I’ve written entire 1,200-word columns about Cain for the American Spectator that never mentioned his race. And it’s funny at times to see MSM reporters try to find a less-than-awkward way to introduce race into their stories. Unencumbered by the conventions of mainstream journalism, Bill Quick at Daily Pundit takes the issue head-on:
I have a gut feeling that when push comes to shove, the GOP is not going to in the end nominate a Black man with no political experience as their candidate. I think the attitude will be, “Been there, done that, not happy with how it worked out.”
Which may be true — except that Obama’s problem was not a lack of political experience, but rather a lack of private-sector experience or executive experience, which are in fact Cain’s trump cards.
Obama was very good (and is still very good) at campaigning and giving speeches. But his neo-Keynesian economic policies were the exact opposite of what was needed to foster recovery. And whatever you think of Cain’s “9-9-9” plan, he is at least oriented toward a supply-side approach to economic growth. As I said way back in December: “Steve Forbes with charisma.”
Many policy-oriented pundits — e.g., Charles Krauthammer — clearly distrust charisma. They’d prefer a wonk like Mitch Daniels or a bore like Tim Pawlenty to a charismatic populist like Cain. They don’t want Cain as a candidate for the same reason they didn’t want Sarah Palin as a candidate: Both Palin and Cain are personalities whose appeal to voters is their status as Ordinary Americans. The “hockey mom” from Wasilla, the pizza guy from Atlanta — they aren’t part of what Angelo Codevilla famously called “The Ruling Class,” and fighting back against the Ruling Class is what the Tea Party is all about.
The question now is, can the Tea Party elect one of its own to the White House? Is the Tea Party movement serious about taking on the entrenched power of the Ruling Class? And will they rally to Herman Cain’s banner? Let me remind you what I wrote yesterday when Chris Christie endorsed Mitt Romney:
Thanks to commenter Joe for reminding me of this headline from last year:
Yeah. That explains a lot, doesn’t it? Guess that means Herman Cain is this year’s Christine O’Donnell. Even if Cain gets the GOP nomination, the Establishment insiders would rather see Obama re-elected than to let an outsider win an election.
It may be, as Bill Quick says, that Cain’s race is a factor in GOP resistance to his candidacy. Certainly his political inexperience is a greater factor. The last president with no previous political experience was Eisenhower, elected in 1952, and being Supreme Allied Commander in WWII was a somewhat stronger qualification than being CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.
Nevertheless, at a time when recession may be turning into a depression, Cain’s business experience and optimistic attitude makes him “a breath of fresh air,” as Pundette says. And if “raaaaacism” is indeed a factor in Republican resistance to Cain, please notice that it’s not coming from the Tea Party grassroots, but from the Ruling Class elite. Just sayin’ . . .
“In a David-vs.-Goliath situation, you don’t start by trying to calculate the odds of success, because the odds are liable to be so daunting as to inspire helpless despair.
“But let me ask you this: What were Herman Cain’s odds in 2006, when the doctors diagnosed him with Stage 4 cancer? Think about that before you say Cain can’t win.
“As my father used to tell me, ‘Can’t never could.’ ”
— December 28, 2010
Reporters from The Times of London and The New Republic interview
J.D. Gordon, communications director for the Herman Cain campaign,
at the Pentagon City Costco in Arlington, Va., Friday Oct. 7
If nothing else, the “Occupy Wall Street” protests give the media a reason to ignore the GOP presidential campaign, and to avoid discussion of the increasing possibility that Herman Cain could be the Last Man Standing in the conservative grassroots battle to stop Mitt Romney from getting the nomination on the basis of the Republican Establishment’s “It’s His Turn” principle. “Sunshine State Sarah” has a nice round-up of Cain campign news today, and reminds me of something I wrote Friday:
You may have noticed that some of our Republican friends seemed to lose interest in the GOP nomination fight just about the time Rick Perry melted down and Herman Cain surged into contender status. These people are already making peace with the idea of Romney carrying the 2012 Republican banner.
