Thread: Herman Cain. Who is this guy?

The Dark Horse
Herman Cain, the pizza magnate who would be president—the first in a series of Slate looks at the 2012 candidates.
By David Weigel
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011, at 2:14 PM ET

Herman Cain speaks during a press conference by the Tea Party Express on Aug. 4, 2010 in Washington, D.C.Herman Cain's political career began when he defeated Bill Clinton on live television. If you missed it—and it was 17 years ago—it happened when the president was making one of the last blitzes for his health care reform plan, and was holding town-hall-style meetings to explain how mandating employer-based coverage would work.


Cain got a question in. He'd been a turnaround artist at Pillsbury, working with Burger King, and in 1986 he'd been put in command of the failing Godfather's Pizza franchise. He saved it with triage, closing 250 of around 800 restaurants, before leading an investor group that bought the franchise and put him in charge. By the time he met Clinton, he had been elected president of the National Restaurant Association. This explained some of his confidence as he lit into his president.

"On behalf of all of those business owners that are in a situation similar to mine," asked Cain, "my question is, quite simply, if I'm forced to do this what will I tell those people whose jobs I will have to eliminate?"

"Well, wait a minute," said Clinton, attempting a charm offensive. "Let's ask—let's talk a minute about what you would have to do." The employer mandate would add only 2 percent to Cain's costs, Clinton argued, and Cain could just charge more for pizza.



"I'm a satisfied customer, I'd keep buying from you."

"Mr. President," said Cain, "with all due respect, your calculation on what the impact would do, quite honestly, is incorrect."

Conservatives treated the Cain mutiny like a bootleg from a Bob Dylan/George Harrison jam session, passed from fan to fan. Rush Limbaugh played the clip on his short-lived TV show. Cain's senator, Paul Coverdell, called him a "profile in courage." Newt Gingrich praised Cain and, after Republicans won Congress in the fall, gave him a slot on a flat-tax study group.

That didn't pan out—a representative of fellow panel member Pete DuPont said he "doesn't remember enough of what they worked on and spoke about to do an interview." But Jack Kemp made a pilgrimage to Omaha to meet the man who called himself The Hermanator—a name he has now trademarked—and bring him into the Republican Party. "Here's a black guy," Kemp told reporter Ceci Connolly after he was nominated for vice president in 1996, "who stands up with the voice of Othello, the looks of a football player, the English of Oxfordian quality and the courage of a lion."

No surprise that he stuck with the GOP after treatment like that. He co-chaired the 2000 Steve Forbes campaign, ran for U.S. Senate in Georgia (he came in second to now-Sen. Johnny Isakson, pointing out that, while he got half as many votes, he "came within two percentage points of getting into a run-off"), and launched a radio talk show and political column. Last week Cain launched a presidential exploratory committee, becoming the first Republican candidate of the 2012 race. He did 15 launch interviews and got the polite coverage afforded to a dark horse. "Cain didn't seem particularly plugged into the day to day of politics," observed Politico's Ben Smith.

That's the oddity of the Cain campaign: He's a man out of time. In the 1990s and 2000s, there was no easy way to transition from The Man Who Invented the Hot Slice into politics. In 2011, the Republican electorate wants to hear from anyone who's not a politician. That's what they say, anyway.

"The political landscape has changed dramatically because of the citizens' movement spurred by the Tea Party movement," Cain told me in an interview, giving me the elevator pitch for why he couldn't win a GOP Senate primary in 2004 but can win a presidential primary now. "Based upon me being very active in that citizens movement, talking to dozens and dozens and dozens of Tea Party rallies, events, conferences all over this country, I believe that people have a better attitude for an unconventional candidate—someone who's more of a problem-solver than a politician."

He's right about the Tea Party. When Cain speaks at conservative conferences and Tea Party rallies, he gets bigger crowds than members of Congress, and only slightly smaller crowds than Fox News hosts. He was invited to join the board of Tea Party Patriots, declining in part because he was thinking about this presidential bid, and he was a spokesman for Ginni Thomas' "Liberty Central." At the October 2010 Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention in Richmond, I saw football-jersey-style T-shirts displaying names of those who might run for president this year: Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Mike Pence, and Herman Cain. When no other Republican wanted to talk about 2012, Cain would walk into speeches introduced by a heavily produced video, a highlight reel of his other speeches.

What sort of speech do they get? What do they get when they tune into Cain's radio show? It's a mash-up of Dale Carnegie-esque leadership talk and conservative talk about the Constitution, the socialism of Barack Obama, and the rest of the Democrats' crimes against the individual. His speech in Richmond was a perfect example. "The tragedy of life does not lie in not reaching your goals," said Cain. "The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach for." It could be the case against Marx, or it could be one of those weekend-long conferences on self-actualization.

This might be because Cain has spent as much time writing and talking about business skills as he's spent talking about politics. He's penned three books, one of which is a standard political epistle, but two of which—Leadership Is Common Sense and Speak As a Leader: Develop the Better Speaker in You—fit snugly on the shelf next to Tony Robbins. Foolish people, he argues, avoid the "A, B, and C factors" that drag them down and pivot to "the D, E, and F factors—the world might appreciate the D, E, and F of something instead of another A, B and C of everything." When I talked to Cain, he accused the Obama administration of falling in that trap as it fumbled from crisis to crisis. "He picked the wrong experts!" said Cain. "Good grief! The wrong experts!"

In his book on public speaking, written after he'd done years of get-motivated speeches, he analyzed his turnaround at Godfather's in terms that sound exactly like what he, and every other Tea Party star, wants to do to Washington. "We discovered that what our loyal customers wanted most was a consistent original crust with their choice of ten different toppings made to order," he wrote. "So we eliminated the other crusts and concentrated on original product … the entire organization was then self-motivated to produce quality consistently, having identified and removed the biggest barrier to do so—too many crusts!"

