He literally seems to be making it all up on the fly, and I mean all, so when he’s asked a question like this, all he knows about the situation is literally just that which was contained in the question.
You can read the rest. It’s pretty brutal, and this is the kind of situation — a blunder that exposes him to lacerating criticism from conservatives — that Cain must avoid henceforth if he wants to be taken seriously as a contender.
Herman Cain answers reporters’ questions Tuesday night in the ‘spin room’
at the Sands Expo and Convention Center (Photo: Robert Stacy McCain)
LAS VEGAS, Nevada
This morning, I remember the first time I ever heard Herman Cain’s name: My brother Kirby called me from Georgia and said, “Have you heard about this guy? . . . He’s the real deal.”
Former businessman Herman Cain holds a narrow lead in South Carolina’s Republican primary, and he’s running neck and neck in Florida with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, according to two new NBC News-Marist polls.
These two states have played pivotal roles in past Republican presidential nominating contests: Since 1980, the winner of South Carolina’s GOP primary has gone on to win the party’s nomination, while Florida ultimately decided the party’s pick in 2008. This cycle, South Carolina’s contest will occur on Jan. 21 and Florida’s will take place on Jan. 31.
“The road to the convention is going to go through these two states,” said Lee Miringoff, the director of Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion.
Last night I was talking to Steve Foley of Citizens for Cain and we agreed: We’re looking like political geniuses now. Nobody else saw the potential of the Cain campaign back when we first got fired up about it back around Thanksgiving last year. Here’s my American Spectator column today:
Scores of reporters and dozens of cameras surrounded the candidate in the “spin room” here at the Sands Expo and Convention Center following Tuesday night’s CNN Republican presidential debate. “Mr. Cain! Mr. Cain!” reporters shouted, shoving their microphones toward the man who was never expected to become a serious contender for the GOP nomination. If nothing else, the Las Vegas debate confirmed that Atlanta businessman Herman Cain is indeed now a contender. . . .
Read the whole thing. I filed it at about 1:3o a.m. ET and then enjoyed a night on the town with Smitty and Wombat, who were smoking Davidoff cigars. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Thanks to all the readers who helped send us here and in case you weren’t one of them, please: Hit the freaking tip jar!
So I thought I’d go over to Cain’s campaign website and spend an equal amount of time to analyze his foreign policy thinking.
I found…. a total of five paragraphs on “national security.” That’s it. No white papers, fact sheets, bullet points, or list of advisors. So you gotta think that these are going to be the most awesome and mind-blowing foreign policy paragraphs ever!!!
Drezner is “professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University,” and his mocking commentary exemplifies a widespread attitude within the foreign policy/national security elite that expertise is essential in all such matters.
Turn back to 2008, however, and this insistence on national security expertise was nowhere to be seen, as John McCain — a man who had specialized in such matters even before being elected to Congress — was scorned in favor of the parvenu Barack Obama, whose only claim to foreign-policy expertise was having spent several years of his childhood in Indonesia.
Obviously, Cain expects the election to be fought over domestic economic issues, his own field of expertise, as a successful businessman. His occasional comments about foreign policy have not demonstrated a reassuring mastery of the subject, but one suspects he’s also losing points with the elite because he doesn’t talk the kind of talk that Obama talks. When Chris Buckley praised Obama’s “first-class temperament,” this was what he was praising: Having attended the right schools (Columbia and Harvard Law), Obama talks like . . . someone who attended the right schools.
Morehouse College and Purdue University graduate school, preparatory to a career in the food-service industry, do not impart the same sort of attitude as do Columbia and Harvard Law, preparatory to a career in academia and government.
Cain’s seeming indifference to expertise, his evident unwillingness to learn to talk the way politicians are supposed to talk about foreign policy, is what’s really being criticized here. But Cain may be smarter about this than his critics suspect. The grassroots voters are apt to think back over the past few years and wonder exactly what we’ve gained by listening to the soi-disant experts in foreign affairs. And so when Cain says wild stuff that sets the tongues of the punditry wagging, I’m not sure that’s going to cost him many votes in the Iowa precinct caucuses.
It may be no comfort to Daniel Drezner or Chris Buckley, but I hope David Brooks will be reassured to know that the creases of Herman Cain’s pants are always meticulously pressed. And if he ever needs to know anything about Vanuatu, I’m sure he’ll ask the expert.
Those were the first four words of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s announcement speech at the Red State Gathering in Charleston, S.C., on Aug. 13. At the time, I was the only one who saw Perry’s diss of Iowa Republicans — his deliberate attempt to upstage the Ames Straw Poll held the same day — as an ominous portent of doom.
