James Carville Trashes Herman Cain

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Herman Cain “is not going to be the president of anything,” says Corporal Cueball. “He’s just trying to get some attention. He’s not going to get the nomination.” Yeah. Tell it to the voters:

Herman Cain takes the lead in the Republican presidential nomination contest as GOP voters continue to deny Mitt Romney clear front-runner status.
A Fox News poll released Wednesday shows support for Cain has quadrupled among GOP primary voters since late August. At that time, he stood at 6 percent. After three September debates, he jumped to 17 percent. And now Cain leads the pack at 24 percent.

The numbers:

Herman Cain …………………….. 24%
Mitt Romney …………………….. 20%
Newt Gingrich …………………… 12%
Rick Perry ………………………… 10%
Ron Paul ………………………….. 9%
Rick Santorum ………………….. 3%
Michele Bachmann ……………. 3%

Wonderful fact about our two-party system: When it’s time to choose the GOP nominee, James Carville doesn’t get a vote.

UPDATE: Herman Cain was on Sean Hannity’s show tonight:

54 comments

  1. I’m not sure whether or not Carville is right about Cain’s nomination prospects. Probably, but not for certain.

    There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s right about Cain’s presidential prospects, though.

    Cain is a hot mess. Every day that the Republican primary base takes him more seriously is a day that the general electorate takes the Republican Party less seriously.

  2. I must respectfully disagree. Herman Cain’s resume makes him infinitely more qualified than many of the GOP contenders. My guess is that you didn’t take the GOP seriously long before Cain decided to run. Don’t punish Herman for that.

  4. Tad482,

    “Herman Cain’s resume makes him infinitely more qualified than many of the GOP contenders.”

    I guess it depends on what you mean by “infinitely more qualified.” That’s something that the voters judge, and history says that the last time they elected a president who was not:

    1) A sitting or former governor;
    2) A sitting or former US Senator;
    3) A sitting or former Vice-President; or
    4) A wildly popular victorious general

    was …. well, hell, care to guess?

    The answer, unless my memory is failing, is: Warren G. Harding. He and Taft are the only two in US history, and they were both cabinet officials.

    I left out “sitting or former US Representative,” as the last time someone got elected right out of the House was 1880.

    That’s what the resume requirements are. We don’t have to like it to admit that it’s the truth. And that’s leaving aside Cain’s weirdass complicated tax plans and inability to stick to a position for more than 30 seconds, if he can identify one in the first place.
    “My guess is that you didn’t take the GOP seriously long before Cain decided to run.”It’s not safe to assume that because I offer an opinion of how Class X will react to something, that I am a member of Class X. In this instance, I am not a member of either the GOP primary base or the general electorate. I just observe them.

  5. Cain cannot do blunders every interview and win the general.  He will implode…but that said Carville’s attacks are certainly not intended to help the GOP.  He knows that Hermain Cain is far more dangerous to Obama than Romney is (personally I think Romney could beat Obama, but it would be very close). 

    What does Mary say?  She is the smarter of the two. 

  6. On those historic facts you are not wrong.  That does not mean Cain cannot win.  He can.  But he has to make people feel comfortable.  Because they are already burned once by inexperience.  They really do not want to go down that road again.   

    That said, I do think voters want a clear choice.  Not a Romney mushy choice.  A clear one. 

  7. Agreed, Carville doesn’t have the GOP’s best interests at heart.

    But I don’t think Cain is any more dangerous to Obama than Romney is.

    As I got paid in a blind consultation earlier today to note, there’s only one GOP prospect who might conceivably offer a serious challenge to Obama, and he’s been having major traction problems so far.

  8. When it’s time to choose the GOP nominee, James Carville doesn’t get a vote.

    Depends what state he is claiming residence in Stacy.  He might. 

  9. Mary is saying, James you say something nasty about Herman Cain, I’ll come out and say something nice about him, and maybe we can get a guest shot on Meet The Press debating him.

  15. Abraham Lincoln and Herbert Hoover wouldn’t make the cut either. Counting Grover Cleveland is 6. So actually there have been 6, which means it has happened 13.6% of the time.

    The one thing that can be said with 100% certainty is that James Carville has never supported a black candidate in a Presidential primary.

  16. True enough.

    And the argument could be made (with Perot ’92, the Trump ballyhoo earlier this year, etc. as supporting evidence) that “the people” are genuinely interested in a non-politician businessman, but that the party establishments have the process rigged to reward political careerists.

    Still, it’s a pretty consistent record. If we add that House of Representatives criterion back in there (Madison was a US Rep), only two — fewer than 5% — of US presidents have been non-governor/senator/veep/congresscritters/generals, and those two were both cabinet officials, and the last one was nearly 100 years ago.

