He was first snubbed by Republican voters earlier this year during the primaries. This, his ultimate rejection, came only after revelation after revelation followed accusation after accusation of alleged improprieties, inappropriate, improper and even criminal conduct with women became a weekly event.
At one point, though, he was the actual frontrunner for the Republican Party Presidential nomination. I write, of course, of pizza magnate and quintessential black Republican, Herman Cain. I point to his blackness only because it is so rare during this election cycle to see those two words, “black” and “Republican,” in such close proximity.
Yet he has surfaced once again, apparently after a healthy (or unhealthy) helping of sour grapes. Earlier he appeared with CNN’s Wolf BlitzerWolf Blitzer in the “Situation Room” where he explained to Wolf exactly why failed to win the Republican nomination for the presidency:
“The process is fair, but many of the people that are involved in the process are not fair, and they are not honest. If everyone had competed fairly and honestly, I’d probably be the nominee being nominated this week,” he assured Blitzer.
Apparently anticipating Wolf’s next question, Cain preempted it. “The attack on my character came out, and it was coordinated…it had to be coordinated.”
Although Wolf did not ask, we must assume that Cain was responding to the sexual harassment allegations that came to define, and finally end, Cain's campaign. Wolf managed to recover from his obvious surprise at this monumental display of hubris, and mustered enough composure to ask the pizza man by whom “the attack” was coordinated.
But before Wolf could get the question all the way out of his mouth, Cain was on it: “We can’t tell you by whom because we don’t have..we don’t have proof exactly by whom, but we do know that it was coordinated.” (Notice the rhetorical, generalized, first-person “we.” Don’t you just love individuals who call themselves “we” when trying to convince us that something he or she did as a single, lone, all-by-himself, individual person was really a group effort – especially if that thing is borderline legal or moral?)
Bllitzer, living up to his first name, Wolf, smelled blood: “Can you tell us if it was coordinated by a Republican?”
Cain, however, finally abandoned his rhetorical friends, broke down and answered this one for himself: “Nope. I can’t tell you that, either, because I don’t want to say anything that might jeopardize what we might do in the future in terms of exposing what happened.”
This “conversation” was reported by Ed Schultz on his MSNBC show today, “The Ed Show.” Ed, of course, mocked Mr. Cain and pointed to Cain's blazing hypocrisy. Seems Cain has no problem calling his competitors for the nomination “dishonest” and “unfair.” Yet he plans to party like it’s 1999 (Hurricane Issac permitting) with all of them in Tampa this week.
According to the latest polls, Herman Cain may be the only black person in America voting for the Romney-Ryan presidential ticket. Thus, should Romney win, may we expect the very diplomatic and serious-minded Herman Cain to be appointed as the new Secretary of State? Or, even better, how about the U.S. Supreme Court? Yeah...why not? He does look a lot like "Justice" Clarence Thomas, doesn't he. They'd make a matched set.
REFERENCES:
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/the-ed-show/4 8808178/#48808247
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/201 2/08/27/cain-investigating-source-of-imp ropriety-reports/
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/herman-ca in-miss-campaign-trail/story?id=17090742 #.UDxKx8FlSac
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Afr ican-American_Republicans