When I talked to Cain, he put every issue into this framework. Asked about foreign policy, which he doesn't talk about much in speeches, he identified a problem—weakness and slow decision-making—and proposed a solution: gathering up leaders.

"I support the surge in Afghanistan but I would have sent those troops earlier than the president sent them," said Cain. "I don't know, because I'm not privy to all of the intelligence, if we can win in Afghanistan. If we can, then I would have never announced a withdrawal date. And so the first thing that I'd do [if elected] is summon the experts to find out can we win. If the answer is yes, what is it going to take? And I'm not going to broadcast it to our enemies as to when we're going to get out of there."

He restated this, to be clear about how much he saw his job as handing out tasks to smart people. "If the experts—the generals, the joint chiefs of staff—if they believe we can win, I'm not going to tear up the plan they give me," he said. "I'm going to execute the plan. If we can't win, I want to know what we can do to exit with dignity out of that country."

Cain spent some more time explaining his view of the war on terror—"we're going to be in this war forever" —and the Iraq War. "The people of Iraq, they wanted to become a democracy," he said. "If they did not want to become a democracy, I do not think President Bush forced it upon them. Once it was clear that they wanted to become a democracy, President Bush pledged to help them do that. I know enough from the reports that I've read that this is something the Iraqi people wanted."

These are not the issues that got Cain into politics, though. He won that first debate because he was discussing the business he spent his life working with. He eased into electoral politics after mastering public speaking. When Cain doesn't know something, he studies. He trusts the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Media Research Center, and research from Americans for Prosperity and Americans for Tax Reform. (He supports replacing the income tax with the national consumption Fair Tax.) Is it enough for a Republican presidential candidate to hit Iowa and South Carolina and New Hampshire—he's been to all of them—conversant in the work of the think tanks?

Cain is going to try. He likes to open speeches with a joke at President Obama's expense. He'll recite the opening words of the Declaration of Independence by memory, then he'll point out that he didn't need a teleprompter to do it. He said he had a better grasp on reality than Bill Clinton. Does he have a better grasp of facts than Barack Obama?

"I have been studying this stuff," said Cain. "Now, about the president." His thinks on this. "I try to be nice. This president, I don't think, can discuss any of the things that he says in speeches deeper than on the surface. I can go two and three deep on trying to help people understand where we're coming from, because I've been studying these issues for years."

http://www.slate.com/id/2281516/pagenum/all/#p2 I realize this is an old piece by news standards, sometimes it helps to look back. I know everyone is looking at Perry. Perry has been telling people what they want to hear for many years now. and he has grown very good at it. For a long time many of us have been asking why can't we elect a regular person, someone more like me and not a career politician who owes too many people favors. As it goes the last time I can remember a viable non-politician ran for president was Ross Perot. Finally we have a candidate in Herman Cain who has been successful in business , has some common sense, and does not seem to have forgotten where he came from or how he got there. He seems to understand the basics. If you can market a product to the common man on the street and understand what he wants in a product , and satisfy that demand then you have more understanding of the mindset of the general public than the current administration does. Something as simple as too many crusts. Obama on the other hand would have devised a campaign designed to convince you that you actually liked other crusts and convince you too many choices was a good thing. In the absence of convincing you to buy a different crust of your own choice , he would discontinue the most popular crusts and force you to consume ones you did not like. This is the difference between Herman Cain and the field of other candidates. He seems to understand the idea that government of the people and by the people means that the people will decide what it is they like and want. This comes from his experience in business , knowing you cannot force people to buy something they do not like or want. For too long we the people have been forced to accept what we have been given and it has not mattered whether we like it or not. We pay the bill for a product, governance. We pay for the legislation that comes from Washington. For too long we have paid too much and gotten too little for our money. Herman Cain understands this. He understands that no matter how you package it, advertise it, or promote it , if people do not like it they will not buy it. We the people fund and consume the products of our government , we are the ones who will determine whether that meets our expectations or not. Here is the man we have been asking for that understands how to provide what Americans want and need. Government is a business. It would not take a superhuman to turn it around. You cut costs, eliminate waste, increase efficiency, these are the basics which any successful business must tackle to survive in hard times . Herman Cain knows all of this, unlike our present leader who would spend more, hire more people and create more agencies to simply manage the waste and inefficient operations of the departments and agencies that already exist.

I'm hopin' Perry and Romney cancel each other out and Ol' Herman slides on in!

the point is , No one had ever heard of Barak Hussien Sotero Obama outside of Illinois before he ran for president. Half the People in Illinois probably did not know who he was. I had never heard of Herman Cain 6 months ago. Proves he does have a chance. And I would bet he has no Illegal relatives skulking around.

Originally Posted by dsprtt

the point is , No one had ever heard of Barak Hussien Sotero Obama outside of Illinois before he ran for president. Half the People in Illinois probably did not know who he was. I had never heard of Herman Cain 6 months ago. Proves he does have a chance. And I would bet he has no Illegal relatives skulking around.

Actually, he was very popular here from the beginning. One of my old bosses and her husband who are very prominent, wealthy and connected long time partners at a very old established prominent law firm were doing all that they could to get him elected to the senate and then the presidency.

He had a lot of powerful people in Chicago backing him from the start. At the time I wasn't sure why. but he did. I guess we all know why now.

Unfortunately, Cain shoots straight from the hip, and we all know that the liberal media wealthy, powerful and corrupt will do all they can to keep Cain and anyone who does not follow the script buried in red tape.