    Add that glass ceiling to Cain’s problems, which are significant, and he’s got a tough row to hoe.

  19. Imagine Cain in 3 one on one debates with Obama.  The repent & apologize profusely to all of humanity for ever supporting Cain.

    Romney would beat Obama, though.  So would Gingrich.

    (Are debates a dumb way to pick a President?  Maybe.  But they nevertheless would be decisive, a disqualifier, for Cain.)

  20. Yup – Virginia and Louisiana have open primaries.  I believe Maryland and DC are closed.  But it seems to me I’ve heard Matalin complain about traffic in their NoVa area. Not sure where they vote.

  21. Hoover had been in Coolidge’s Cabinet.  Cleveland had been Governor of New York, the biggest state at the time.  Taft had been Solicitor General, an Appeals Court Judge, and Governor-General of the Philippines. 

    Lincoln was elected in the first century of our Republic, when the federal government was so small it was not such a morass to manage, as was Madison. 

    No one had ever hit 30 home runs in a season until Babe Ruth did it, but until he did it, no one had.  Knappster’s right:  this is the resume requirement.  Doesn’t mean Cain can’t win, just that he is outside the parameters of successful candidates within memory.

    Of course, in May 1992 Ross Perot took the lead in the national polls, whereupon he suddenly withdrew from the race with insane tales as to why.  Had he not melted down and just kept going, he might well have won.

  24. These past trends, no matter how strong, are not “resume requirements.” Otherwise, prior to Obama, being identified as racially and ethnically white was a resume requirement. Also, before Obama, being a former (and current stealth?) Marxist would have been a disqualifier, too.

    I agree that Cain must overcome some heavy past trends, but it’s not 1996 anymore.  

  27. Ahhh, the Loosiana snakehead hisses his way into the news. I still say that Mary Matalan marrying this creep doomed Daddy Bush’s reelection. (I know, paranoia strikes deep but still ….. )

    Another gift from the Clinton’s; this asshole. Who has zero good intentions and zero prophecy score.

     

  28. Right? Cain is blacker than Obama, and unlike Obama, Herman Cain actually LIVED what they call ‘the black experience’.
    Obama was a child of privilege, growing up in a foreign country where he attended private school (a madrassa where he was registered as a muslim citizen of Indonesia) until he was sent to Hawaii to live with his wealthy grandparents, one of which was a banker. He never had to work for anything and never knew hunger and never had to struggle to pay for anything.  Obama attended ivy league colleges and experienced preferential treatment throughout his entire life.
    Contrast his life story with that of Herman Cain who grew up dirt poor in the segregated South, whose dad worked 3 jobs and whose mom worked as a maid to put food on the table. Herman Cain attended a local black college and relied on his Christian faith to get him through hard times. He became wealthy because he worked his ass off, nobody ever handed him anything that he didn’t earn. He beat stage 4 cancer. He loves Jesus (Obama loves allah and mohammed and things the howling from the minarets 5 x a day is the ‘prettiest sound’ in the world’.)
    Herman Cain belives that America is a special place where if you are willing to work for it, you can make your dreams come true he believes that you needn’t be a victim of the circumstances of your birth, and that you have the power within you to improve your life because America is a special place and Americans are special people. Obama thinks America is no more special than any other country and feels that we are flawed and need to be apologized for relentlessly. Obama thinks that Americans are powerless to do anything to improve their lives without government intervention but that only certain people should be the beneficiaries of the government largess.
    Obama thinks success should be punished and that those who work hard to get what they have should have the fruit their labors confiscated to be redistributed to those who have not worked to be successful. Herman Cain believes that hard work leading to success should be encouraged.
    If you took away the R & D from beside their names and simply compared life experiences and philosophies side by side, whose narrative would be more appealing to regular Americans?
    All of the black people I know work hard, many were born without a whole lot but worked their asses off to attain a better life for themselves and their children. If you put Cain’s and Obama’s life stories and general philosophies side by side in a nameless comparison, I think most black people would more readily identify with Herman Cain than with Barrack Hussein Obama.
    The reason why the majority of black people are still behind Zero and not Herman Cain is because they do not yet know that Herman Cain is just like them, meaning also he is just like MOST of us, regardless of color. That is a failure of the GOP and actually of us all because we need to get the message out about Herman Cain.
    His life story in comparison to all of the other GOP candidates aligns more with regular American people than the others, I don’t recall any stories of MitRick Romnerry ever having to struggle to survive or work their way up from pretty much nothing. You know?

