Category: Politics

Remember When David Gregory Raked Obama Over the Coals on ‘Meet the Press’?

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Yeah. Me neither.

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:

Long Ties to Koch Brothers Key to Cain’s Campaign

You can see the gallows from the courtroom window.

UPDATE III: Of course, the liberal media were salivating in anticipation of Gregory’s MTP assault on Cain, as Salon news editor Steve Kornacki wrote Friday:

“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:

Herman Cain: ‘I’m Not Familiar With
The Neoconservative Movement’
— Huffington Post

Cain Says His Deadly Fence Plan Was ‘a Joke’
— New York Times

 Cain foreign policy would lean on experts
 — Politico

Cain: People Will Demand 999
Even Though It Raises Their Taxes
— Think Progress

Cain says his rise in polls is for real
— Associated Press

GOP presidential candidate
Cain defends ‘9-9-9’
— Washington Times

UPDATE IV: Thanks to The Lonely Conservative for the video:

‘A Real Leader Dot Com’

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“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.

Oh, yeah?

The Club for Growth just endorsed “9-9-9.” Jokes’s on you, Karl Rove.

Now, if you think Herman Cain’s tax plan is too “simplistic” and “unrealistic” as policy, let me tell you something else you won’t believe:

ARealLeader.com

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.

ARealLeader.com

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.

ARealLeader.com

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:

ARealLeader.com

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:

ARealLeader.com

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.

ARealLeader.com

 

 
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And you may enjoy an update about my future career as U.S. Ambassador to Vanuatu.

UPDATE II: Linked by The Lonely Conservative — thanks!
 
UPDATE III: Linked by Nice Deb — thanks!
 

Cain Campaign Finished Third Quarter With $1.3 Million Cash on Hand, No Debt

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Got this press release just after midnight:

Cain’s Surge Leads to Increase in Support

The Friends of Herman Cain presidential campaign committee reports total third quarter contributions of $2,813,341.52 with cash on hand of $1,333,778.56. The committee reported no debt.
The momentum from the September 22nd Fox News-Google GOP Presidential Debate in Orlando and Cain’s subsequent Florida, Kansas City, Minnesota, and Illinois straw poll victories has elevated Mr. Cain to front-runner status and has helped the committee raise an additional 2 million dollars since the close of the FEC reporting period.
“We have had a very successful quarter.  Mr. Cain’s message is spreading and attracting supporters all across the country,” said Mark Block, Chief Operating Officer for Friends of Herman Cain, Inc.
Cain’s 9-9-9 Plan to restore the economy is resonating with the general public and this surge of momentum has enabled the campaign to leverage Cain’s rise in the polls into financial resources.  The American public is eager to elect a leader with a proven record of leadership and common sense.

Speaking of “resonating with the general public,” Citizens for Cain has this video of Cain’s appearance on the Steve Gill Show:

CITIZENS for CAIN
Join the Grassroots Online Army!

From the Future Ambassador to Vanuatu

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Feb. 17, 2010: When we first met by accident in an elevator
at CPAC, Marco Rubio said to me, ‘Hey, your camera’s pink.’

After the events of this afternoon, I e-mailed my American Spectator story (about Marco Rubio denying my Thursday exclusive) to a fellow journalist. He replied, “My guess is that you were right about the story, too.” And this seemed to require an explanation on my part:

Well, whether or not I was “right” — that is, whether my source was correct about the actions and motives of Cesar Conda — the facts are that (a) my sources said what my sources said, (b) [redacted description of key source], (c) Cesar was named specifically, (d) this story just “fell in my lap” and (e) both Rubio’s advocacy for an early primary and Conda’s Romney connection had been previously reported elsewhere.
The dots were already forming a pattern. My sources just named Conda as the glue connecting the dots. Maybe they were mistaken, who knows? But I didn’t “make it up out of thin air,” and the fact that my sources don’t want to fall afoul of Conda (or Rubio or Romney) was something I knew before I reported it. Ergo, I’m on the hook for a story I can’t prove but which a lot of people vow is the real explanation behind all this.
Also, glancing at my notes, I now see that the name “Jeb Bush” appears for some reason, reminding me that the phrase “the Jeb Bush people” was used by one of my sources to describe the forces arrayed behind the (alleged, but officially denied) Conda/ Rubio/ Romney push. But I can’t remember now which source used that phrase, and I also don’t remember whether this was characterized as a known fact or just speculation.
Well, just another day on the beat, eh? I was sitting here Thursday minding my own business when the phone rang, and the tip struck me as heavy enough to make some calls and turn it into a story, so I’ll take whatever blowback I get. As I said in an update to my blog just now, I plan to be laughing about this over beers in Tampa in August, and by then maybe it will be sufficiently safe to tell the truth. Cesar Conda will come into the hotel bar, offer to buy me a beer and say, “Hey, Stace, can you get me in with the Cain people? Because ever since the Romney campaign imploded after that Vegas debate last October, I’ve been trying to get through to them, and they won’t talk to me. And now that Paul Ryan is Herman’s VP pick …”
Eh, forgive and forget, y’know? Let bygones be bygones, I always say. It’s the Christian thing to do.
— Robert Stacy McCain
Future U.S. Ambassador to Vanuatu

 





 

 
PREVIOUSLY:

Herman Cain: The Back Story

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Herman Cain at the Value Voters Summit, Oct. 7 (Photo: Robert Stacy McCain)

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Georgia) is one of the most conservative members of the Senate. But being a native of Georgia, I remember Isakson’s reputation as a “squish” — damned near a RINO — among the hard-core conservatives of my acquaintance. It is therefore a rather ironic fact that the first time I heard of Herman Cain was in 2004 when my older brother Kirby, who still lives in Douglas County, Ga., called me while I was working at The Washington Times to tell me about this guy he’d heard on the radio who was, he assured me, “the real deal.” (If you knew Kirby, you’d understand why that got my attention.)

Cain was then a candidate in the 2004 Georgia Republican primary for Senate and, after Kirby called, I urged one of our reporters to investigate this insurgent candidate. Whatever ended up in the paper as a result of my editorial suggestion, what I learned from my own research was that the GOP Establishment had anointed Isakson as their candidate — and by “GOP Establishment” of course I mean Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman.

Back during the Bush years, Rove and Mehlman were the chief puppeteers pulling strings in DC to manipulate Republican primary contests across the country. This sort of top-down intervention was simultaneously (a) notorious among grassroots conservatives and (b) nearly impossible to prove, so that anyone who mentioned it publicly could be dismissed as a paranoid kook. But everybody knew what was really going on, and the most infamous example was in the 2004 Pennsylvania Senate primary where the conservative grassroots spported Pat Toomey, while the Rove/Mehlman axis put the fix in for the RINO incumbent, Arlen Specter.

You can ask Rick Santorum about this: Santorum was more or less forced to walk the plank for Specter’s re-election but — two years later, when Santorum faced a tough re-election contest in a bad year for Republicans — Specter and the GOP Establishment were MIA. What the Rove/Mehlman axis did to Santorum is fairly well-known, but how they conspired to beat Herman Cain in the 2004 Georgia Senate primary is less well-known. It is therefore helpful to read a recap of Cain’s 2004 campaign by Atlantic‘s Molly Ball:

Cain came out of nowhere: a virtual unknown banking on his business background, his message and his ability — honed as a paid motivational speaker — to hold audiences in thrall. And he very nearly forced Isakson, who was supposed to have it in the bag, into a humbling runoff.
“Had he understood politics a little bit more, had he started a little bit earlier and done things a little bit differently, he would be the United States senator from Georgia now,” said Atlanta-based Republican strategist Tom Perdue, who supported Cain in 2004 but didn’t work on his campaign.
Perdue believes the 2004 race was a vital political education for Cain.
The former Godfather’s Pizza CEO went into that race “naive about politics,” thinking he could command the political arena like he did the world of business. He came out of it with a better understanding, Perdue said.
“He learned from his mistakes,” Perdue said. “That doesn’t mean he’s going to be president of the United States. But he learned, and that in itself tells you that he’s a smart man.”

