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Charlie Cook Sees GOP Winning Big in 2012
From U.S. News & World Report:
Republicans may be heading toward complete control of Washington—maintaining the House, taking the Senate, and likely capturing the White House—if Election Day 2012 unfolds as Charlie Cook, acclaimed vote counter, predicts.
Republicans may be heading toward complete control of Washington—maintaining the House, taking the Senate, and likely capturing the White House—if Election Day 2012 unfolds as Charlie Cook, acclaimed vote counter, predicts.
Sure that the former Gov. Mitt Romney will clinch the GOP nomination, Cook says President Obama faces an uphill battle to be re-elected, and the election will be a referendum on his presidency and the dire economic situation he now “owns.” [Vote now: Will Obama be a one-term president?]
Even if Obama did manage to hold on to the presidency, he will face a Republican-controlled legislature that will likely shut down his agenda entirely.
Cook sees House Republicans losing some of their majority, perhaps five to 10 of the seats he calls “exotic and problematic” that rode the wave in 2010 midterm elections. But he believes that Democrats stand no chance of winning enough seats to gain control.
For similar reasons in the Senate, he sees Democrats losing some of the seats that they gained in their own wave in 2006. “Best-case scenario” for the Democrats, says Cook, is that they lose only three of their 23 seats that are up for grabs. More likely however, they will lose at least six of the 10 most at risk, tipping the Republicans into a slight majority. [See photos of 2012 GOP hopefuls on the campaign trail]
As for the Republican nomination, there is no doubt in Cook’s mind that it will be Romney. Herman Cain might have passion, Newt Gingrich intellect, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry money, but, “Romney is the only guy with the whole package.”
For Cook, “The $64,000 questions is, ‘Is it going to be quick and clean or long and messy?’” If Romney gains the support of his party early, he will pick a vice presidential candidate who appeals to the center. If issues like his faith or his Massachusetts healthcare plan continue to disrupt his path for nomination, he may have to do some “awkward ticket balancing” like Sen. John McCain did in his choice of former Gov. Sarah Palin for vice president, explains Cook.
Either way, Cook says, Obama, quoting the president himself, “faces an uphill battle.” Cook adds that the only chance he has is to borrow moves from former President Bush’s 2004 playbook and “marginalize” Romney just as Bush’s team tried to marginalized Sen. John Kerry. [Check out a roundup of political cartoons on the 2012 GOP candidates.]
Cook, who spoke at an event last night hosted by Prism Public Affairs and C. Fox Communications, also says that the Gallup presidential approval poll is the best indicator of president’s chances for re-election. “Don’t pay attention to the horse race figures,” he says.
Most tellingly, he adds, Obama has only 39 percent approval among independents—only 32 percent among the “pure independents” who do not lean left or right—and they will be the ones who decide the election.
R.S. McCain: Complaints About the Cain Campaign? Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
My good friend, and frequent contributor to The Minority Report, Robert Stacy McCain knocks this one out of the park!
I love how everyone has an opinion about how others should run their campaigns… if they really knew of which they speak they would have put it in practice already on their own campaigns or getting paid to advise campaigns!
Another thing Republicans and Conservatives need to remember is that this primary is ours, stop the backbiting and stop letting the Left and a complicit media control the narrative it’s our primary and they don’t have any business interfering in it… period!
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
For the past several days, in conversation after conversation, I’ve listened while friends told me what’s wrong with the Herman Cain campaign. Some of these friends are enthusiastic Cain supporters, some are not. And as I told several people who criticized the campaign’s handling of the sexual harassment allegations, “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. Any 24-year-old with a semester of Leadership Institute training could do a better job than they’ve been doing.”
Look, I’m no campaign strategist. But you don’t have to be a campaign strategist to see that, for example, HermanCain.com is without question The World’s Suckiest Campaign Web Site.
Just in terms of doing my job I noticed this months ago, because when you click the “Newsroom” tab on the site, a reporter might expect to find an archive of press releases. What you find instead is some kind of 1996-era “frames” format with out-of-date news articles about the campaign – which doesn’t even include links to the original articles.
OK, so click the “Press Resources” link at HermanCain.com and we find — wait for it – a form you can fill out and request information.
Fill it out. Maybe they’ll get back to you.
If I were the manager of a campaign paying good money for a Web site and somebody provided me with a useless piece of crap like HermanCain.com, either I’d be in jail for attempted murder or else he’d be in jail under indictment for fraud and theft by deception.
