Can’t the Republican Party do better than this?
We’re just two months from the Iowa caucus and despite allegations of sexual harassment from the 1990s that recently surfaced, former business executive Herman Cain is, inexplicably, among the GOP front-runners. But how could anyone actually take his candidacy seriously? Some have questioned whether Cain himself is taking his campaign for president seriously. It’s been suggested that Cain might be running for president in order to sell copies of his new book, or to raise his speaking fees. But whether or not Cain is fooling us by running for president, the polls don’t lie. For the moment at least nobody can argue that he has legitimate popularity among GOP voters.
But this brings us back to our original question: can’t the Republican Party do better than this? Herman Cain has no elected political experience. For many that means that he’s an “outsider,” and that’s a good thing. But it also means that he has no experience working the political process, or campaigning for political office, and this inexperience has clearly shown in recent weeks.
The floodgates of craziness seemed to open when Cain introduced his flashy new tax plan at the beginning of October. The 9-9-9 plan would introduce a flat 9% business tax, a 9% individual income tax, and a 9% sales tax, and while its simplicity might make it marketable, it also might be its downfall. The 9-9-9 plan has been roundly criticized by both liberals (for raising taxes on too many people and providing the rich with a nice tax cut) and conservatives (who believe that the rates would not remain at 9% for long once congress got a hold of them.) But it’s Cain’s disturbing list of recent faux pas that have really raised eyebrows.
In October Cain told CNN’s Piers Morgan that abortion comes down to a “choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as a president. Not some politician. Not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decided, they decide.”
Cain had provided Morgan with what was essentially the pro-choice abortion argument but, of course, he is an avowed pro-lifer. How could that happen?
After being heavily criticized by anti-abortion conservatives Cain has since gone out of his way to convince everyone and anyone that he is pro-life and anti-abortion. On October 30th on CBS’s “Face the Nation” he said that he is “pro-life from conception. Period” and called Planned Parenthood “Planned Genocide.” There would be no more ambiguity about where Cain stood on the abortion issue but why had that ever been allowed to happen? Because he clearly didn’t have a true grasp on the issue.
For a self-proclaimed ultra-conservative to fumble the abortion issue is unforgivable. Perhaps less surprising, but frankly no less unforgivable for any presidential candidate in the post-9/11 world, was his flippant remark about “gotcha questions” related to foreign policy. Mocking Uzbekistan Cain told an interviewer who asked him how he’d handle so-called “gotcha” foreign policy questions designed to trip him up he said “when they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say ‘you know I don’t know, do you?’”
Sure, a presidential candidate doesn’t need to know every head-of-state on earth, we get that, but do they have to wear their ignorance like a badge of honor? Why, at a time in history when legitimate threats against America exist in far-flung places like Yemen or Somalia or, yes, even Uzbekistan, would a legitimate presidential candidate give that kind of answer? Cain, of course, claims that he’s a “joker” and that many of his quips are simply meant to be funny. That’s an easy excuse to make when you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
Cain also recently admitted that he “misspoke” when he said that he’d free the prisoners in Guantanamo in exchange for US soldiers. And he showed remarkable ignorance on another issue of vital importance to the future of the Middle East peace process—the right of return for Palestinians—when he was questioned about it on Fox News.
“Right of return?” he asked interviewer Chris Wallace twice by way of clarification before saying that it was something that “should be negotiated,” an answer that certainly doesn’t jib with the standard Republican platform or his formerly very pro-Israeli stance. In a more recent interview Cain even referred to the “so-called Palestinians,” seemingly questioning the fact that they even exist at all.
Cain also said—later claiming that it was a joke—that an electrified fence should be installed on the US-Mexican border to kill people trying to cross on the spot.
More recently in an interview with PBS, Cain said that China—perhaps the single most important nation that any twenty-first century president would deal with—is “trying to develop nuclear capability,” yet China has, in fact, had nuclear capability since 1964.
It’s easy to say that pointing to such things is an example of elitism at work. But is it really elitist to expect that a top-tier, major-party candidate for the most powerful political office in the world have a basic understanding of vital issues of both domestic and international importance? Is Cain’s “outsider” status—and remember, he used to be a Washington lobbyist—really more important than having at least a slight grasp of the issues he would be expected to handle while in office?
Maybe Cain isn’t actually serious about running for president. That’s one joke that the Republican Party—and the American people in general—will probably hope is true.