Read the whole thing, and maybe you’ll understand why I grit my teeth whenever some critic of Cain blames him for never having held elective office before. And maybe you’ll also understand why, despite my fanatical support for Herman Cain professional journalistic neutral objectivity, I have a soft spot for Rick Santorum. Both he and Cain are, in a sense, victims of the same kind of shady “party insider” machinations that are now being used to try to orchestrate the nomination of Mitt Romney.

As Michelle Malkin said yesterday: “Damn, I hate politics.” And every time I see Karl Rove on Fox News badmouthing Herman Cain, I tremble in fury, wishing they’d stick a “Mitt Romney Stooge” disclaimer on Rove.


Karl Rove Says Herman Cain Campaign ‘Not Gonna Have a Nice Ending’

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Via POH Diaries and Gateway Pundit:

Let me be blunt in saying that I am thoroughly familiar with every argument against Herman Cain’s candidacy, and far more aware than most political journalists of the organizational challenges (to put it mildly) of the Cain campaign. Last night I was on the phone with my buddy Ali Akbar as we bemoaned bewailed bitched about discussed the hopeless clusterfuck organizational challenges of Cain’s staff situation. While all campaigns go through their rough spots, and I’ve seen campaigns win elections despite serious errors, Herman Cain’s campaign now faces two huge problems:

  1. They’re less than 90 days away from the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. Even if the Nevada situation can be worked out to keep New Hampshire from jumping to December, 90 days from Iowa is still a damned short time to put together an effective ground game in all 99 counties in Iowa.
  2. They’re up against Team Romney. Say what you will about Mitt, his campaign staff is a ruthlessly disciplined machine, and they’ve got about a 5-to-1 fund-raising advantage over Cain.

As I explained to Ali, if the Cain campaign were to raise $100,000 every day, that would be $3 million a month or about $8 million between now and Jan. 3. The problem is that the Perry campaign’s sitting on something like $15 million and Romney raised $10 million in the last quarter. Even if the Perry campaign didn’t raise another dime, they could spend $5 million a month between now Jan. 3, and that’s a heckuva lot of TV ads in Iowa and New Hampshire. Whatever Romney’s cash-on-hand figures, he’s got the big bundlers like Georgette Mosbacher behind him, and will have no shortage of cash for TV ads.

How can the Cain campaign possibly hope to compete with that? If you just look at it as a problem of simple math, by the ordinary logic of campaign operations, Cain would be doomed beyond hope even if his staff were as efficient as Team Romney. So I cannot necessarily say that Rove’s basic calculation is wrong. Insofar as normal politics is concerned, Rove’s prediction of an unhappy ending for the Cain campaign seems smart.

But normal politics has taken a savage beating the past few years, and it’s hard to calculate the odds of success for the kind of “outside-the-box” campaign that Cain and his staff have been talking about since December. Nobody expected, 10 months ago, that Herman Cain would be where he is now, neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney at the front of the field. Hell, nobody expected this even one month ago, when Cain’s poll numbers were stuck in single digits. It’s been only 20 days since Cain shocked the world with his victory in the Sept. 24 Florida straw poll, so everybody’s still trying to get their heads wrapped around the concept of “Herman Cain, Republican contender.”

If you’ve got a Road to the White House map, we’re currently off at the edge in uncharted seas where the legend reads, “Here Be Dragons.”

And when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

It just occurred to me that today, Oct. 14, is the two-year anniversary of the day in 2009 when Lisa De Pasquale invited me to join a conference call with a guy named Doug Hoffman. Maybe you’ve heard of him.

Miracles can happen, and what happened in NY-23 two years ago was a rare kind of inspirational moment in politics. And when it was over, a new kind of campaign paradigm had been created:

Yates Walker ate breakfast in the Blue Moon Café on Main Street in Saranac Lake, New York, on the morning of November 4, [2009] and delivered an after-action report on the battle that had just been fought in the upstate 23rd District.
“We took a CPA from 9 percent to 46 percent in two and a half weeks,” said Walker, a young veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division who had been hired 18 days earlier to work on Doug Hoffman’s congressional campaign staff. “I couldn’t be prouder.”
He fell 5,000 votes short of defeating Democrat Bill Owens, but Hoffman’s surprising surge in the closing weeks of the three-way special election in upstate New York had, in Walker’s words, turned the bespectacled accountant into “an electric symbol of conservatism.” . . .