There is no excuse for this. I could pick up my cell-phone this very minute and, just from the numbers in my speed-dail, give you the names of six professionals who could design a better Web site than HermanCain.com. Five months ago, Steve Foley of Citizens4Cain published an open letter to the Cain campaign telling them what a wreck their Web site is and . . . no response.
Nobody home. Nobody cares. Crickets chirping.
When the campaign has failed to fix a blindingly obvious and basic problem like that, months after they’ve been told about the problem, it does not inspire confidence. And this kind of problem — which can be seen by anybody who cares to look — is replicated throughout the Cain campaign’s operations.
People with years of experience in the campaign business keep talking my ears off, telling me stuff the Cain campaign is doing wrong, and I don’t know what to tell them, except that they’re telling me the umpteenth version of the same story I’ve been hearing from everybody else. If I had any influence at all with the campaign, they’d have long ago re-hired Dan Tripp and given him two orders: Kick ass and take names. They’re not listening to me, they’re not listening to Steve Foley, they’re not listening to anybody, and so all I can do is to do my job — I’m a journalist, not a campaign strategist — and try not to worry about it.
The reason I wrote that 500-word rant is because today I noticed bloggers demanding that Herman Cain fire his chief of staff Mark Block:
Herman Cain’s Worst Enemy
– Michelle Malkin
Dear Herman Cain
– Erick Erickson
Cain campaign: We’re sticking with Mark Block
– Ed Morrissey
In Erickson’s post, he writes:
Herman, you said you’d surround yourself with the best people and you’ve surrounded yourself with Class A failures. The problems you are facing are problems of campaign staffing. You’ve failed to live up to your own standard of hiring the best people.
Which is pretty damned categorical, and which might have more credibility if Erickson’s buddies – “the best people” — weren’t the guys piloting the hopelessly doomed Rick Perry campaign.
Malkin’s complaint, basically, is that Mark Block is a lying scumbag. Having spent a good deal of time covering Republican campaigns, however, I’m willing to attest that “lying scumbag” and “GOP political operative” are pretty much synonymous. The key thing is to hire effective lying scumbags, and the “Blame Rick Perry” move was pure genius. For two or three days, everybody was screaming bloody murder about Block trying to pin the blame on Curt Anderson, which bought Team Herman enough time to come up with a better story.
Guess what? It worked.
But if you’re a conservative who wants to get quoted in the mainstream media this week, hurry up and denounce Mark Block:
Cain chief of staff under fire
Conservative pundits and former Cain staffers are calling for the resignation of Herman Cain’s chief of staff, who they say has damaged the GOP candidate’s credibility.
The calls for Mark Block to resign come as Cain’s campaign deals with sexual harassment allegations that threaten to ruin his candidacy. . . .
“Mark Block has to go,” prominent conservative blogger Ed Morrisey of Hot Air wrote Wednesday morning. “If he’s not gone by tomorrow, no one will take this campaign seriously again — nor should they.”
No expertise is required to identify and criticize the Cain campaign’s errors. Everybody with two eyes and a brain can see it. And yet . . .
Cain’s fundraising surges past $9 million
Herman Cain has raised more than $9 million since Oct. 1, his campaign announced Thursday, more than doubling his cash haul for 2012.
More than $2 million of that total was donated within the last 10 days, as Cain battled mounting allegations of sexual harassment from his time as president of the National Restaurant Association.
Cain only raised $4.7 million from May through Sept. 30, although it was not until his Sept. 24 victory in the Florida straw poll that the candidate began to rise in Republican polls. The campaign has now raised a total of $14.1 million. . . .
For the past 40 days, while the Cain campaign has broken every single maxim of Political Communications 101, they’ve been raising money at the pace of $225,000 a day. If that’s failure, it’s the kind of failure many campaign operatives would kill to have.
Despite everything, Herman Cain is No. 1 in the polls.
And next time I see Mark Block, I expect him to buy me a beer for calling him an “effective lying scumbag.”
Obviously, it was intended as a compliment.
Under the Fedora: Space Goats, Mea culpas and the Mick
In the TV version of the Classic British radio show Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy there is an amusing scene where Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect find themselves on “B” arc with an inept crew carrying an equally inept population away from their doomed planet. At this point of the conversation Mr. Dent asks a question:
Arthur Dent: What was wrong with your planet?
