This week at Truth-2-Power.com, I've been writing about both Barack Obama and Herman Cain. No, not the sex scandal, but the bigger financial scandal in the Cain campaign that the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel uncovered. At the same time, I took about a week to sit back and really take a long, hard look at Barack Obama's record, and his positions on the issues. He's doing pretty damn well, if you consider both the circumstances he inherited and the unprecedented gale-force political headwinds that he meets daily.
Still, what is interesting is the why of Herman Cain in relationship to President Obama. Why have the Koch Brothers and the Club for Growth backed a man with hundreds of thousands of dollars who is so blatantly lacking the knowledge of social, government and world affairs that even Fox News people are left with their jaws hanging?
Herman Cain is a shill. The anti-Obama. A distraction. A deception. Yes, even though he is ostensibly the Republican flavor of the week. He is not a candidate who was built to succeed. He is a candidate propped up there to diffuse the GOP's long winter with severe racism, and Libertarian enough in his financial views to push the only viable candidate of the Seven Dorks, Mitt Romney, harder to the Right.
In an odd, backhanded way the jack-booted beauty queen that is Ann Coulter probably put the purpose best:
"Our blacks are so much better than their blacks," Coulter told Fox News.[1]
It is easier to diffuse the huge backlash against how far Right and white the Republican party has become by saying you had a legitimate candidate, a brief front-runner, even, in your ranks.
It's not hard to do. As we have seen, results in Republican contests are largely about how much money is spent brainwashing the remaining zombies who make up the active 7% of the 23% of voters who still call themselves registered Republicans.
Mr. Cain's giving actually went up over the week of his sex scandal, catering to that reaction by the Right to that evil Liberal media and its horrible bias, or, more correctly, to the flood of pro-Cain propaganda that flushed from the sewers that are Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's media empire.
Herman Cain, though is not a viable candidate. Probably the reason that Bill Maher was willing to put up a million dollars that Cain will not be the nominee.
On the issues, he is a mess. He frequently contradicts himself, as Factcheck.org finds, on all of the hot-button issues dear to Republican voters.
- He against abortion, except in certain specific cases, like the life of the mother, unless of course he is not. He also is against any exceptions to a ban on abortion, but acknowledges that it is a personal decision that women and their families must make.
- His 9-9-9 plan, devised either by SimCity or an employee of a Wells Fargo branch, has been the subject of frequent contradictions
- He says, now familiarly, that he was unaware of campaign finance irregularities in his campaign, but says that a businessman like himself is a preferable outsider because they know how to run things.
Cain does a lot of "misspeak" from which he has to backpedal off.
- His comment earlier in the week to Judy Woodruff that we had to keep China from getting nuclear weapons, when China has had them since 1964 [2]
- Cain told Wolf Blitzer that there were situations where he would negotiate with terrorists, then said that he wouldn't at one of the debates.[3]
Herman also demonstrates that he is ill informed on a wide range of issues. He had no idea when Fox's Chris Wallace tossed him a softball after his boilerplate condemnation of Barack Obama's Israel policy on the Right of Return, Israel's open door to Jews from around the world. Cain had no idea what it was. [4]
He blamed the poor for being poor, and affirmed the Horatio Alger Myth. [5]
This is the kind of stuff that crucified Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential candidate. It seems to have limited stick on Cain at the moment, even though most of his melt-downs come right on the Republican propaganda outlets.
He still lacks a shred of organization in key primary states. Even if one presumed that Cain could survive the comedy of errors that has been the GOP Primary process, Mr. Obama would cut him to ribbons in the general election.
His flat tax centerpiece is discriminatory against minorities, the poor and the elderly. His hard Right, Libertarian world view other than the issues that he has misunderstood or missed altogether are not in sync with the polling of mainstream independent voters.
So why have the Koch Brothers, the Club for Growth, and the Dead Billionaires all been pouring money down the drain of the Cain campaign?
It is profound, yet subtle propaganda.
On the one hand, Republican operatives can slap down the party's bigotry by trotting out Cain and the fair airing that his views got during the primary as proof that they're not the white old-boys club that they have always been since Reconstruction.
On the other, they are stoking the same inherent racist fears that the McCain campaign brought to a boil in 2008. Tarring Obama with the Cain brush. All of "them" look fine, but when you press, their substance is all wrong. It justifies that white fear that the GOP knows is seething in the vast ocean of Independents who used to be Republicans.
The frightening thing is that racism is still such a powerful force in American life. Even modestly reasonable people can put aside every fact in front of them to vote with it. Enough for many white religious Republicans and Independents to hold their nose and vote for the two-faced flip-flopping Mormon who will likely be their standard bearer against Obama.
Polls bear this out. In my other piece of the week, we gave Obama an A- on his report card, adjusted for the monumental hurricane force headwinds that he faces daily on any issue or policy. The American people are hugely in lock-step with Mr. Obama's thinking, yet his personal polling numbers are twenty points off of his issue-to-issue tracking with the electorate.
That twenty points is race, pure and simple.
Cain Kubuki theater is an elaborate dance that is being staged to diminish Obama at the polls next November. Sadly, with a media as poorly educated and as deep into the pockets of major corporations as we have, it is working really well.
My shiny two.