Read the whole thing in case you’ve forgotten that magical two and a half weeks. Karl Rove never saw that coming, either, and if Herman Cain is going to beat Mitt Romney, his campaign is going to have make that kind of lightning strike twice. Such were the thoughts that came to my mind in the wee hours this morning, after I had filed my latest American Spectator column:

Hickory trees were blazing brilliant gold in the forest surrounding my home on the western slope of South Mountain as I stepped outside Thursday afternoon to take a call on my cellphone from a well-informed source. My enjoyment of the autumn scenery was diminished only slightly by the cool drizzly overcast weather, but much more by the shadows of gloom gathering over the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, which was the reason for the phone call.
After listening with great interest, I walked inside to the dining room table, picked up a pen and asked my source to repeat the information which I scrawled into a notebook: “Rubio [chief] of staff — CESAR — used to be w/ Romney’s campaign … used his contacts to push primary to 31st because they want Romney in.” A couple more phone calls to D.C. and Florida, a few minutes of online research, and I had an exclusive: “Top Rubio Staffer Reportedly Pushed for Early Florida Primary to Help Romney.” Perhaps not the kind of story Matt Drudge would consider worthy of a banner headline, but a key piece of the puzzle surrounding events that have hopelessly scrambled the 2012 schedule. . . .

Please read the whole thing. We’re on the road to political Armageddon, folks, and the next stop on this road is Las Vegas. Hit the freaking tip jar!

Top Rubio Staffer Reportedly Pushed for Early Florida Primary to Help Romney

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* * * UPDATE OCT. 14 * * *

Marco Rubio Denies His Office
Influenced Florida Primary Date

PREVIOUSLY (OCT. 13)
* * * EXCLUSIVE * * *

When Florida defied Republican National Committee rules to move the state’s 2012 presidential primary from an RNC-approved March date to Jan. 31, conservatives immediately suspected that state party insiders had orchestrated the move to help former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney thwart the momentum of Tea Party-backed candidate Herman Cain. Some Florida activists focused their suspicion on moderates in state party leadership — allies of Senate candidate George LeMieux and of former Gov. Charlie Crist — as orchestrating the change in the primary date. The move was seen as helping the centrist Romney, whose superior fund-raising resources would enable him to score an early knockout in the Sunshine State before Cain could fully leverage the boost he got from an upset victory in a Sept. 24 Florida GOP straw poll.

Yet while the moderate Republican faction in Tallahassee was immediately blamed for the primary date-switch, only insiders knew that a key factor was a push from inside the staff of the Tea Party’s own 2010 hero, Sen. Marco Rubio. GOP sources in Washington and Florida say that Rubio’s senatorial chief of staff, Cesar Conda, has been a major force in persuading Florida Republicans to move their primary to January.

“Cesar used to be with Romney’s campaign,” one informed source explained to me in an interview today, adding: “Conda used his contacts to push the primary to the 31st because they want Romney in.”

Conda’s loyalty to Romney was highlighted in a Politico story by Scott Wong last week: “At least six past and current Rubio Senate aides, including chief of staff Cesar Conda and his deputy, Terry Sullivan, worked for Romney’s 2008 presidential bid, establishing a direct link and a line of communication between the front-runner for the 2012 GOP nomination and the front-runner in the Republican veepstakes. There’s also a trail of fundraisers, donors and consultants who have overlapping relationships with Rubio and Romney.”

In a March 2010 column for National Review, Conda defended the so-called “RomneyCare” Massachusetts health insurance program. A former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, Conda was originally an ally of Crist, as the St. Petersburg Times noted when Conda was picked as Rubio’s chief of chief in January 2011:

Like many Republicans, Conda once thought Charlie Crist would be the next senator but later distanced himself from the former Florida governor, saying he lacked conservative credentials.
Conda has worked as a lobbyist and analyst for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and founded the Washington office of Navigators, a lobbying/consulting firm where another top Rubio adviser, Todd Harris, also worked.
The firm’s clients included GlaxoSmithKline, At&T, Visa and Citigroup, which got $45 billion under the bank bailout.