Captain: Well it was doomed as they say, apparently it was going to blow up or crash into the sun or some such thing.
Number 1: That’s not what I was told. My commanding officer swore blind that the entire planet was about to be eaten by an enormous mutant star goat.
Ford: Oh Really?
Number 1: Yes he said how lucky I was to be going off on the first ship.
Arthur: But they made sure they send all you lot off first anyway?
Captain: Oh yes…
I couldn’t help but think of this when I saw that after a week of frenzied stories on all the networks beating their breasts on how if only National Restaurant Association would release Herman Cain’s accuser from her confidentiality arrangement we could find out what happened.
Well the NRA obliged and to the surprise of the MSM her lawyer announced that she saw “no Value” in discussing the matter publicly or privately, yet it hasn’t stopped them from continuing to advocate for accusers who they won’t identify, making accusations they can’t identify. On Way Too Early with Willie Geist and on Morning Joe, they hit Cain for not answering question, but had nothing to say about the new found silence of his “accusers”.
No word if a mutant star goat was involved.
Herman Cain raised two million from this farce and still remains at the top of the polls. Looking at the results of this nonsense I’m hoping the media will start attacking me as it will lead to success in my November fund raiser.
About Hitchhikers guide. If at all possible btw do NOT watch the movie version whose only redeeming feature is Alan Rickman’s voice work. Stick with the British TV show or the even better Radio shows.
Saturday Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain had what was billed as a Lincoln Douglas style debate. It wasn’t actually much of a debate as they both agreed on almost every issue. I’d like to see about a dozen of these maybe 3 a week with a different pair of candidates each time, you’d learn a lot more but it wouldn’t be sexy.
Although the debate was free of acrimony the twitter stream was not. An awful lot of insults were directed at both Cain and Gingrich from people who support other candidates. On the bright side it was clean.
I see an awful lot of language on twitter that I wouldn’t tolerate in my house. The worst of it is directed at Andrew Breitbart, the level of vitriol directed at this man is beyond belief.
Speaking of vitriol I must confess I had quite a bit toward the Muslim students at Catholic University who supposedly complained about crucifixes in the classroom. Turns out it was not the students but a tenured university law professor who initiated the complaint without the consent or agreement of a single one of the 122 Muslim students in the school.
I owe these students an apology, Mea Culpa. It’s nice to be able to report that there are in fact Reasonable Muslims out there.
Meanwhile unreasonable Muslims this week…
Beat to death a Christian Student Aynam Nabil Labib in Egypt for exposing his crucifix in class by his teacher and classmates.,
Slaughter 67 Christians in Nigeria
Firebombed a French satirical paper that they say offended Muslims
And reportedly forced people in France at with knives at their throat to say “Allah Akbar”
I’d really like to avoid a apocalyptic confrontation that is going to end with a lot of dead people most of them Muslim, reasonable Muslims are the best chance to achieve that.
BTW that magazine Charlie Hebdo in coordination with a left wing paper re-produced the “offensive” cartoon today in a special supplement…good for them!
Did you remember to turn your clock back this weekend? A lot of people forget, there are interesting side effects, the 8 a.m. Mass for example was absolutely packed and people were still coming in after the homely.
BTW after mass had breakfast in Lancaster at Michael’s Bridge Diner, it was pretty good.
During the Giants/Patriots game this weekend the question arose where Tom Brady ranks compared to the all-time greats. He was compared him to Joe Montana.
If you are a football quarterback and can be mentioned in the same sentence as Joe Montana without people laughing; you’re are one of the all time greats.
As if to back the point up Brady completed a 4th quarter 4th down touchdown to give his team the lead with under 2 minutes to go…and then Eli Manning of the Giants followed that up with his own under 90 seconds later to win the game.
In sports there is always someone right behind you ready to take your place on the pedestal.
Last week was All Saints Day (Nov 1st) followed by All Souls day, One of the things that people often forget when looking at the lives of the canonized saints (referring to those we know of) is they tended to have some serious faults before they took the right patch. Folks tend to forget Christianity is all about redemption.
At the Conservatory Joy McCain is starting a weekly Bible Study, there is an odd myth among some Christian denominations that Catholics don’t read or study the bible, but I’ve found that most critiques of the church that “everybody knows” tend to be false.
