If ever there was a candidate for the Horatio Alger award, it would be Herman Cain (and in fact he won it in 1996.)
Cain was born to poor parents – a mother who was a cleaning woman and a father who was a barber and chauffeur. Yet Cain graduated from Morehouse with a degree in mathematics and went on to receive a Masters degree in Computer Science. He rose through the management ranks at Burger King, a subsidiary of Pillsbury whose CEO recognized Cain’s talent and made him CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, another Pillsbury subsidiary.
He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, a member of various public company Boards, the CEO of the National Restaurant Association, a talk show host, syndicated columnist, author of five books, and an unsuccessful candidate for the 2000 Republican Presidential nomination and 2004 US Senate seat from Georgia.
Disclosures filed for the Republican Presidential nomination show his net worth to be between $3 million and $6.5 million and his income for the combined years of 2010 and 2011 is between $1 million and $2 million – an imperfect though frequently-used measure of professional success.
Yet despite his arguments that his real-world business experience would make him a better President than a career politician, his recent campaigning shows otherwise.
Americans elected a person in 2008 who arguably had the thinnest resume of any President in the history of the Republic. His hope and change rhetoric proved to be ephemeral barnyard refuse as he has brought the country less hope and inflicted change that 74% of the people think is going in the wrong direction.
Cain doesn’t have a thin political resume; he has no political resume. While his business experience would give him a different view of the world than a hack who had spent his (or her) entire career in politics, the top office in the land is not the place to get on-the-job political training. Business and politics operate with different ground rules and one doesn’t carry over well to the other. Harry Truman believed that when he assessed General Eisenhower’s suitability for the Oval Office. Truman said, “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike – it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.” Eisenhower, however, had been the Supreme Commander of the largest Allied Army in the world which was fraught with big egos and politics.
The reason that a state governorship is better training for the presidency than a House or Senate seat or a business career is that it gives experience on a smaller and less threatening scale in dealing with a legislature, state budgets, and the federal government bureaucracies. Even with gubernatorial experience Al Gore made Texas Governor George W. Bush look a bit foolish for not knowing the names of heads of state he would likely have to deal with if elected President. If Cain were to get the nomination, Obama would exploit what Cain doesn’t know about the federal government, how agencies work, procedures, and the office of the presidency.
Cain’s knowledge deficit disorder in foreign affairs is especially stunning. In one of the debates he said the US must prevent China from getting nuclear weapons – which they’ve had for decades. When interviewed by Chris Wallace who asked him to state his position on the Palestinian "right of return" issue, Cain was obviously confused. "The right of return? [pause] The right of return?" asked Cain. Wallace helped him connect the dots and Cain’s answer was positively awful, clearly ignorant that to allow the Palestinians to reoccupy Israel would end Israeli statehood. The President, not the Congress, takes the lead in foreign policy, and Obama’s disastrous ignorance of it has shown what can happen to a political parvenu. Today, despite Obama’s bowing and apologies, the Middle East is a more dangerous anti-American region than it has ever been in the modern era, and the prospect of another world war centered there is likely in the next decade.
Cain found his inner Rick Perry this week when he gave an interview to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Monday. It was palpably painful to watch. Asked if he agreed with Obama’s Libyan actions and policy, Cain looked like a kid stumped in an oral exam. "OK, Libya…" Cain replied followed by ten seconds of silence. The presidential wannabe looked as if he were waiting for a clue in the parlor game of Charade. "President Obama supported the uprising, correct?" Then a few seconds later he took a stab at an answer: "I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reasons…nope, that's a different one…I've got all this stuff twirling around in my head. Specifically, what are you asking me that I agree or not disagree (sic) with Obama?" Ugh! Cain ought to take something for that “twirly” stuff.
His response concerning his non-position on Iran wasn’t much better. He started out saying that the mountainous terrain of Iran made a military strike "not a practical, top-tier alternative." Huh? I believe planes can fly higher than mountains. I can’t imagine the Israelis letting Iran go nuclear saying, “We can’t go in there; the place has mountains.” Minutes later he flipped and said, "… stopping Iran may be nearly impossible without direct military intervention..." Cain’s frequent reference to getting input from advisors when cornered as he was in this interview was not comforting. What if his advisors are idiots – like the ones advising the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
Mitt Romney has been the object of scorn for his storied flip-flops, but Cain is little better. Early in his campaign he said abortion was a woman’s choice. The pro-life constituency so necessary to win the Republican nomination howled. Cain did a 180 and stumped for days that he had been misunderstood. Even when he was given softball questions during the “Center Seat” segment of Bret Baier’s Special Report his responses to A.B. Stoddard’s attempt to reconcile his “before and after” statements on abortion still sounded like he’d changed positions from pro-choice to pro-life.