Some have speculated that, by delivering Florida for Romney, Conda would not only help Romney lock up the 2012 presidential nomination, but also secure the 2012 vice-presidential pick for Rubio.

It was Rubio’s underdog campaign that helped spark Tea Party activism in Florida and across the nation. Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer and National Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) conspired to “fix” the 2010 Senate primary in Florida with a May 2009 endorsement of the moderate Crist. At that point leading Rubio by more than 30 points in polls, Crist was seen as the safe bet in Florida’s Senate race. But the Greer/Cornyn endorsement backfired, as conservatives pointed out Crist’s embrace of President Obama’s deficit-spending “stimulus” agenda and denounced the effort by party insiders to determine the Republican candidate 15 months ahead of the August 2010 primary. The newly aroused Tea Party movement made Rubio their hero. Crist, overwhelmed by the conservative rally for Rubio, quit the GOP to launch a doomed third-party Senate race. Crist’s ally Greer resigned in disgrace and is now under criminal indictment for corruption charges.

Reports that Rubio — or at least Rubio’s top aides — are working behind the scenes for Romney, who is seen as representing the RINO (“Republican In Name Only”) moderate wing of the party, will be a bitter disappointment for conservatives who supported Rubio’s insurgent campaign last year. Many Tea Party activists who backed Rubio against Crist in the 2010 primary are now supporting Cain, the conservative Atlanta businessman who has surged to the front of the the Republican presidential pack in the past three weeks.

Cain’s candidacy got a boost not only from his Sept. 24 straw-poll win, but also from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s announcement last week that she would not seek the White House in 2012. In an appearance on  Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News Channel program to discuss her decision, Palin singled out Cain for praise, saying she was “intrigued” and “impressed” with Cain’s “business acumen” and “up by the bootstraps” success.

The latest Rasmussen poll shows Cain tied with Romney nationally. Recent polls by Public Policy Polling and NBC/Wall Street Journal show Cain now leading Romney, and within 3 points of the longtime GOP frontrunner in the influential Real Clear Politics poll average. Meanwhile, a new poll of likely Florida Republican primary voters shows Cain now at 34% to Romney’s 28%, with former frontrunner Texas Gov. Rick Perry falling to a distant fourth at 5%, behind former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was third with 11%.

— Robert Stacy McCain




 

UPDATE: Linked at Fire Andrea Mitchell — thanks!

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin on Twitter:

UPDATE III: Headline from The Washington Post:

Mitt Romney attracts new support as donors
and elected officials coalesce behind him

Hmmm. Kinda like how the Establishment lined up behind Dede Scozzafava, isn’t it? And Herman Cain is Doug Hoffman in that analogy.

UPDATE IV: “Say it ain’t so, Marco.”

UPDATE V: “Rubio, Rubio! Wherefore art thou Rubio?”

UPDATE VI: Linked by Finrod at Red State — thanks! — and Bob Belvedere at Camp of the Saints, who wonders if Rubio is “crossing over to the Dark Side?”

UPDATE VII: Linked by Maggie’s Notebook — thanks! — and Da Tech Guy sees Team Romney replicating the errors of Team Coakley. Meanwhile, getting linked by Allahpundit at Hot Air inspired me to leave this comment:

If this, indeed, an effort to secure Rubio’s slot as running-mate for Romney, has anybody else noticed that (a) Herman Cain’s top campaign staffers are from Wisconsin and (b) Paul Ryan praised the 9-9-9 plan today?
IYKWIMAITYD.

PREVIOUSLY:


VIDEO: Brian Williams Announces NBC Poll Showing Herman Cain Leading

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Wanted to post this one as a record for history:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Comment? I got no comment. I’m just thinking back to CPAC, when I was introducing my friends in the hotel lobby bar to “the next president of the United States.” And they all thought I was kidding.

HERMAN CAIN for PRESIDENT
Because Everybody Keeps Saying He Can’t Win
And Yet Somehow He Just Keeps on Winning