At Big Government they now have an official regularly updated rap sheet for the Occupy Movement that now numbers in the 100’s. Other than the New York Post, no national paper wants to play with any of the trouble at the camps.
We now have our first occupy fatality over in Vancouver, a drug OD. Protesters smashed the ambulance window as they took the body away.
I know it is redundant to say, but The left’s and the media’s rhetoric concerning the Tea Party of last year, perfectly matches the actions of the Occupy movement nationwide. I don’t remember the Tea Party folks pushing 78 year old women down stairs or scaring reporters to the point they declare they will not cover it.
The Greek bailout saga continues as markets calmed down at the news that the Greek President had decided against a plebiscite on the bailouts, after all once you start letting the people decide their fate who knows where it ends?
I think this isn’t about bailing out Greece it’s about bailing out the concept of centralized control and hiding the true state of affairs from investors for a as long as possible.
Let’s finish with a little sports nostalgia about Mickey Mantle I’ve had heard the story of Mickey Mantle’s gimmie Home Run vs the Tigers during his last time up ever in Detroit, but I always thought it was a bit of a legend until I saw this video of Mantle telling the story.
Not to take anything away from Mickey but contrast that to Ted Williams story of his last Homerun in his last at bat with a pitcher trying to get him. Yet Mantle cards are still the most valuable baseball cards that you can buy.. 42 years after his retirement.
Next time you read this column I will be in Denver at Blogcon covering the event, I’ll see you there.
Previewing the Sunday Shows
All shows will be bashing Herman Cain!
Getting Cained
Clearly, the press is at it again. It is a familiar script to those of us who remember the sad days when “Bork” became a verb, and Clarence Thomas railed against high-tech lynching during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
We now have the Cain affair. Allegations of harrassment, but no details. Prurient minds, a staple of the Washington DC scene, rush to supply them. Imaginations go wild, which they are meant to do. The hapless Cain team concentrates on the leaker, a big mistake. The scandal set wants to know about the SEX. It would be otherwise in a perfect world, but one look at our nation’s capital and you know this is no perfect world. The goal is to trash Mr. Cain’s character, and do that far in excess of anything merited by a lapse in his behavior or judgment, to display the raw power of the demon arts of false witness. And teach a lesson to aspiring black conservatives.
Wesley Pruden sums it up well:
Herman Cain doesn’t look like Jack the Ripper, but Scotland Yard never pursued Mr. Ripper with the passion of the newspapers and television networks so hot after Mr. Cain. He may be guilty of whatever it is that he is accused of — so far little more than a wink, a predatory smile or even a suggestive smirk. Or he may not be guilty. But in the wonderland of Washington journalism, we demand the verdict first and only then the evidence (if any).
Will it succeed? In normal times, it probably would. But these are not normal times. It may be news to the enablers in the Republican establishment who participated in this disgrace, but the voters have already been caned – by the Obama economy, high unemployment, high inflation and all the dispiriting prospects for the future. Two decades ago, in far less dire circumstances, the voters overlooked the manifest imperfections of Bill Clinton’s personal life as a way out of the economic doldrums. They can do it again.
The real jury is deliberating now. If Mr. Cain is guilty of nothing more than bad judgment in a PC, lawsuit-mad age, they will acquit. And raise Caine with a vengeance!
Video: Herman Cain – “High Tech Lynching”
From ABC News:
An emotionally charged and slickly produced new video obtained by ABC News from the group Americans for Herman Cain portrays the sexual harassment story as a racially motivated effort to destroy Herman Cain.
The video ends with the Clarence Thomas’s closing statement at his 1991 confirmation hearing: “This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. It is a high tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves . It is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order you will be lynched, destroyed caricatured rather than hung from a tree.”
As Thomas speaks, the video superimposes the words “Don’t let the LEFT do it again.”
Americans for Herman Cain is a so-called Super Pac independent of his campaign.
The Racially Tinged Assault on Herman Cain
I was, I think, the first conservative to charge that Politico and the media were engaged in a “high-tech lynching” of Herman Cain. Since that time (Sunday night), several influential conservative bloggers and writers have demurred. Race, they insist, has nothing to do with this story; and conservatives should stop “playing the race card.”
“Cain would have us believe his critics are racists,” declares Jennifer Rubin. And that “really sickens me,”emotes Quin Hillyer.
“If harassment was the sort of blanket smear of black conservatives that [Ann] Coulter [and others] suggest it is, you’d expect them, [other black conservatives], to have been smeared, too, by now,” adds Allah Pundit.