Asked what his solution would be to people coming into the US illegally from Mexico, Cain said as President he would build an electric fence that had the potential to kill those climbing it. As criticism mounted he said he had been joking. But then later he told Arizona reporters that he wasn’t “walking away from that idea.” His inconsistency leaves voters ignorant of his position on the fence and the prevention of illegal crossings.
On October 31, the left-leaning online e-zine, Politico, reported two anonymous women had filed sexual harassment complaints against Cain years ago when he was the CEO of the National Restaurant Association. They were resolved by NRA payments for sizable settlements to each woman. Sexual harassment has become a growth industry because plaintiff attorneys have learned how easy it is to “greenmail” an employer that doesn’t want the expense or publicity of defending itself in a trial. Cain was rising in the polls at the time, so that fact combined with the political tilt of Politico and the anonymity of the plaintiffs had the smell of a “gotcha” all over it. (The same thing is happening to Newt now that he’s rising in the polls – to wit: the amount and purpose of money paid to him by Freddie Mac.) Campaign contributions began pouring into the Cain coffers from sympathetic supporters who believed Cain was the victim of a smear.
Two things are worth noting, however. One is that Politico asked Cain to comment on the story ten days before it was released. He refused, and his campaign staff did nothing to prepare for the coming media frenzy even with ten days’ notice. Additionally, a third and fourth woman have come forward also alleging untoward advances from Cain, the latter lawyered up with controversial uber attorney, Gloria Allred. Now a fifth woman has gone public with a story that would have seemed innocent were it not for the allegations of the other four.
What is important here is not whether Cain is guilty of these assertions. His innocence can be plausibly explained, and fair-minded people ought to assume innocence until it can be proven otherwise. What is important is how Cain handled it. First he denied the Politico story, then he couldn’t recall it, then he recalled bits and pieces of it but excused his spotty recollection because it “happened over 20 years ago.” (Newt is making the same mistake.)
Now, I can buy not being able to recall something that happened 20 years ago. Sometimes I have problems recalling details from a year ago. For the record, the first incident happened, allegedly, in 1998 – 13 years ago, not 20. What’s remarkable is that Cain had ten days to get ready and didn’t. He should have called the NRA and asked for a briefing so that he would be prepared with a focused response – not one that flopped around like a newly caught fish in the bottom of a boat.
A charge of sexual harassment from two different women a year apart which resulted in money settlements is not a trivial business issue that an accused CEO could or should be ignorant of. And both accusations occurred as Cain expressed interest in running for national office – knowing every skeleton in his closet would be scrutinized if he came close to winning the nomination. If he truly knew nothing of the settlement, what does that say about him as a candidate for the highest office in the land? And if he did know the details and still gave the gaffe-riddled explanations that I’ve heard, what does that say about his seat-of-the-pants approach to solving problems and making decisions?
When he appeared on the “Center Seat” segment of Fox News, Charles Krauthammer asked Cain to explain his curious parsing of the difference between the words “agreement” and “settlement” which was then part of his defense perimeter against the allegations of the first two women. His response was jaw-dropping. Krauthammer, somehow managing to restrain himself from busting out laughing, said, “it sounds like you are explaining, ‘Well, it depends on what the word ‘is’ is.’ So, how does Herman Cain end up parsing the words in a Clintonian legalistic way?”
As if his first explanation wasn’t horrid enough, Cain repeated it!
“It wasn’t intended to be Clintonian,” Cain said. “It was simply using the word ‘agreement,’ which in business organization (sic) I have run, when there has been an employee leaving, whether voluntarily or involuntarily we generally call it an ‘agreement.’ So that was the perspective from which I got around to that.” Oh puh-lease, no more already!
Yet when Sharon Bialek, the fourth accuser, met the press with Gloria Allred, the Cain campaign’s response was right out of the Clinton play book – destroy the character of the accuser. He launched a slash and burn attack on Bialek, itemizing personal bankruptcies, custody battles, and sundry financial problems. It didn’t come up to the standards of James Carville’s “drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park” attack on Paula Jones but it wasn’t pretty. Predictably, Cain’s support among women dropped.
Among the many things that the Cain campaign is revealing about its leader, the sexual harassment attack has shown that Cain doesn’t do crisis management well. But if there’s anything a US President ought to do well it’s manage a crisis.