  30. Well, one thing’s for certain and I know I’ll invite no dissent from any: the only way this nation escapes its morass is to do exactly as we’ve done before and reelect yet another politician. They’re always the optimal choice.

  39. Yeah, while we’re at it we should demand pardons for Madoff and Bulger, put Bernie in charge of the Treasure Department and let Whitey run the Justice Department. Pretty much the same damn principle.

  40. Lincoln served in the US House of Representatives.

    Herbert Hoover is who I meant when I said Warren Harding (Harding was the first incumbent US Senator to be elected President).Cleveland was the sitting governor of New York when elected.

    And Carville ran the campaign of the first black president 😉

  41. Yeah, Perot’s meltdown was a big letdown. I spent a lot of time walking up and down hills in southern Missouri collecting signatures to get him on the ballot before that, and hated to see it happen.

    I still ended up reluctantly voting for him, simply because I didn’t see any other option (I was ready to vote for Bush until he broke his “read my lips” pledge, was never interested in Clinton, and didn’t think much of the Libertarian Party on that first pass over their stuff — ended up becoming an LP activist from 1996 until last year, though).

    In retrospect, my guess is that Perot would have been a major disappointment had he won. I respected him for things he’d done before that (the flight into Hanoi with gifts for the POWs, doing what it took to get his EDS people out of Iran, etc.), but policy-wise he was a big-time technocrat under the populist veneer.

  42. Fair cop, PGlenn. You’re right, America is always doing stuff it hasn’t done before.

    I doubt that Obama is a current Marxist. More a Lassalle-style social democrat, which could be said of nearly every president since Theodore Roosevelt.

  43. The closest Obama ever had to living the “black experience” was being passed up by a cab a time or two, which he automatically assumed was because he was black, with no evidence whatsoever. And this is even assuming the incident happened at all. Oh, and he had a white girlfriend who broke up with him, and that of course was because he was black. Other than that, let’s see, I guess here and there a few people gave him some nasty looks, now you just know that had to be because he was black.

    But wait a minute, I forgot the most important black experience of all. He’s been surrounded all his life by liberal Democrats and leftist asshats who have inculcated into his essence a sense of entitlement and fed his ego for years, and led him around like a puppet on a string while they were making sure he was properly indoctrinated with hardcore progressive and socialist dogma.

    Damn, what do you know, I guess he’s a typical black American after all.

  44. He’s as much of a Marxist as he’s allowed to be under the current confines of the constitution. But you’re probably right, he probably is what I call a European style social democrat, I think is the proper term. Actually, he might be more of a communitarian.

  45. I hate to split hairs here, but Marxism and European-style social democracy are two very different things.

    They’re both socialism, but there was socialism before Marx, and there remain socialisms that programmatically (as opposed to ideologically) owe little or nothing to Marx.

    The essential differentiating characteristic of Marx’s socialism was its program: Revolution, followed by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

    Lassalle, the Fabians, et. al, advocated programs of achieving socialism through reformism — some labor action, but mostly electioneering.

    So far as I can tell, even if Obama accepted Marx’s economics, he ended up going in the opposite direction programmatically. Instead of putting on a beret, grabbing an AK-47, and launching a guerilla movement on Maui, he climbed the established political ladder (probably not as quickly as most people think, either — my guess is that some future biography will divulge that the reason for the murkiness around the years spanning his studies at Occidental, his trips to Pakistan and his Ivy League career is that he served in the Central Intelligence Agency).

  47. That’s possible, and I wouldn’t discount it out of hand, but on the other hand, he could have been such a mediocre personality there’s nothing really worth talking about. If he was in the CIA, I have an idea he’d figure out a way to leak that out. I don’t know what years this would involve, but  chances are there’s no sources he would need to worry about protecting after all this time and he probably wouldn’t give a crap anyway as long as he can maintain plausible deniability pertaining to the leak. You never can tell though. Barak Obama, Superspy.

  48. Until the day before Thanksgiving, all we need is the name C A I N spelled accurately.

    CAIN!

    After Thanksgiving, when folks can tell their family what the big news is, Cain will leap to the status of “inevitable” and at that point, any major gaffe will be felt through the general election.

    After the horrible McCain, mediocre Bush, Dole, etc… I have little faith that the early primary states are aching do anything but muck it all up and give it to Romney, but Cain just isn’t gonna let that happen.  It’s like in the film “Maverick” when J. Foster’s character says about the lead:  He’s just too damn likable.

    Cain knows it too, and that confidence in himself and his convictions  combine to hurt Romney more and more every time Cain’s compared with the evercandidate Romney.

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