like I do every morning, and I gotta tell ya, this makes my day. I am so proud of you, Stacy, and truly delighted to see your hard work rewarded with this incredible exclusive interview. Well done, and thank you for everything that you do!
Shawn Gillogly
November 11th, 2011 @ 7:10 am

True, it hasn’t. But if Cain can pull a win in one of the early states (and South Carolina and Iowa are both possibles), then he can throw the media switch on for the national campaign of Super Tuesday, and for all these months of Romney having the money/infrastructure, blah/blah, it’ll be Herman with the $ in hand advantage, at the time it’s most profitable to have it.

For an outsider’s campaign, it’s very smart. Not saying it will work. But it certainly has a better chance to me of working than going toe-to-toe with someone who had 6 years to build a professional campaign.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 7:25 am

Nice to see that RSM ain’t chopped liver. 🙂

However, I’m still skeptical about all the talk about this being a nontraditional campaign. I’m not saying that they’re wrong, and every election is different, but if I were a Cainiac, I’d be worried about banking too much on that.

Part of this is based on what I know of Iowa and their caucuses, and what early momentum can do for a campaign. Suppose that the Huckabee of 2012 (Santorum) has a surprise upset. That could really upset Cain as the pre-eminent not-Romney candidate. I would just feel more comfortable if I knew they were working hard to turn their polling into delegates.

Also, I take a lesson from the 2008 Democrat primaries. The Obama organization was much more focused on how to get to the magic number, and out organized Hillary in the early caucuses. Yes, there are significant differences with respect to winner take all and the two parties, but still.

And which Republican campaign seems like its the most organized, etc? Oh, right! Romney!

I will concede RSM’s point that I’m just an amateur voter talking out of my ass, but that’s what my ass is telling me today.
Bosun349
November 11th, 2011 @ 8:21 am

After this, if Cain wins and doesn’t give you an ambassadorship…well, there’s just no justice in sucking up. I think I can actually feel the vacuum you’re creating.

And then there’s this: “Does Block make mistakes? Of course!”

There are public figures who refer to themselves in the third person when speaking to the press. There are public figures who butt into their press interviews to ask themselves some questions of their own. And then there’s Mark Block, who does both at the same time.

And speaking of doing two things at once, he’s dropping his accusation against Anderson but not his accusation against the Perry campaign? The former was his only basis for the latter. An honorable person doesn’t respond to having his bluff called by trying to fold AND double down. But this is Mark Block.

One of a kind, and highly entertaining.
ThePaganTemple
November 11th, 2011 @ 9:27 am

That might actually be a good tactic for a candidate to use in an interview, especially when he feels obliged to be interviewed by some saliva drooling, closet faggot fossil like Bob Schieffer, Gregory, etc. Just ask the questions you want asked, and then answer them. Schieffer would have a heart attack, which would be a bonus point. Some of these old relics would likely shit all over themselves, which would be hilarious, and another reason candidates should always insist on bringing along their own film crew to record the proceedings.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 9:38 am

That might work for a live interview, but they can do a lot in the post editing process to neutralize that.
Finrod Felagund
November 11th, 2011 @ 9:51 am

The problem from what I understand is that the Perry people had been saying for something like 3 weeks before the story broke that the opposition research on Cain would do him in. Stacy posted a tweet from one of them.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 9:53 am

After this, if Cain wins and doesn’t give you an ambassadorship…well, there’s just no justice in sucking up. I think I can actually feel the vacuum you’re creating.

I’ll keep that in mind while I’m sunning myself in Vanuatu.

Your reference to “an honorable person” suggests that there are honorable people with jobs as GOP campaign operatives — an interesting hypothesis which ought to be examined critically. In my experience, GOP operatives play by the Al Davis rules: “Just win, baby.” There are no penalties in that game for conniving bullshit, only for conniving bullshit that doesn’t work.
Finrod Felagund
November 11th, 2011 @ 9:57 am

There are no penalties in that game for conniving bullshit, only for conniving bullshit that doesn’t work.

Truer words never spoken. You’re reminding me strongly of the stuff Art Chance posted on RedState, before they banned him for working for Murky’s campaign in 2008. His focus was more on what it’s like for Republicans to take over a government structure built by and for Democrats (first rule: fire everyone you can. Bureaucracies are nearly impossible to stop, and it’s better to have empty positions than positions filled by someone loyal to the other side), but the idea is much the same.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 9:59 am

It’s more like a war, or an Ocean’s 11 style caper.

Exactly. Which is why, when Block told me about their long-term strategy in July, he did so only on condition that I not report it — or, at least, that I not make a big deal out of it. I think a few times I mentioned that they had a long-term strategy that involved making early visits to states other than Iowa and New Hampshire. But it wasn’t like I blared it like a big exclusive.
Anonymous
November 11th, 2011 @ 10:02 am

The war analogy makes sense. The other visits being something like the equivalent of deep strikes to enemy infrastructure, and setting things up for later. Hopefully (for their sake) they haven’t done that at the expense of not having forces in place for the first actual battle.

I guess we’ll know come 4 January.
ThePaganTemple
November 11th, 2011 @ 10:35 am

Which is why I said candidates should insist on bringing along their own film crews to record the proceedings. They might not be able to broadcast everything the interviewers cut out, but they can at least make sure the pertinent points are broadcast on YouTube, their websites, etc.
Dave
November 11th, 2011 @ 10:35 am

Y’know, you keep saying this like it’s the holy grail of the Cain camp’s incompetence, and I suppose to you it is, but it’s just not true. Politico told them “We’re going to go with something damaging” in 10 days. The Cain people said “What?”, and Politico refused to tell them. They continued to refuse, even as the Cain camp went nuts trying to find out. Tell me please, how do you plan a coherent and coordinated response to “allegations”. I’ve got some allegations about you Adjoran. I’m not saying what, but be ready! You can’t do it. In my mind, Cain’s somewhat bumbling response bears this out; his reaction was that of an innocent man suddenly confronted with an accusation about a minor incident from 15 years ago. A court case, or arrest or something major? Sure, you’d remember that, but, one day on your way into the office, a NRA lawyer says “BTW Mr. Cain, that woman with those flimsy charges? We’ve settled that, it’s over, don’t worry about it”? You’d probably forget that the next week.
Book
November 11th, 2011 @ 10:37 am

I’m still not impressed with Block. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see Cain succeed, but I’m hoping he gets some better representation. Block’s face is out there too often.