Threatened that the sexual harassment allegations would overtake his campaign, Cain opined initially that their disclosure was motivated by racism, then he accused the Perry campaign of leaking the stories because a staffer had left Cain and defected to Perry. Neither of those explanations developed legs so his campaign manager, Mark Block, told Sean Hannity that Karen Kraushaar, 55, the second woman to leave the NRA with a settlement, was the mother of Josh Kraushaar, an employee of Politico. “So we’ve come to find out that her son works at Politico,” Block assured Hannity. Asked if he’d confirmed that as fact, Block responded, “We’ve confirmed that he does indeed work at Politico and that’s his mother, yes.” Well at least Block got half of it half-right; Josh Kraushaar did work at Politico but he left in 2010. And same surname; not related. Block should have been fired but he’s still laboring on in the Cain campaign, racking up another question mark about Cain’s judgment in keeping him.
I sometimes wonder if Romney the Robot can fog a mirror. He is the Second Coming of Bob Dole. But smiling like a Cheshire Cat, he is also unflappable when criticized and so far he hasn’t lost his cool on the campaign trail. In contrast, the sexual harassment affair has revealed a dark side to Herman Cain’s temperament. Personal attacks cause him to become irritable and surprises flummox him.
When asked about possible campaign violations committed by Mark Block, Cain got testy and told the reporter to change topics. It was a legitimate question. Non-profits can’t contribute to political campaigns. In this case the Federal Election Commission was asked to look into money that came from a non-profit founded by Block which was not reported as a loan on the books of the Cain campaign. Block has a record for these shenanigans. He was charged with campaign law violations in 2001. It was settled when he agreed to pay a $15,000 fine and stay out of Wisconsin politics for three years. His legal battles left him broke and stocking shelves at Target. Hiring him to run the campaign is another example that calls Cain’s judgment into question.
All things considered, Herman Cain is a likable guy. At a young age he achieved success as a key executive in a major corporation. The fact that he is successful and a black man makes him an important role model – desperately needed in the black community, which lacks few outside of sports and entertainment. Now 65 and well off financially, he is still in the harness when others are beginning to slow down. But his campaigning has shown how unprepared he is for prime time.
Sorry, Mr. Cain, we already have an on-the-job trainee as President. We don’t need another.
Cain was born to poor parents – a mother who was a cleaning woman and a father who was a barber and chauffeur. Yet Cain graduated from Morehouse with a degree in mathematics and went on to receive a Masters degree in Computer Science. He rose through the management ranks at Burger King, a subsidiary of Pillsbury whose CEO recognized Cain’s talent and made him CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, another Pillsbury subsidiary.
He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, a member of various public company Boards, the CEO of the National Restaurant Association, a talk show host, syndicated columnist, author of five books, and an unsuccessful candidate for the 2000 Republican Presidential nomination and 2004 US Senate seat from Georgia.
Disclosures filed for the Republican Presidential nomination show his net worth to be between $3 million and $6.5 million and his income for the combined years of 2010 and 2011 is between $1 million and $2 million – an imperfect though frequently-used measure of professional success.
Yet despite his arguments that his real-world business experience would make him a better President than a career politician, his recent campaigning shows otherwise.
Americans elected a person in 2008 who arguably had the thinnest resume of any President in the history of the Republic. His hope and change rhetoric proved to be ephemeral barnyard refuse as he has brought the country less hope and inflicted change that 74% of the people think is going in the wrong direction.
Cain doesn’t have a thin political resume; he has no political resume. While his business experience would give him a different view of the world than a hack who had spent his (or her) entire career in politics, the top office in the land is not the place to get on-the-job political training. Business and politics operate with different ground rules and one doesn’t carry over well to the other. Harry Truman believed that when he assessed General Eisenhower’s suitability for the Oval Office. Truman said, “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike – it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.” Eisenhower, however, had been the Supreme Commander of the largest Allied Army in the world which was fraught with big egos and politics.
The reason that a state governorship is better training for the presidency than a House or Senate seat or a business career is that it gives experience on a smaller and less threatening scale in dealing with a legislature, state budgets, and the federal government bureaucracies. Even with gubernatorial experience Al Gore made Texas Governor George W. Bush look a bit foolish for not knowing the names of heads of state he would likely have to deal with if elected President. If Cain were to get the nomination, Obama would exploit what Cain doesn’t know about the federal government, how agencies work, procedures, and the office of the presidency.