Are Rubin, Hillyer, Allah Pundit and other like-minded cons really this obtuse and this clueless? Do they really think that race has nothing to do with this story? Really? Where have they been for the past 25 years?
No one, obviously, thinks that Politico consciously set out to smear Cain because he is black. That’s a gross oversimplification and caricature of the point that Coulter, myself and others have been making.
As I pointed out at the Daily Caller on Monday, Politico is no better or worse — and certainly no less liberal — than any other standard D.C.-based media outlet.
Politico certainly shares the same political and cultural biases of the Washington press corps as a whole — which is to say: they lean decidedly to the left. And so, they commit the same errors and mistakes — and indulge in the same stereotypes and prejudices — as most other reporters.
This means, consequently, that they are far more zealous about examining the alleged misdeeds of black conservatives (i.e, Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain) than they are the real-world wrongdoing of white liberals (i.e, John Edwards and Bill Clinton).
It means that they are not at all reticent about playing into, and exploiting, ugly racial stereotypes involving black men and sex. And it means that they will rush into print with incomplete, half-baked stories that unfairly indict black conservatives, while ignoring well-documented facts that damn their while liberal allies.
“With no standard other than the subjective offense taken by the accuser,”explains Coulter, “absolutely anyone could be called a witch, i.e., a sexual harasser. So it’s striking that the only two conservative public figures accused of being witches both happened to be conservative blacks: Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain.
“Liberals,” she adds, “go straight to ugly racist stereotypes when attacking conservative blacks, calling them oversexualized, stupid and/or incompetent.”
Indeed, this is the cultural milieu that Politico partakes in and swims. This is the world that they live in and inhabit. It is a world in which black conservatives are viciously attacked and abused with all manner of derogatory insults: ”Uncle Toms,” “Aunt Jemimas,” and “Oreo cookies” (black on the inside, but white on the outside).
It is a world in which reporters and journalists are ever-so-careful not to offend the politically correct sensibilities of the culturally dominant Left, but seem not to worry at all about smearing lone and abused black conservatives.
So yeah, race absolutely has something to do with this story — quite a bit, actually — and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And it matters not at all that Politico’s initial base report — that when Herman Cain was its president, the National Restaurant Association settled sexual harassment charges against him — is true.
For starters, you don’t publish a piece — and you don’t smear a man — based on flimsy and anonymous accusations.
Politico’s story was premature at best and should not have been published until such time as they had better reporting and more facts. (You know, the kind of facts that Politico and other media studiously and disinterestedly waited for in the John Edwards scandal.)
Moreover, Politico’s reporting has since extended well beyond its initial base report to encompass a veritable smear campaign against Cain.
“There are currently 10 Cain-related stories at the top of Politico.com. Jim Geraghty noted yesterday. And the assault has continued throughout the week: Why, by my count, there are now 12 Cain-related stories on th ePolitico.com homepage.
This isn’t dispassionate journalism; this is passionate politics aimed squarely at the Right and designed to discredit a prominent black conservative who is now leading in the GOP presidential race. And conservatives who say race has nothing to do with the media assault on Cain are deluding themselves with overly simplistic, ahistorical and non-contextual thinking.
The truth is that the Left knows what it is doing, even if Politico doesn’t. And some of us on the Right at least are on to their racket. And we intend to circle the wagons to protect one of our own unjustly accused.
Ride to the sound of the guns.
Cain Camp Accuses Perry Campaign of Leaking Sexual Harassment Claims
From FoxNews:
Herman Cain’s top aide accused Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign of being behind the recent stories about sexual harassment allegations against Cain from the 1990s that have rocked the former pizza company executive’s presidential campaign.
“This is one of the actions in America that is the reason why people don’t get involved in politics,” Mark Block, Cain’s campaign chief of staff, said in an exclusive interview with Fox News’ “Special Report.” “The actions of the Perry campaign are despicable.”
“Rick Perry and his campaign owe Herman Cain and his family an apology,” Block added.
Cain has been grappling with the allegations since Politico first reported Sunday night that at least two women who worked for the National Restaurant Association when Cain was its head had received financial settlements after they complained about his behavior.
The Cain campaign suggests the source for that story was longtime GOP consultant Curt Anderson, who worked for Cain’s failed 2004 U.S. Senate bid and had been debriefed on the harassment allegations by Cain himself. Anderson now works for Perry.
