No one seems happier with Herman Cain’s rise to the top of the Republican presidential field than pun-crazy American headline writers.
“Yes, He Cain” and “Is Cain Able?” have made the rounds. Another favourite, used to convey experts’ reaction to Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan: “Nein, Nein, Nein.”
Indeed, there is so much joking going on about Mr. Cain, including by the candidate himself, that no one is quite sure whether to take him at all seriously.
On paper, the former talk radio host who made a name for himself as the turnaround expert who rescued a flagging national pizza chain, seems credible. And he has a compelling personal story as the self-made son of an Atlanta chauffeur and maid.
But so many politically incorrect pronouncements have come out of Mr. Cain’s mouth on the campaign trail that pundits are not sure whether he is running for president or auditioning for his own show on Fox News, the hard right’s go-to cable news network.
If his improbable candidacy started out as an attempt to drum up publicity for his suddenly best-selling autobiography, however, it is no longer a laughing matter. Polls now place him in a neck-and-neck race for the nomination with Mitt Romney.
Cain it last?
Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry each took a turn as chief rival to the moderate Mr. Romney before GOP voters turned on them. Despite protesting that he is no flavour of the month, Mr. Cain, 65, may be just that.
“His rise indicates a restlessness among [conservative] Republicans who are looking for a candidate they can get excited about,” University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock says. “Bachmann and Perry proved not to have staying power. So, now they’re infatuated with Herman Cain.”
Some critics charge that the Tea Party movement, dominated as it is by aging white men and women, has warmed to Mr. Cain primarily to show off its inclusiveness.
“The Tea Party is embracing him because they love him, not because they don’t want to be seen as racist,” counters Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “Cain has great rhetorical abilities when he’s before a conservative audience.”
Still, there is something about this ABC – or American black conservative, as Mr. Cain refers to himself – that Tea Partiers cannot resist. He validates the view that personal responsibility, not affirmative action or welfare, is the key to racial equality.
“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks,” Mr. Cain said in response to the recent anti-capitalism protests in New York and other U.S. cities. “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”
Although he came of age during the era of lunch-counter sit-ins and earned a math scholarship to the same Atlanta-area black college where Martin Luther King Jr. had studied, Mr. Cain was no civil-rights militant. His mantra was: “I shall overcome.”
Indeed, he did. After returning the Godfather’s Pizza chain to profitability, Mr. Cain led a leveraged buyout of the Pillsbury subsidiary in 1988 and ran the company until 1996. A decade later, he beat the 30 per cent odds given him and survived stage 4 colon cancer.
Politics became a career option for the part-time Baptist minister after he convincingly took on Bill Clinton in a 1994 town-hall meeting, arguing the then-president’s proposed health-care reforms would force Godfather’s to resort to layoffs.
He briefly entered the GOP presidential race in 2000 and ran for the Republican Senate nomination in Georgia in 2004. In that latter contest, he surprised nearly everyone by finishing a strong second, ahead of a well-known sitting congressman.
“Cain’s real strength then, as it is today, was his rhetoric,” Prof. Bullock says.