There was a time, barely a month ago, when these friends of mine seemed to be convinced, and were trying to convince everybody else, that a Perry-Romney showdown for the nomination was a fait accompli, so that supporters of all the other candidates might as well pack it in and quit now. The collapse of the Perry bubble has embarrassed a lot of people, including those who accused Michelle Malkin of “bad faith” and lacking “intelligence and integrity.”
The Perrybots’ response to political demoralization has been a sort of Kübler-Ross grieving process and, while I’ve had occasion to point out that I predicted Perry’s collapse, I don’t blame the bandwagon-jumpers for thinking they were rolling to inevitable victory. It seemed logical, after all, that the Texas governor would be a strong voice for conservative values with the necessary skills, money and campaign organization to take on the brutally efficient Romney machine. We really can’t blame Perry’s supporters for the unfortunate fact that the candidate they supported turned out to be a doomed and useless dingbat.
People stood in line for more than an hour Friday at the Costco discount store in the Pentagon City complex of Arlington, Virginia, across the river from D.C. At the front of the line was the man they had come to see, who smiled and chatted cheerfully as he signed his autograph on the first page of his new book, This Is Herman Cain!
The exclamation point serves as a fitting symbol of the shock among the political class at how far Cain has come along the path described by his book’s subtitle: “My Journey to the White House.” The Atlanta businessman’s sharp rise in national polls since winning a Florida GOP straw poll on Sept. 24 has left pundits of all persuasions struggling to explain how a candidate so recently rated somewhere between “long shot” and “no chance” could have suddenly emerged as a contender. Even Cain — who has said all along that he was “in it to win it” — seems slightly surprised by how quickly he’s jumped to second place in the Republican field, edging past Texas Gov. Rick Perry and closing the gap with the front-runner, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Although he has “enjoyed a phenomenal surge within the last couple of weeks,” Cain told reporters after his Friday book signing, his campaign “has gradually built momentum” for several months. His stunning breakthrough last month in Orlando, where the Republican straw poll delegates gave him more votes than Perry and Romney combined, has kicked that slow-building momentum into overdrive. And the question now is whether he can sustain his surging momentum or whether Cain, who has never before held elected office, will become just another “flavor of the week” in the see-saw GOP campaign. . . .
Please read the whole thing. I’ve got more photos and videos to upload, and there’s more campaign news to share, but I’ll add that in updates.
UPDATE: One of the things I foreshadowed in this morning’s column was an expectation that Rick Santorum was ready to go on the attack against Cain:
The Pennsylvanian is one of the few Republican candidates who hasn’t yet gotten a “flavor of the week” moment and, with another round of debates Tuesday in Hanover, N.H., and Oct. 18 in Las Vegas, Santorum may be foremost among those looking to throw a few rhetorical punches toward the surging Cain.
And this afternoon came the news that Santorum has released a radio ad — with a $30,000 buy in Iowa — that includes a shot at Cain for supporting the 2008 TARP bailout. As the Washington Post‘s Aaron Blake says, Santorum thus “effectively becomes the first major candidate to attack Cain.”
Cain has said he knows he’s got a target on his back now, and we’ll see how well he handles it in the debates Tuesday (Hanover, N.H., on Bloomberg TV) and Oct. 18 in Las Vegas. I have previously remarked that Santorum has proven himself a “brutal counter-puncher in debates.” He has been bumping along in single digits in the polls, waiting for his shot, and talking to him Friday at the Values Voters Summit, I got the sense he was ready to make a move.
UPDATE II: Here are a couple of videos from Herman Cain’s book-signing event Friday in Arlington. First, I spotted some familiar faces in the line at Costco:
And here is Cain, after the book-signing and his Q&A with reporters, talking about his “phenomenal surge” in the campaign:
Perry clocks in at four percent, tied for fifth with Huntsman behind Romney, Cain, Paul, and Gingrich at five percent. Four percent is also what he polled in last week’s WMUR survey of New Hampshire likely voters, so in case you were thinking of discarding that one as an outlier, think again. This guy is, for the moment, on life support in one of the big five early-primary states . . .
