No toaster for Herman Cain
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
The great media toaster isn’t broken, exactly, but
it doesn’t work like it once did. By all accounts,
Herman Cain should be toast now, served hot, a bit
scorched around the edges and left unbuttered. But
try as they might, his tormentors have not yet had
him for breakfast.
The tormentors, journalists, lawyers and an
assortment of ladies who appear to have been around
the block a few times, have so far failed to destroy
him and thus his candidacy. They still have to come
up with lower-mileage ladies to make the accusations
stick with the Republican base.
Mr. Cain’s remarkable—and unexpected—resilience has
upset Democrats trying to find hope for change in
their 2012 prospects in a reading of Tuesday’s
off-year elections and referendums. The easily
persuaded are even finding a little. Politico, the
Capitol Hill tabloid that sometimes channels a
Democratic party organ, concludes that “the
Democrats are not dead yet.” But nothing has changed
for President Obama. “For many Democratic candidates
who will be sharing the ticket with Barack Obama in
2012,” quoth Politico, “the president is not going
to be an asset. And in some states, it’s clear he is
going to be a dead weight.”
Gov. John Kasich opposed repeal of the union-reform
law in Ohio and remains popular among Republicans.
These Democrats take comfort in two referendums, one
in Ohio and another in Mississippi. In Ohio, a state
with large and well-financed unions, voters repealed
a reform law intended to curb unions’ abuse of
workers, and in Mississippi voters overwhelmingly
rejected the so-called “Personhood Amendment,” which
would have effectively prohibited all abortions
anywhere in the state. The amendment was supported,
at least tacitly, by nearly every elected official
in the state, Democrat and Republican, black and
white.
However, Gov. John Kasich, who opposed repeal of the
union-reform law in Ohio, remains popular with
Republicans, and in Mississippi, Phil Bryant, the
Republican, was elected governor in a landslide.
Results were similarly mixed on election day across
the nation.
The most telling phenomenon this year is the rise
and improbable survival of Herman Cain, and what it
says about the cheerful goodwill of an oft-maligned
American public often accused by liberals of racism,
bigotry, indifference, nativism and maybe even
mopery. He has done almost everything wrong, as
conventional politics is played. He offered
conflicting details of his recollections of the
allegations against him, and continued to rise in
the public-opinion polls in the face of relentless
mainstream-media coverage, which has taken
everything said against him as gospel and treated
his defense as improbable and even a little wicked.
He blamed his Republican rivals for leaking
misleading accounts of things that happened more
than a decade ago. He blamed hacks of the press, who
deserve it, but such criticism always sounds like
whining. “I am not a creep,” even when true, sounds
too much like “I am not a crook.” The checkered
history and motives of the anonymous accusers were
left unexamined by indifferent editors and lazy
reporters posing as gallants and gentlemen.
Still, he has so far escaped the toaster, even when
his Republican rivals began to think it was safe to
start piling on. Mitt Romney, discreet at first,
hinted that it was time for Mr. Cain to come clean.
Newt Gingrich, ever the professor unable to stifle a
runaway mouth, lectured his “good friend” that he
has to “have an answer [to all the questions] and it
better be accurate because if it’s not accurate it
won’t stand.” You might think that the professor,
with the history of emotional abuse of several
wives, would have avoided the subject of the sins of
others.
The real story here is that racial politics is dead,
if the left will allow it. You might think that the
prospect, unlikely as it still may be, of a black
challenger, nominated by a white conservative party,
against a black incumbent president, would be an
occasion for cheers, or at least applause. Here’s
evidence that the bad old days are swiftly fading
into the past. But Mr. Cain is the wrong kind of
black man. Some Democrats sneer that the Republicans
only found a black man who “knows his place,”
employing an insult from an earlier time and place.
The emergence of Mr. Cain as a credible conservative
candidate undercuts the liberal canard that the
Republican Party is a hopelessly racist party. That
was the sub-text of the Democratic campaign four
years ago and reprising that for 2012 was nearly all
the hope Barack Obama had. Herman Cain’s escape from
the toaster, even if temporary, changed that.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The
Washington Times.