Perry’s decision to make his announcement in South Carolina was widely viewed at the time as a genius move that would lock down his support in a crucial early primary state, and once he emerged as the most viable conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, Perry would have no trouble making up whatever he’d lost in Iowa by dissing Ames.
Such was the conventional wisdom in August, but now today (via Wombat’s “Live at Five” aggregation) we see this headline:
Cain Takes Lead In South Carolina
ATLANTA — Herman Cain holds a decisive lead in the South Carolina Republican primary, according to a survey conducted Sunday for The Augusta Chronicle.
The InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion Research poll of 476 registered voters likely to vote in the GOP primary gave Cain 32 percent, twice the share of Mitt Romney’s 16. Rick Perry holds12 percent, making him essentially tied with Romney because the difference is within the 5 percent margin of error.
“In this case, South Carolina is a three-man race,” said InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery. . . .
In a telephone conversation over the weekend, a Perry supporter tried to convince me that the Texas governor is still the only viable alternative to Romney, that Herman Cain can’t possibly win the nomination, and that anyone who is supporting any candidate other than Perry is therefore effectively pro-Romney.
I’m a complete idiot who knows nothing about politics or blogging (just ask Tabitha Hale), so it is beyond my ability to explain that, or to fathom why Rick “Viable Alternative” Perry is in sixth place — trailing Jon Huntsman! — in the recent New Hampshire polls.
Maybe Rick Perry will have bought $15 million worth of debate mojo, and maybe Herman Cain will have forgotten how to tie his own shoes. And then all the bloggers in Denver can laugh at me some more, just like you’ve been laughing at me all along.
Left-wing actor Sean Penn slimed the Tea Party as motivated by racism, charging on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight on Friday evening that an impediment to President Obama’s success is “what I call the ‘Get the N-word out of the White House party,’ the Tea Party.”
At a time when Herman Cain tops polls of Republican primary voters, Penn proceeded to allege, without citing any evidence, that “there’s a big bubble coming out of their heads saying, you know, ‘can we just lynch him?’”
Jeff Goldstein: “Crazy haters, these redneck hickist teabaggers are. That is, crazy like racist racist foxes!” But of course, Goldstein is a Jew, and everybody knows how those Jews are, right?
You may be amused to learn that a few weeks ago one of our posts got linked by the neo-Nazi site StormFront, where they noted (a) Herman Cain’s upset victory in the Florida GOP straw poll and (b) what I had called the Cain Doctrine: ‘You Mess With Israel, You Are Messing With the United States.”
And then, of course, Question the Timing, despite the fact that Cain had been saying this for months, back when he was “Herman Who?” and stuck in single digits in all the polls.
How long before Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, Morgan Freeman and the Occupy Wall Street crowd resort to calling Herman Cain a “Zionist puppet”? And what will they say when we remind them that neo-Nazis thought of it first? You can be sure that there was some nudge-nudge wink-wink among lefties when they saw this HuffPo headline:
Well, of course, he would deny it, right? To the kooks, his denial actually proves that Cain is part of the Zionist/neocon/Wall Street/Republican plot, because one of the defining characteristics of a conspiracy is that it is clandestine. And if you don’t understand their theory, you’re probably using the wrong brand of tinfoil in your hat, so that the CIA brain-control signals are still penetrating. Kooks always prefer their theories to be extraordinarily complex, because that way they look like geniuses for having figured it out. Whereas my theory of the Florida Republican Party’s secret plot is quite simple: They’re evil!
“I thought David Gregory really lost his cool early on, as he was questioning Cain about 9-9-9. If you watch the video, you can see he’s agitated and grimacing in a way that really lacks the usual polished journalist quality.”
— Ann Althouse, “Herman Cain Nailed Meet the Press”
This is an unexpected but really quite welcome development. Professor Althouse has been critical of Cain previously and (like most in academia) is not generally a fan of the populist style. From the transcript of Meet the Press, she excerpts these examples of David Gregory’s visible frustration:
The reality of the plan is that some people pay more, some people pay less…. You’re saying [prices] actually go down?… This isn’t about behavior, Mr. Cain, this is about whether you pay–if you don’t pay taxes now, and you now have income tax and a sales tax, you pay more in taxes…. Mr. Cain, we talked to independent analysts ourselves…. We’re not just reading newspaper clips here… They tell us, they’ve looked at this, based on what’s available of the plan, and it’s incontrovertible.
MR. GREGORY: The wealthiest Americans would pay less, the poorest Americans and middle class would pay more. You don’t dispute that.