Allah goes to great lengths trying to imagine a comeback strategy for Perry, but . . . Dude. When your “conservative” Republican front-runner candidate is tied with Jon Huntsman, it’s over.
UPDATE IV: A commenter objects to my employing the phrase “useless dingbat” to describe Rick Perry. This required an explanation in the comments, which I’ll repeat up here for the benefit of anyone who might be curious:
“Useless dingbat” is a phrase borrowed from Hunter S. Thompson’s description of Ed Muskie in 1972. If you haven’t read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, you probably didn’t notice the parallels between Perry’s meltdown in the Orlando debate and Muskie’s infamous “Sunshine Special” debacle. But I noticed the parallel, and the idea of describing Perry in similar terms as Thompson described Muskie was inspired by that parallel.
Given how Perry’s supporters spent the first six weeks of his campaign personally savaging anyone who criticized Perry — including Michelle Malkin — I’m not in much of mood to hear pleas for mercy from Perrybots now that their candidate is doomed beyond hope of recovery.
I warned readers in early August of my concerns about the Perry campaign. Little notice was paid to my warning, while other blogs were urging everybody to jump on that $17 million bandwagon. So if the Perrybots are feeling butt-hurt now, that’s not my fault. You chumps need to go ask Erick Erickson why he didn’t warn you that Perry couldn’t debate his way out of a wet paper sack.
UPDATE V: Having mentioned my warnings, let’s take a stroll down memory lane, why don’t we? On Aug. 5 — the third day of my Iowa trip — I wrote:
Having Rick Perry’s potential campaign looming on the horizon casts a certain shadow over the proceedings here.
Perry’s supporters were running TV ads in Iowa in the run-up to the Ames Straw Poll, even though (a) Perry was not yet officially a candidate; and (b) Perry wasn’t participating in the straw poll.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Who does a thing like that? Later that day (Aug. 5 was a Friday), I posted:
My phone just rang with a tip from a source who says his Texas sources tell him that Rick Perry is going to unofficially announce this weekend that he’s going to make an official announcement next week.
Which was pretty close to right: The “unofficial” word went out Monday, and the official announcement was . . . Saturday, Aug. 13, the same day as the Ames Straw Poll, a deliberate diss to Iowa and an attempt to upstage the other candidates already in the race.
Yeah, I know political journalists aren’t supposed to believe in “omens.” Still, there’s something vaguely . . . hinky about the way Perry’s stealth campaign has been operating here in Iowa.
Call me crazy. Attribute my forebodings of doom to irrational prejudice. Say what you will, and I don’t care, but I felt a need to put on the record my instinctive sense that there’s something fundamentally wrong about the Perry campaign. And if Jan. 20, 2013, brings the joyous inauguration of President Perry, then you can say my fears were mistaken. Yet I can’t shake my gut hunch is that it won’t work out that way. Some kind of catastrophe will result, one way or another.
And in response to a comment by Steven in TN, I explained:
There have been a few little things — including one source who says Perry has been on the wrong side of the eminent-domain issue — that lead me to think Perry is a lot less certain ultimately to win the nomination than some people seem to think. What I fear will happen is that Perry will spend several months sucking up media oxygen and burning through GOP donor cash, only to collapse early next year. This will have the effect of suffocating other conservative candidates, and thereby lead to … Romney 2012.
Understand, Steve: I’m not exactly anti-Perry. I got nothing against him personally or ideologically, and many of my Texas friends swear by the guy. But in my experience, when something looks too good to be true, it usually is. And there is a too-good-to-be-true vibe to this idea of “Perry to the Rescue.” Maybe my Jedi senses are wrong this time, but I’ve got a spooky bad feeling and I just can’t shake it.
