After a poignant performance at the last GOP debate — where he shared his experience with combatting cancer in light of how an ObamaCare patient might fare — and an out-of-nowhere win at last week’s Florida straw poll, ex-Godfather’s Pizza CEO has suddenly zoomed onto the public radar. The latest Fox News poll has him third behind Romney and Perry. While he’s not Chris Christie — for one thing, he’s, ahem, an actually announced candidate — Cain seems to be getting the most favorable press of the moment.
Thus, Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger decided to take Cain seriously and devotes some ink (pixels?) to him: He asserts that Cain’s business background, compared with Mitt Romney’s — which the latter seems to stress even more than his time as Massachusetts governor — is “deeper in terms of working on the private sector’s front lines.”
Beyond that, Henninger assesses Cain’s self-confessed major political asset:
When Mr. Cain talked to the Journal’s editors, the most startling thing he said, and which he’s been repeating lately, was that he could win one-third of the black vote. Seeing Herman Cain make his case to black audiences would be interesting, period. Years ago, describing his chauffeur father’s influence on him in Atlanta, Mr. Cain said: “My father gave me a sense of pride. He was the best damn chauffeur. He knew it, and everybody else knew it.” Here’s guessing he’d get more of this vote than past GOP candidates.
Does a résumé like Herman Cain’s add up to an American presidency? I used to think not. But after watching the American Idol system we’ve fallen into for discovering a president—with opinion polls, tongue slips and media caprice deciding front-runners and even presidents—I’m rewriting my presidential-selection software.
It’s not completely out of the question that a presidential nominee Cain could grab one-third of the black vote — a figure that would essentially cripple an Obama re-election effort (assuming, of course, that Cain would keep 95 percent of the GOP base vote). As an historical point, the last time a Republican nominee got a third of the black vote was 1960; the candidate’s name was Richard Nixon. Of course, that was a different Republican — and Democratic — party back then.
Given the odd times in which we live, it’s not out of the question that a frustrated, Tea Party-driven, Republican base could nominate a Herman Cain. In fact, given how much the media likes to portray the Tea Party as racist, arguably the movement is hungry to put forward a a non-white conservative candidate. Note the Tea Party support that Congressmen Tim Scott (SC) and Allan West (FL) — both African American — Gov. Nikki Haley (Southeast Asian background), Sen. Marco Rubio (Latino), etc. all received. The diversity narrative, arguably, will work in a much different way in future national elections, redounding to the GOP’s benefit.
That said, Cain’s biggest future obstacle is neither his business background (i.e., no elected experience) or his race; it’s — like Michelle Bachmann — his shoot-from-the-hip style that occasionally gets him into trouble. That statement that a Muslim wouldn’t be able to serve in his administration? Yes, he apologized for it, but it’s very difficult for someone running for president to unwring a comment that suggests a bigoted sensibility. And that, of course, rounds back to the political experience knock on Cain. A Romney, Perry, Bachmann, etc. wouldn’t make that sort of an error (of course, they’ve made others), because they’ve navigated the political minefields already, at a level below the presidential campaign trail.
One shouldn’t completely dismiss a Cain candidacy (or the eventual nominee considering him as vice president), but one wonders if the learning curve needed to run for president might just be too steep in this case.