MR. CAIN: I do dispute that. You are making — you and others are making assumptions about what wealthy Americans would do with their money, and you’re making assumptions about what the middle class and the poor. You can’t predict the behavior. If wealthy Americans…
MR. GREGORY: This isn’t about behavior, Mr. Cain, this is about whether you pay — if you don’t pay taxes now, and you now have income tax and a sales tax, you pay more in taxes.
MR. CAIN: More people will pay less in taxes. More people will pay less in taxes when you consider all the taxes.
What Cain was saying is that every system of taxation involves hidden economic incentives, and incentives influence behavior. Cain was correctly saying that the sales tax element of “9-9-9,” which Gregory and others assume would impose higher taxes on the poor, would only cause them to pay more taxes if they do not respond to the incentives, namely to spend less — or buy more secondhand merchandise, which isn’t taxed under his plan.
Cain is likewise correct in saying that “you can’t predict behavior” — i.e., The Law of Unintended Consequences. While this is as good an argument against “9-9-9” as it is in favor of it, Cain is correct that we cannot make easy assumptions about how such a radical alteration of the federal tax system would impact the economic behavior and financial well-being of various classes of people.
We can agree that a flat tax will generally be of most benefit to the wealthy (who pay a much higher percentage of their income under the existing progressive system) without assuming, willy-nilly, that others will be impoverished as a result. And the point of “9-9-9” is not to achieve “social justice,” but rather to unleash capital investment to spur economic growth. It is a supply-side solution to our current economic woes, and as such has been praised by the Club for Growth and by Art Laffer.
Would a man rather be unemployed and paying no taxes, or would he rather have a job and pay taxes? That’s the real choice, and yet David Gregory can’t seem to understand it.
We could update an old joke Ronald Reagan used to tell: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. And a recovery is when David Gregory loses his job.”
When Democrats go on Meet the Press, it’s like Justin Bieber sitting down for a hard-hitting interview with Tiger Beat. (“Do you like puppies?”) When conservatives go on Meet the Press, it’s like Hans Frank on trial at Nuremberg, except without benefit of a defense lawyer.
David Gregory just got through interrogating Herman Cain and grilled him relentlessly until, as Alex Pappas reports at The Daily Caller, the guilty perp finally confessed his crime:
Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain admitted Sunday that “some people” would pay more in taxes every year under his “9-9-9” tax reform plan.
“That’s right. Some people will pay more,” Cain told David Gregory of NBC’s Meet the Press. “But most people will pay less, that’s my argument.”
Gregory, like all other critics of 9-9-9, seemed obsessed with the sales tax component. A 9% sales tax would be an incentive to saving and a disincentive to consumer spending, and you can argue about that as an economic effect. But as to the “who would pay more” question — a fetish of class-warfare liberals — Herman Cain is correct that this is dependent in large measure on individual choices, to wit:
Asked by Gregory who will pay more, Cain said, “The people who spend more money on new goods. The sales tax only applies to people who buy new goods, not used goods. That’s a big difference that doesn’t come out.”
UPDATE: After the Cain interrogation, Gregory then went to a panel discussion about the GOP campaign with Chuck Todd, Katty Kay and Joe Klein (none of whom would ever vote Republican under any circumstance) and followed that with a weird segment: a debate between Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (as proxy for Rick Perry) and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (proxy for Mitt Romney). It was as if Gregory meant to say: “OK, now that we’ve dismissed Herman Cain as a complete joke, let’s talk about the real contenders.”
UPDATE II: The media’s Nuremberg tribunal continues:
“Herman Cain is about to get his time in the bright lights and he’s got 20 days to show he can handle it,” Scott Reed, a GOP strategist told Politico for a story that ran this morning. Actually, Cain may have a lot less than 20 days, because a look at this weekend’s Sunday show lineup finds that he’s scheduled to appear on “Meet the Press.” . . .
As for Cain, it’s often seemed like he’s winging it as a candidate, tirelessly preaching the “boldness” of his 9-9-9 tax plan and trying to handle everything else on instinct. Does he know what he’s getting himself into on Sunday?
Thanks to Joe in the comments for the catch. It’s important to note that Herman Cain is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Only if Gregory’s interview hurt Cain with GOP primary voters would it have any negative impact on his campaign. And from that perspective, I didn’t see any damage. Maybe others saw it differently — and I’m sure the usual suspects will show up in the comments to tell us all about how catastrophic MTP was for Cain.