I stuck by that prediction without apology, and on Aug. 28 — while Perry was building a huge lead on Romney in the polls — I re-iterated:
Go back to what first concerned me: Why would a Republican campaign go out of its way to “diss” the Iowa GOP in that manner? It is one thing for a candidate like Mitt Romney to de-emphasize Iowa, skip the straw poll and concentrate his efforts elsewhere. It was another thing — an unnecessarily provocative thing — for Perry’s campaign to deliberately upstage the Ames Straw Poll the way it did.
And who was the primary victim of that gesture? Michele Bachmann.
Bachmann won the straw poll, thereby destroying Tim Pawlenty’s campaign, but no sooner had the Republican 2012 herd been thinned by the culling of its weakest candidate — Pawlenty was always weak — than Perry jumped in and vaulted to the front of the pack. This put Perry ahead of other candidates who had spent many months criss-crossing the country and shaking hands with folks at county GOP events and hustling up contributions $50 and $100 at a time.
OK, fine. Congratulations to Team Perry on their Instant Front-Runner status. But I again repeat that I’m getting bad vibes about this development. When all is said and done, my early sense of foreboding will either be vindicated or discredited.
And I think we see which way matters are tending, eh? Perry stuck his thumb in Iowa’s eye, and it was the kind of bullying gesture that seemed to me so ill-advised as to raise serious doubts. There was more than that, though.
Before Perry ever got in the race, I had talked to an operative who had met Perry and worked with him in Texas. The operative said that (a) Perry was not a dynamic speaker, and (b) Perry was “uncomfortable in his own skin.” My source wasn’t very specific about what that last remark meant, but once the debates started, I could see what he was talking about.
And here’s the thing: My source was not anti-Perry. He liked the guy, but was being frank in expressing doubts as to whether Perry could make it at the presidential level.
The worst of it, though, was the godawful defensiveness of Perry’s supporters. For about six weeks there, anybody who criticized Perry got ripped to shreds because (so the Perry supporters had convinced themselves) Perry was the only alternative to Romney.
Ergo, if Bachmann hit Perry on the Gardasil thing, or if Santorum slammed Perry on immigration, Bachmann and Santorum were de facto Romney allies, and must be destroyed. All of that venom directed at Perry’s critics — including Streiff’s vicious attack on Michelle Malkin — did nothing to help Perry, however.
In fact, once Perry started freefalling, nothing could help him. So Perry’s defenders were just wasting their time and energy defending him, and the parallels to Ed Muskie’s startling collapse in 1972 were hard to ignore.
Why did Team Perry wait nearly two months into their campaign to do this? If the argument for their candidate is “He Can Beat Mitt,” why not, y’know, start beating Mitt?
But never mind. I don’t know nothing about politics. And here’s some sad news for you Perrybots:
I really hope Perry gets his act together and soon. There are debates scheduled for this week and next. With the primary schedule getting ever more condensed, it’s getting late pretty early for Perry.
Ace seems to be making the assumption that Cain can’t possibly go the distance and beat Romney. But nobody ever thought Cain would get this far, did they? Having covered Cain for 10 months, I’ve been hearing the “Cain can’t win” argument for 10 months. Maybe the people who keep saying “Cain can’t win” are right.
But Herman Cain just keeps on winning, doesn’t he?
After Thursday evening’s “interview” on MSNBC, Professor William Jacobson and others were outraged by Lawrence O’Donnell’s self-righteous and disrespectful hectoring of Herman Cain.
So when the surging GOP presidential candidate agreed to take questions from reporters at his book-signing Friday at the Pentagon City Costco in Arlington, Virginia, I asked the question that many others were asking:
My question comes at about the one-minute mark of the video.
RSM: Mr. Cain, who is Lawrence O’Donnell to tell you how to be a black man?