Cain’s knowledge deficit disorder in foreign affairs is especially stunning. In one of the debates he said the US must prevent China from getting nuclear weapons – which they’ve had for decades. When interviewed by Chris Wallace who asked him to state his position on the Palestinian "right of return" issue, Cain was obviously confused. "The right of return? [pause] The right of return?" asked Cain. Wallace helped him connect the dots and Cain’s answer was positively awful, clearly ignorant that to allow the Palestinians to reoccupy Israel would end Israeli statehood. The President, not the Congress, takes the lead in foreign policy, and Obama’s disastrous ignorance of it has shown what can happen to a political parvenu. Today, despite Obama’s bowing and apologies, the Middle East is a more dangerous anti-American region than it has ever been in the modern era, and the prospect of another world war centered there is likely in the next decade.
Cain found his inner Rick Perry this week when he gave an interview to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Monday. It was palpably painful to watch. Asked if he agreed with Obama’s Libyan actions and policy, Cain looked like a kid stumped in an oral exam. "OK, Libya…" Cain replied followed by ten seconds of silence. The presidential wannabe looked as if he were waiting for a clue in the parlor game of Charade. "President Obama supported the uprising, correct?" Then a few seconds later he took a stab at an answer: "I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reasons…nope, that's a different one…I've got all this stuff twirling around in my head. Specifically, what are you asking me that I agree or not disagree (sic) with Obama?" Ugh! Cain ought to take something for that “twirly” stuff.
His response concerning his non-position on Iran wasn’t much better. He started out saying that the mountainous terrain of Iran made a military strike "not a practical, top-tier alternative." Huh? I believe planes can fly higher than mountains. I can’t imagine the Israelis letting Iran go nuclear saying, “We can’t go in there; the place has mountains.” Minutes later he flipped and said, "… stopping Iran may be nearly impossible without direct military intervention..." Cain’s frequent reference to getting input from advisors when cornered as he was in this interview was not comforting. What if his advisors are idiots – like the ones advising the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
Mitt Romney has been the object of scorn for his storied flip-flops, but Cain is little better. Early in his campaign he said abortion was a woman’s choice. The pro-life constituency so necessary to win the Republican nomination howled. Cain did a 180 and stumped for days that he had been misunderstood. Even when he was given softball questions during the “Center Seat” segment of Bret Baier’s Special Report his responses to A.B. Stoddard’s attempt to reconcile his “before and after” statements on abortion still sounded like he’d changed positions from pro-choice to pro-life.
Asked what his solution would be to people coming into the US illegally from Mexico, Cain said as President he would build an electric fence that had the potential to kill those climbing it. As criticism mounted he said he had been joking. But then later he told Arizona reporters that he wasn’t “walking away from that idea.” His inconsistency leaves voters ignorant of his position on the fence and the prevention of illegal crossings.
On October 31, the left-leaning online e-zine, Politico, reported two anonymous women had filed sexual harassment complaints against Cain years ago when he was the CEO of the National Restaurant Association. They were resolved by NRA payments for sizable settlements to each woman. Sexual harassment has become a growth industry because plaintiff attorneys have learned how easy it is to “greenmail” an employer that doesn’t want the expense or publicity of defending itself in a trial. Cain was rising in the polls at the time, so that fact combined with the political tilt of Politico and the anonymity of the plaintiffs had the smell of a “gotcha” all over it. (The same thing is happening to Newt now that he’s rising in the polls – to wit: the amount and purpose of money paid to him by Freddie Mac.) Campaign contributions began pouring into the Cain coffers from sympathetic supporters who believed Cain was the victim of a smear.
Two things are worth noting, however. One is that Politico asked Cain to comment on the story ten days before it was released. He refused, and his campaign staff did nothing to prepare for the coming media frenzy even with ten days’ notice. Additionally, a third and fourth woman have come forward also alleging untoward advances from Cain, the latter lawyered up with controversial uber attorney, Gloria Allred. Now a fifth woman has gone public with a story that would have seemed innocent were it not for the allegations of the other four.
What is important here is not whether Cain is guilty of these assertions. His innocence can be plausibly explained, and fair-minded people ought to assume innocence until it can be proven otherwise. What is important is how Cain handled it. First he denied the Politico story, then he couldn’t recall it, then he recalled bits and pieces of it but excused his spotty recollection because it “happened over 20 years ago.” (Newt is making the same mistake.)
