Cain Was Not Able

"But Cain answered the Lord, "My punishment is too great to bear!"

           The biblical Cain after learning God’s punishment for 

killing his brother Abel

"The pundits would like me to drop out, shut up and go away."

                                                                          Herman Cain

It was just two short months ago that an unlikely candidate rose to be the front runner in the Republican presidential race.  In the last quarter he had raised a paltry 2.5 million dollars in campaign funds, his organization could best be described as ragtag and he had an uncanny penchant for stepping in a steaming pile when presented with basic policy questions.

Herman Cain’s presidential run has now ground to an ignominious halt.  And while I thought he was at best a caricature of a presidential candidate I can’t say that I’m happy about the circumstances of his exit.   He hit the wall in the presidential marathon not because he wasn’t presidential material but because of allegations that he had a long running extramarital affair and had tried to kindle a few other out of wedlock fires over the years. 

Make no mistake, I am not a Cain supporter.  He should have disappeared back to pizza nation a long time ago.  But his exit should not have been for allegations but for the considerable evidence of his lack of qualifications to be president.  And it’s this evidence that should have been damning.   

                There was Cain’s stance on gays.  Cain declared that homosexuality is a matter of personal choice.  He also stated that he supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; a statement that came a mere week after he called marriage a states' rights issue and suggested that he did not back an amendment.

                His very apparent disdain for the first amendment. Some time back Mr. Cain declared that communities should have the right to ban mosques.  Not only does that run smack into the constitution but by his horribly twisted logic (and I use that term loosely) Islam is not just a religion but a set of laws and by allowing mosques and by extension Islam we run the danger of a religion insinuating its laws into our government.  Mr. Cain seemed to have forgotten that insinuating religion into government has been the Republican modus operendi for years, ever since it decided to bow in supplication to the religious right. I’ll buy his reasoning when I see him call for the banning of Christianity the next time some fundamentalist group pushes for prayer in public schools.

               His apparent bigotry.  Isn’t it terribly ironic that a black man in America seems to harbor such unabashed prejudice as Herman Cain?  In relating a story about his colon cancer surgery, Cain told a crowd that before the procedure he found out that the surgeon was named Abdalla.  I can hardly do justice to Mr. Cain’s anecdote so I’ll defer to his very own words.

“That (Abdalla) sounds foreign.  Not that I had anything against foreign doctors, but it sounded too foreign.  My mind immediately started thinking, ‘wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine,’”

            Upon being assured that Dr. Abdalla is Christian Cain reportedly said, “Hallelujah.  Thank God.”

            Reading the story brought me back to an episode of “All in the Family,” in which Archie Bunker blanched at the prospect of getting a transfusion from a black female doctor; afraid to mix his white hemoglobins with her black “shemoglobins.”  Archie seemed abashed by his racism as opposed to Cain who seemed to revel in telling the story.

           His Palinesque lack of any conception of foreign affairs and what the presidency entails.  Most recently Cain gave a blithering, hamana-hamana-hamana response to the question of whether or not he supported Obama’s Libya policy.  Cain always gave the impression that he didn’t understand the magnitude of the job, always falling woefully short in describing what he could bring to the table.  He always came off as the mailroom clerk aspiring to CEO. 

All of these are the reasons that Herman Cain should have ridden long ago into the political sunset.  Instead, despite all of his gaffes and apparent dearth of knowledge he rose to be, for a short time, the Republican front runner until his alleged peccadillos came out of the woodwork, ending his presidential run.

Do I feel sorry for Herman Cain?  Not one whit.  If the stories are true then he’s guilty of the kind of  hubris that marked a recent former president and governor of Texas.  Did the names Tiger Woods, John Edwards and Mark Souder never ring a bell? 

If the stories are false then Cain is indeed a victim of, at best, some vindictive women or at worst political dirty tricks.  My sense is that dirty tricks were not at play here.  Despite his recent front runner status it’s doubtful that the other candidates saw Cain as a viable long term threat.  You don’t risk opening up your bag of dirty tricks to derail a campaign that’s on a track to nowhere.  We may never know the truth except for one truth and that is that someone is not telling the truth.   

But, you say, if he had the affair and denied it then he lied.  Well of course he lied.  Who doesn’t lie about an affair?  You and your partner can be caught dead to rights, nekkid and rolling in the hay and the first thing you do is come up with a cockamamie excuse; “Uh, I lost a contact and she was helping me look for it.” “You don’t wear contacts.”

I don’t really care who the president does nasty things with as long as it’s not children or animals and I don’t care if he lies about it.  I would prefer that he lie about who he’s coupling with than, for instance, telling a lot of stretchers to get Congress and the nation behind an illegal war that he’s jonesing to wage.  If he’s going to be doing some naughty undercover things I’d rather it be under the bed covers than in the covert sense of, oh, illegally wiretapping his fellow citizens.  I’m looking for a good president not a priest (although let’s face it priests seem to be challenged when it comes to avoiding sexual misconduct).  If he, or she, can keep us out of questionable wars, get the economy righted, find a way to work with a fractious Congress and generally gain control of a drifting ship of state then it doesn’t matter to me who the president sleeps with (although to be precise is sleeping really the issue?).

There’s something of a naiveté and hypocrisy at work when it comes to all of the righteous hoo-haw over the sexual misadventures of politicians.  Is there some illusion that politicians don’t lie?  Ever see a campaign ad which the candidate rubber stamps (“…and I approved this message.”)?  Ever see a poll that overwhelmingly damns politicians as unabashed lying crooks?  It’s generally accepted that politicians are a bunch of unrepentant Pinocchios yet when they deny their naughty misdeeds; “Oh my God! He lied! We can’t have a lying politician.”

So Herman Cain is gone.  In the end Cain was not able. Not able to get out from under the stories of sexual misconduct and, he determined, not able to continue his campaign.  What those who supported him should long ago have realized is that Cain would never be able to handle the world’s most powerful, and difficult, of jobs.