CAIN: “It’s an absurd thing to try and do, isn’t it? I mean, for Lawrence O’Donnell to try and challenge me on what was I doing during the civil rights movement, that’s about as ridiculous as me asking him, ‘What were you doing when you were in kindergarten?’ The two things don’t even relate to one another. So, you’re right — his attempt to do that failed, in my opinion.”
While I certainly do not wish to accuse O’Donnell of raaaaacism, the way he treated Cain on MSNBC was typical of the let-me-tell-you-what-to-think attitude of elite liberalism. In the minds of liberals, anyone who disputes their pre-conceived narrative — whether about history, economics, foreign policy, race relations or anything else — is not merely wrong, but evil.
That is to say, on any issue that liberals care about, there is exactly one point of view that all people of good faith must share, and anyone who expresses skepticism toward the Official Liberal Viewpoint is presumed to be acting on secret motives of bad faith (mala fides).
So if you dispute, for example, the Official Liberal Viewpoint on “climate change” (anthropogenic global warming), their certainty of your wrongness leads them immediately to provide an explanation for why you are wrong. You may be merely too stupid to grasp the “consensus,” but it’s also possible that you have hidden motives — corporate greed! religious extremism! — that inspire your opposition to the Official Liberal Viewpoint.
This intolerance of dissent is especially characteristic of those liberals who, like O’Donnell, come from privileged upbringings where liberalism functions as a sort of noblesse oblige, and who therefore pre-emptively condemn conservatives as guilty of an indifference to the suffering and hardship of the downtrodden.
For a Boston Democrat of the My-Daddy’s-a-Lawyer variety like Lawrence O’Donnell, Herman Cain’s refusal to accept the Civil Rights Victimhood narrative — the only template for race relations that liberals understand — is a personal insult.
Marooned in Marin has lots more photos of the Costco event. Such was the reaction to O’Donnell’s insultingly high-handed lecture to Cain that O’Donnell spent a good chunk of his Friday show trying to un-dig the hole he’d put himself into. And in this video from Friday, you’ll hear a familiar voice at the 2:48 mark:
With the benefit of hindsight, O’Donnell told Melissa Harris-Perry that he didn’t “want to oversimplify the menu of choice that existed for black families in the South at that time,” although that’s exactly what he had done when he suggested that Cain “sat on the sidelines” rather than participating in demonstrations.
Harris-Perry wisely identified the problem with the manner of O’Donnell’s questions. She said that she was “squirming with discomfort” while watching the interview, and in explaining that discomfort, kindly employed the “royal we,” rather than point the finger directly at her colleague. “When we are not facing the lynchers’ noose,” she said, ”when we are not facing that imminent violence, ourselves, we have to be extremely careful about even the implication that those who did not participate were necessarily cowards.”
She pointed out that “it was always simply a minority of African-Americans who were engaged at any point in the civil rights movement because it was a life and death question.” . . .
Harris-Perry also nailed the inherently racist double-standard embedded in the Civil Rights line of questioning. “I can`t remember anyone ever asking a white politician who is of the same age where they were during the sit ins. As you pointed out in your interview, there were white students who came down to be part of freedom summer. There were white allies at every point.”
“Yet we don’t consider it a litmus test for white politicians to have had enough moral courage, ethical vision and American value to have participated actively in the civil rights movement,” she continued, pointing out that military service is a common such litmus test. “I”m worried when we don’t ask white politicians about their patriotism related to how they have or have not stood up for racial equality.”
Like Herman Cain, I am a native of Atlanta, where Henry Grady’s post-Reconstruction “New South” message of economic growth was first proclaimed, and where Booker T. Washington famously urged American businessmen not to rely on immigrant labor, but rather to “cast down your bucket where you are” by employing black workers. During the civil rights era, Atlanta was proud to be “The City Too Busy to Hate.”