And Chris Wilson, a former pollster for the restaurant association, said Wednesday he witnessed Cain’s alleged inappropriate behavior. He’s now involved with a pro-Perry super political action committee.
But both men deny leaking the story.
The Politico Media Harassment Scandal
As readers of my blog, ResCon1 know, I’m with Jeffrey Lord, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham: This is a high-tech lynching of a highly accomplished black man who threatens the liberal order. Indeed, it’s no “Herman Cain sexual harassment scandal”; it is, instead, a Politico media harassment scandal.
I say this because, as Robert Stacy McCain has observed, Politico has presented no real and discernable evidence against Cain. The charges, such as they are, are so vague and lacking in specificity that they could include even innocuous behavior which no reasonable person would find objectionable.
And of course, we have no way of knowing whether the charges are credible because Cain’s accusers are being protected by a cloak of anonymity.
This may be standard journalistic practice, but it’s also highly unethical in my opinion: Concealing the identities of the accusers allows them to level ruinous charges against high-profile figures, but without ever having to subject themselves and their allegations to critical scrutiny.
Yet, it’s a basic principle of American justice (enshrined in the Sixth Amendment) that the accused has a right to confront his accuser.
Then, too, there is something called the statute of limitations: The charges against Cain date back at least a dozen years, Stacy notes. And the passage of time and distance make it increasingly difficult to gauge whether these charges were and are legitimate.
As Quin Hillyer points out, “people are falsely accused of all sorts of things, all the time.” Still, says Quin, “There is every reason for people to look into this further, and every reason for Cain to give a full accounting.”
Fine. Let Politico “look into this further.” And, should they find anything real and credible, then they can rush into print with their story. But you don’t publish a piece — and you don’t smear a man — based on flimsy and anonymous accusations.
And by the way: I don’t think this story makes Politico any more or less liberal than the next conventional media outlet; it just makes them typical, and that’s the problem: Too many (liberal) American journalists, especially in and around the beltway, think that it’s OK to smear people; and that it’s especially OK to smear conservative black men. It’s not. It’s wrong, and it has got to stop.
As Aaron Goldstein writes, the truth is that a lot of people are terrified at the prospect of a Herman Cain presidency, and, in large measure, because Cain is a black conservative. And many of these people will do anything — anything! — to stop Cain.
That’s understandable, I suppose, if you think that the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment rightfully own the black vote. But what’s more difficult to fathom is elite conservative criticism of Cain. He has not handled this controversy well, we are lectured. He has been amateurish and slow to respond.
Yeah, I suppose there’s a small element of truth to that charge. Cain is an unconventional politician running an unconventional race. He’s also wonderfully human. And he was caught off guard by an unfair and distant nonstory.
But what’s beyond dispute is that Cain has confronted these allegations forthrightly, with grace and with dignity. And, so long as he is under fire, no conservative should abandon him to the savagery of the Left. Ride to the sound of the guns.
Originally published at the Daily Caller and cross-posted at ResCon1.com.
‘Sources Say’: Herman Cain meets the D.C. media’s scandal factory.
From the American Spectator:
Gospel singer Dottie Rambo had written more than 2,000 songs by the time she died in 2008, but she remains best known for a 1970 hymn based on the Irish folk tune “Londonderry Air” (the same melody as “Danny Boy”) which got a memorable performance Monday. “‘Amazing Grace’ will always be my song of praise, for it was grace that bought my liberty,” Herman Cain sang in his warm baritone as he closed his speech at the National Press Club with the chorus that ends, “He looked beyond my faults and saw my need.”
Whatever his faults, Cain’s need as a Republican presidential candidate Monday in Washington was to deny previously private accusations of sexual harassment dating back at least a dozen years which publicly surfaced Sunday in a Politico story headlined: “Exclusive: 2 women accused Herman Cain of inappropriate behavior.” It was one of the most curious articles in the history of political scandals: The article did not name the accusers, reported to be former employees of the National Restaurant Association, where the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO was president from 1996 to 1999, and the description of Cain’s alleged offenses was maddeningly vague. Cain was reportedly accused of “episodes that left the women upset and offended” and “physical gestures that were not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable and that they regarded as improper in a professional relationship.” The article also described “conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature,” and quoted one second-hand source about an allegation of “an unwanted sexual advance” from Cain.