Now, I can buy not being able to recall something that happened 20 years ago. Sometimes I have problems recalling details from a year ago. For the record, the first incident happened, allegedly, in 1998 – 13 years ago, not 20. What’s remarkable is that Cain had ten days to get ready and didn’t. He should have called the NRA and asked for a briefing so that he would be prepared with a focused response – not one that flopped around like a newly caught fish in the bottom of a boat.
A charge of sexual harassment from two different women a year apart which resulted in money settlements is not a trivial business issue that an accused CEO could or should be ignorant of. And both accusations occurred as Cain expressed interest in running for national office – knowing every skeleton in his closet would be scrutinized if he came close to winning the nomination. If he truly knew nothing of the settlement, what does that say about him as a candidate for the highest office in the land? And if he did know the details and still gave the gaffe-riddled explanations that I’ve heard, what does that say about his seat-of-the-pants approach to solving problems and making decisions?
When he appeared on the “Center Seat” segment of Fox News, Charles Krauthammer asked Cain to explain his curious parsing of the difference between the words “agreement” and “settlement” which was then part of his defense perimeter against the allegations of the first two women. His response was jaw-dropping. Krauthammer, somehow managing to restrain himself from busting out laughing, said, “it sounds like you are explaining, ‘Well, it depends on what the word ‘is’ is.’ So, how does Herman Cain end up parsing the words in a Clintonian legalistic way?”
As if his first explanation wasn’t horrid enough, Cain repeated it!
“It wasn’t intended to be Clintonian,” Cain said. “It was simply using the word ‘agreement,’ which in business organization (sic) I have run, when there has been an employee leaving, whether voluntarily or involuntarily we generally call it an ‘agreement.’ So that was the perspective from which I got around to that.” Oh puh-lease, no more already!
Yet when Sharon Bialek, the fourth accuser, met the press with Gloria Allred, the Cain campaign’s response was right out of the Clinton play book – destroy the character of the accuser. He launched a slash and burn attack on Bialek, itemizing personal bankruptcies, custody battles, and sundry financial problems. It didn’t come up to the standards of James Carville’s “drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park” attack on Paula Jones but it wasn’t pretty. Predictably, Cain’s support among women dropped.
Among the many things that the Cain campaign is revealing about its leader, the sexual harassment attack has shown that Cain doesn’t do crisis management well. But if there’s anything a US President ought to do well it’s manage a crisis.
Threatened that the sexual harassment allegations would overtake his campaign, Cain opined initially that their disclosure was motivated by racism, then he accused the Perry campaign of leaking the stories because a staffer had left Cain and defected to Perry. Neither of those explanations developed legs so his campaign manager, Mark Block, told Sean Hannity that Karen Kraushaar, 55, the second woman to leave the NRA with a settlement, was the mother of Josh Kraushaar, an employee of Politico. “So we’ve come to find out that her son works at Politico,” Block assured Hannity. Asked if he’d confirmed that as fact, Block responded, “We’ve confirmed that he does indeed work at Politico and that’s his mother, yes.” Well at least Block got half of it half-right; Josh Kraushaar did work at Politico but he left in 2010. And same surname; not related. Block should have been fired but he’s still laboring on in the Cain campaign, racking up another question mark about Cain’s judgment in keeping him.
I sometimes wonder if Romney the Robot can fog a mirror. He is the Second Coming of Bob Dole. But smiling like a Cheshire Cat, he is also unflappable when criticized and so far he hasn’t lost his cool on the campaign trail. In contrast, the sexual harassment affair has revealed a dark side to Herman Cain’s temperament. Personal attacks cause him to become irritable and surprises flummox him.
When asked about possible campaign violations committed by Mark Block, Cain got testy and told the reporter to change topics. It was a legitimate question. Non-profits can’t contribute to political campaigns. In this case the Federal Election Commission was asked to look into money that came from a non-profit founded by Block which was not reported as a loan on the books of the Cain campaign. Block has a record for these shenanigans. He was charged with campaign law violations in 2001. It was settled when he agreed to pay a $15,000 fine and stay out of Wisconsin politics for three years. His legal battles left him broke and stocking shelves at Target. Hiring him to run the campaign is another example that calls Cain’s judgment into question.
All things considered, Herman Cain is a likable guy. At a young age he achieved success as a key executive in a major corporation. The fact that he is successful and a black man makes him an important role model – desperately needed in the black community, which lacks few outside of sports and entertainment. Now 65 and well off financially, he is still in the harness when others are beginning to slow down. But his campaigning has shown how unprepared he is for prime time.
Sorry, Mr. Cain, we already have an on-the-job trainee as President. We don’t need another.
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