Having been quite literally in kindergarten the year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, my personal memories of that era are necessarily limited. However, it has always seemed to me that decent law-abiding people — working hard to support their families and do the right thing in their everyday lives — need make no apologies to anyone.
Politics isn’t the entirety of our existence and we should keep in mind Eric Vogelin’s warning not to immanentize the eschaton. Quiet acts of Christian goodwill done by such ordinary Americans are not recorded in the pages of history books, and were not front-page headlines in 1964, but nevertheless it should be obvious to anyone with common sense that Rosa Parks and Bull Connor are not the whole story of the civil rights era.
“Herman Cain has bottomed out, but still can’t find momentum to get in the air again. …
“If Cain cannot do well in Iowa, he is finished. And with six months to go, Iowa caucus goers are referring to him as a ‘supernova;’ i.e. a great flash of brightness soon to go dark. There are only around 125,000 caucus goers in Iowa. And many of those who were going to go with Cain are now going to Bachmann or waiting for someone else. He’s losing staff in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“I no longer see a path to victory for Herman Cain.”
The story from Day One of the Christian conservative powwow was not merely that Cain killed it and Perry underwhelmed. That was a foregone conclusion before either of them spoke — when Texas megapastor Robert Jeffress introduced Perry onstage, he tried to exhort the crowd with the unfortunate question, “Do we want a candidate who is skilled in rhetoric or one who is skilled in leadership?” (Confused applause.)
The bigger takeaway was this: Perry, the GOP frontrunner most attuned to the persuasions of the Christian right, completely blew his opportunity to win them over. . . . Instead it was Cain, not known for his religious views, and in fact targeted at the event by the National Organization for Marriage for not having signed a couple of their pledges (the other frontrunners have), who galvanized a ballroom full of Evangelicals and born-again Christians with rousing promises to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act and protect unborn children.
Just to give you an idea of why, when it comes to public speaking, Herman Cain stomps the competition like Godzilla stomped Tokyo, here’s a brief clip from his Friday speech. He had just criticized the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and the crowd leapt to its feet cheering:
With impeccable timing, Cain followed up by reiterating and expanding the point, drawing another round of applause. Nobody else in the 2012 presidential field can fire up a Republican crowd the way Herman Cain can. And you’ll excuse me for thinking that getting Republicans fired up is a big part of what will be needed to beat Obama in 2012.
Cain’s critics like to talk about his gaffes — the Muslim thing, the “brainwashing” comment, etc. — but grassroots Republicans seem to understand that such politically incorrect moments are to be expected from a guy who makes a point of being “Not a Politician.” There is less forgiveness for Perry’s gaffes, including such unforced errors as this:
A Texas pastor introduced Rick Perry at a major conference of Christian conservatives here on Friday as “a genuine follower of Jesus Christ” and then walked outside and attacked Mitt Romney’s religion, calling the Mormon Church a cult and stating that Mr. Romney “is not a Christian.”
The comments by the pastor, Robert Jeffress of Dallas, injected a potentially explosive issue into the presidential campaign: the belief held by many evangelicals that Mormons are not Christians.
And it raised immediate suspicions that the attack might have been a way for surrogates or supporters of Mr. Perry, the Texas governor, who has stumbled in recent weeks, to gain ground by raising religious concerns about Mr. Romney. Mr. Jeffress similarly attacked Mr. Romney and his faith during the 2008 campaign.
For the sake of decorum, let’s not consider whether Pastor Jeffress was theologically accurate in his description of Mormonism as a “cult.” Rather, let’s ask the less esoteric question of whether Rick Perry benefits from having one of his proxies raise the issue of Romney’s heterodoxy. Perry’s trying to win an election, not leading a seminary discussion. Playing the Mormon card against Romney is, at the very least, going to cost Perry points for poor sportsmanship.
