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!
It’s an 11 page .pdf that is as serious as lung cancer about doing something concerning federal over-reach and over-spending, nuking:
Department of Education
Department of Commerce
Department of Energy
Department of the Interior
Department of Housing and Urban Development
What gives me pause about the bulk of the candidates is that they seem to be looking around the elephant in the room, the over-reach, and just talking about reigning in spending.
As they do pretty much every. Single. Miserable. Election. Cycle. It’s like some big news when a Rick Perry calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme. When the truth is like a shocking revelation, that, itself, is a problem.
Admittedly, I get queasy when Ron ventures into foreign policy, but what difference does foreign policy make when the whole country is impoverished by our idiot Ruling Class? One is tempted to vote for whoever is bringing the biggest wrecking ball.
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.
The National Affairs Desk, in the smoking lounge at
Dulles International Airport, 1:10 p.m., Monday, Oct. 17, 2011
DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Less than hour until final boarding for my flight to LAX en route to Vegas, and no time to waste on trivia now. While I was checking in the one-way rental car ($164), I was on the phone with Sarah Rumpf, who told me a bizarre reverse-angle on the Rubio/Romney conspiracy theory. Pagan Temple had picked this out of Javier’s post earlier:
Convoluting matters further, one of Perry’s top campaign consultants was also Governor Charlie Crist’s consultant during the 2010 Senate race before Crist jumped ship and ran as an Independent, and that Perry’s Florida team was being led by Rich Heffley, Jim Rimes and Randy Enwright. Heffley was responsible for fabricating the infamous “truthaboutRubio” attack website against now Senator Rubio.
Get it? Sarah has a post about this that provides links to the dots – including Javier’s post from Friday – but leaves it to the reader to imagine how those dots might be connected. What am I getting at? Some of Rubio’s allies suspect that the Crist/LeMieux/Perry forces in Florida, eager to strike a blow against Romney, and also damage the hated Rubio, spread the rumor of a Romney/Rubio conspiracy to move up Florida’s primary to Jan. 31. By blaming it on Rubio’s chief of staff, Cesar Conda, they help LeMieux in next year’s Senate primary, because Rubio is also viewed as an ally of Adam Hasner.
Rubio has tried to stay officially neutral in both the presidential primary and the Florida Senate primary but – if this connect-the-dots theory is true – somebody in Team Perry managed to spread a damaging rumor in such a way that they must have known would reach me. Because I had solid sources telling me as first-hand knowledge that the Romney/Rubio conspiracy (with Conda as the middleman) was true. Were my sources duped? Or were they part of the Perry plot? Or is the original conspiracy theory true, and this new reverse-angle theory a defensive spin to protect Romney’s operation in Florida? The fact that Rich Heffley was one of the first Florida operatives hired by Team Perry suggests the possibility of dirty tricks, and by now the possibilities have multiplied so much I don’t know who or what to believe.
You see that we’re deep into savage weirdness at this point and, of course, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. But now I’ve got less than half an hour until they call final boarding, so I’ll have to leave all that for later, and finish with the Five Most Important Words in the English Language: Hit the freaking tip jar!
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.”