UPDATE III: Quick rundown of the headline reaction:
“They launched some Web ads, banner ads … and they are proving effective. … As they’ve already said, they raised two million bucks in the first two weeks [of October]. You project that out over the course of the quarter and you’re talking … Romney-esque fundraising numbers. … If you’re raising a million dollars a week, times twelve weeks, you’re talking twelve million bucks. … And actually, there are thirteen weeks in the quarter, so if they continue — as they have said, they raised two million dollars in the first two weeks of the quarter — project that out. … With no debt. … The FEC reports for the second quarter already came out and they announced that they raised two-point-eight million … and Herman said in an interview yesterday that he would report having a million dollars in cash on hand. … If you look at his second-quarter report, and the numbers being talked about, you’re looking at a campaign that has a quarterly burn rate of roughly two million dollars. And while that is obviously going to increase in the fourth quarter as they add staff, et cetera, et cetera — let’s say they go from a burn rate of two million [per quarter] to three million and raise thirteen million — you’re conceivably looking at a campaign that hits January 1st with, potentially, ten million bucks cash on hand.”
— a GOP strategist, in phone interview this morning
To which my reaction was three words: “Wow. Wow. Wow.”
When I reported Herman Cain’s second-quarter fundraising numbers just after midnight, I didn’t get the full significance of what the numbers meant. People who are criticizing the Cain campaign as unserious — e.g., “Why is he in Tennessee?” — probably weren’t paying attention in July when I wrote about the long-term strategic thinking behind a campaign that was then bumping along in single digits in national polls.
So I’m not even going to bother looking that up and linking it now, because heaven knows we don’t want the clueless to get a clue now that Team Herman’s strategy is starting to pay off. (The new front-runner will be on Meet the Press on Sunday.)
You’re hearing a lot of blowback over the “9-9-9” plan right now, but all that blowback is coming from people who never expected Herman Cain to be where he is right now: Leading national poll by as much as 8 points, neck-and-neck with Romney in the RCP average, moving ahead in Iowa, raising a million dollars a week, with a million in the bank and no campaign debt. Three weeks ago, none of Cain’s critics imagined this was possible, and now that the impossible is actually happening, the critics are in denial, doing the Kübler-Ross grieving process over their lost credibility, telling everybody Cain can’t sustain his momentum, and mocking the “9-9-9” plan as if it were a joke.
When I first heard that phrase, I was like, “Yeah, whatever. Catchy slogan. What’s the point?” The point is, it’s so simple you can’t forget it.
Just like “9-9-9,” the phrase sticks in your mind: Easy to say, easy to remember, and if you’ll click the link, you’ll discover that the URL re-directs to the online donation page for the Herman Cain campaign.
Now, we know that Mitt Romney is sucking up all the GOP Establishment cash, and part of the perils of Herman Cain’s success is that the grassroots small-donor types might get the idea that Cain’s doing OK now, so they can stop giving those $25, $50, $100 contributions. But if the projection my source made — the Cain campaign potentially having $10 million in the bank by Jan. 1 — is going to happen, then it’s important to keep pounding one message: Give, Give, Give.
In business management, as in communications theory, there is something known as “The KISS Principle” — Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Rather than confuse people with a bunch of complicated explanations, distill the essence of whatever it is you’re communicating to something people can understand and remember. The Herman Cain campaign appears to be applying The KISS Principle with remarkable success.
The legendary origin of supply-side economic theory is that Art Laffer (who has also praised 9-9-9 lately) drew the now-famous “Laffer Curve” on a cocktail napkin, and thereby created the theoretical basis for what became the Reagan Revolution. Maybe that’s just a legend, but the point is that Laffer’s insight, like so many other breakthroughs in human history, had the kind of genius of simplicity that made people say, “Wow, why didn’t I think of that before?”
So if you want to see Herman Cain sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, if you want his campaign to arrive on the eve of the Iowa caucuses with $10 million cash on hand, this is your cocktail napkin:
During the 11 months that I’ve been covering the Cain campaign — as a strictly neutral objective journalist, just like all those MSM reporters — I’ve often been asked by people, “Stacy, what can I do to help? I love Herman, but when I tried to get in touch with the campaign, I didn’t get a call back.” Yeah, well, a low “burn rate” means they’re always understaffed and overworked at Team Herman HQ, and it’s a miracle anybody gets a call back from them now that everybody wants to be part of the team. But like I said during the now-legendary Doug Hoffman campaign: “Stop asking what you can do, and start doing what you can.”
If you’re sitting around waiting for somebody at headquarters to tell you what to do, you’re doing the wrong thing. Become a Campaign of One. Do everything you can think of to help the Cain campaign. Grab some stuff off the Internet and print up your own flyers to give to your Republican friends and — most of all — include that cocktail-napkin URL so they’ll know where to go to give money:
Of course, I am not one of these Famous Genius Pundits who’s always telling people what to think. I don’t even get invited to BlogCon, because I don’t know nothing about nothing worth knowing. All I know is how to rock and roll all night, and party every day. IYKWIMAITYD.