Keep in mind that evangelical Protestants aren’t generally big fans of popery, either, but that didn’t stop the Catholic candidate, Rick Santorum, from placing third in the Values Voter Straw Poll. The Santorum campaign was celebrating in their press release:
October 8, 2011
For Immediate Release
Contact: Matt Beynon – 703.307.8633
Verona, PA — Continuing a trend that started at the Ames Straw Poll, and continued in both Pennsylvania and Florida, Rick Santorum proves once again that the combination of the right message, right candidate, and hard work is the clear path to winning the Republican nomination. Senator Santorum’s total — 16% — was double that of media anointed frontrunners Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) and Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), and quadruple that of 2007 Values Voter Summit Presidential Straw Poll winner Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA).
Senator Santorum said: “Values voters know me very well. We fought together and we won together on important issues like ending partial birth abortions, welfare entitlement reform, and protecting traditional marriage between one man and one woman. The legislation we fought for changed this country for the better, but we blinked and this President has changed this country for the worse; however, the values voters know we can restore the foundation of America and do great things because we’ve done them before. I thank them for their support in the past, their support today, and their support in the future.”
Hogan Gidley, National Communications Director, said: “Values voters got to see every candidate side-by-side, including the media anointed frontrunners, and the differences were clear. It’s no wonder Senator Santorum’s vote totals doubled-up Governor Perry’s and Representative Bachmann’s, and quadrupled Governor Romney’s. Rick Santorum is the only one who has led and recorded victories on the issues across the spectrum — social, economic, and defense — and the voters know it.
Senator Santorum’s strong third place finish at the Values Voter Summit Presidential Straw Poll — ahead of Governor Rick Perry, Governor Mitt Romney, and Representative Michele Bachmann — is another in a string of momentum building and expectations defying finishes. In May, Senator Santorum won the only statewide straw poll in the First-in-the-South state of South Carolina. In August, Senator Santorum, though outspent 10:1 by his opponents, finished a surprising 4th at the Ames Straw Poll. And then in September, Senator Santorum again surprised prognosticators by finishing 4th at the Presidency 5 Straw Poll in Florida and winning the only statewide straw poll in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania.
Santorum keeps out-performing expectations, chugging along as he says like “The Little Engine That Could” and — with Perry weakened and Bachmann now obviously fading — he’s in better shape than ever. ABC News makes a point in this article:
Santorum is not running in place like Jon Huntsman, but it’s unclear when his moment will come? His national poll numbers remain low, although the candidate says he does not pay any attention to the dismal numbers.
“I don’t want to be depressed by watching national polls,” Santorum said. “I just tend to focus on what we’re doing on the ground and know, just like in the Ames Straw Poll where no one gave us any chance, every poll said we were way, way back in the back and we finished a pretty strong fourth.” Santorum’s campaign has held more than twice as many events in the Hawkeye state as any other 2012 candidate.
Iowa has become practically a second home for Santorum. For now, he and the other GOP candidates are heading to New Hampshire, where they’ll debate Tuesday at Dartmouth College.
The question to be asked is not whether it is unfair for the Paul campaign to keep doing this, but why the rest of the GOP field can’t spend a few bucks to do it themselves. Dave Weigel at Slate reports:
He beat out seven other candidates and “undecided.” The full results, with 1,983 ballots cast:
Ron Paul – 36.9% (732) Herman Cain – 22.5% (447) Rick Santorum – 16.3% (323) Rick Perry – 8.4% (167) Michele Bachmann – 7.9% (157)
Mitt Romney – 4.4% (88)
Newt Gingrich – 2.7% (54)
Undecided – 0.7% (13)
Jon Huntsman – 0.1% (2)
In a post-vote press conference, FRC President Tony Perkins made sure to note that 600 people had bought tickets for Saturday only — a none-too-subtle hint that Paul’s supporters had over-represented themselves. “Do the math,” said Perkins. “Ron Paul and his campaign are very well organized.”
What did 600 tickets cost the Paul campaign? And what would have been the publicity value if, for example, the Rick Perry campaign had paid for 1,000 of their supporters to attend the summit? Perry raised $17 million and he can’t afford to buy a straw poll? Your stupidity is not someone else’s fault. Beyond that, the story is:
A. Herman Cain continues his momentum; and
B. Santorum got twice as many votes as Bachmann.
This pretty much puts a fork into the Bachmann campaign. If she can’t beat Santorum in a straw poll at a national conference of social conservatives, Bachmann probably can’t beat Santorum in Iowa, either.
And by “organizational skills,” he means, the willingness to spend money on grassroots activism, i.e., offering free tickets for any Paul supporter who wanted to come vote for their guy.
Stipulate that the Paul campaign operates according to the “By Any Means Necessary” radical principle. Nevertheless, the point to which I wish to call the reader’s attention is this: The Paul campaign is smart to spend money on getting their supporters to events, and other campaigns are stupid in spending money to hire a bunch of staffers and consultants who don’t necessarily provide value-added to their efforts.
Suppose you are a college kid who might be willing to support a Republican presidential candidate. Now, suppose that you could actually get to meet that candidate, and get free travel to events where that candidate appears. OK, furthermore suppose that the campaign had a sort of Amway incentive deal where, if you were campus activist who could sign up a dozen of your college buddies to accept the same free-travel deal, you’d get a small commission for every warm body you delivered on the Republican candidate’s behalf.
Shouldn’t Republicans be able to understand how the Ron Paul campaign is using market incentives to build their movement?
Why, then, are most GOP presidential campaigns top-heavy affairs that spend ridiculous sums on “media consultants,” etc., rather than to use their money the way Ron Paul’s campaign uses their money?
Like I said: Your stupidity is not someone else’s fault.
Having covered the Herman Cain campaign since December 2010, I’ve had occasion to remark more than once that people underestimate him at their peril. The experts have said all along that there’s no way Herman can win. It’s possible they may keep right on saying that — chanting it like a mantra — until the votes are counted on Nov. 6, 2012, at which point the same TV talking heads who derogated Cain’s chances from the start will then be called on to provide their insightful analysis of how he did what they said with absolute certainty he could never do.
While I’ll later be posting photos, videos and more about our Friday covering Herman Cain and the Values Voter Summit (my 12-year-old son Jefferson accompanied me as my assistant), let me first share another writer’s article. She reports some key facts, but Molly Ball of The Atlantic draws an odd conclusion from those facts:
They admired Rick Santorum. They ate up Rick Perry. But it was Herman Cain who rocked the house at the Values Voter Summit.
Many other speakers got standing ovations, but only Cain provoked church-like shouts of “Yeah!” from the crowd. When Newt Gingrich came up to speak after Cain, a good portion of the crowd got up and wandered out of the giant ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel here in Washington.
Think about that: the former speaker of the House of Representatives — himself once considered a rock star of the Republican base — thoroughly upstaged by a political novice mostly known as “the pizza guy.”
After the speeches, when Gingrich and Cain both held book signing sessions, the line for Cain stretched down a long hallway, then through the hotel’s large lobby to the door. The line for Gingrich was, shall we say, substantially shorter.
Based largely on a similarly rousing speech, Cain won the Florida P5 straw poll late last month, dealing Perry a stunning blow. Cain’s surge in recent polling — he’s rocketed into second behind Mitt Romney in some polls — is getting him billed as the next flavor of the month for a GOP base that’s having doubts about Perry.
The Cain surge has also provoked a round of media hand-wringing over whether, and how much, to “take him seriously” as a contender, or whether it was still safe to treat him primarily as a man trying to sell books and perhaps get himself a television show. . . .
You can read the whole thing, which then goes on to explain that Cain cannot possibly threaten Romney’s front-runner status because . . .
Well, she never says exactly why this can’t happen, but she’s a professional political journalist, whereas the hundreds of people who cheered Cain’s speech are merely Republican voters — and who cares what they think, right?
