The only thing Herman Cain has going for him is that Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States.
Unfortunately for Cain, history shows that such a “precedent” doesn’t extend to black Republicans.
In the last one hundred years, only six black Republicans have been elected to national public office. Only five of the 101 black members of Congress elected in the last century were Republicans, and only one black Republican has been elected to the Senate in the last century.
Even on the state level, the first black Republican governor, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback of Louisiana, was also “the last black Republican governor.” Pinchback served a grand total of 35 days while (white) incumbent Gov. Henry Warmoth battled impeachment charges. And though he gained the title of the “first black Republican governor,” he was never actually elected.
This is not a trend that is likely to be broken in the 2012 election, mainly because the American people have a more favorable view of the racist, inarticulate and intellectually vapid Texan, Rick Perry, and the flip-flopping Mormon, Mitt Romney, than they do of Cain.
Arguably, the only reason Cain is in third place at all is that the other six Republican presidential candidates include (in order of their poll ranking): a philandering asshole; a pro-prostitution, anti-everything isolationist Libertarian; a nightmare in fake eyelashes; an advocate of banning blowjobs; another Mormon who ranks below Tim Pawlenty on the excitability index; and Gary Johnson, who is…uh…Who is Gary Johnson?
When Legendary K.O. came out with the song, “George Bush Don’t Like Black People,” following Bush’s botched handling of the Hurricane Katrina recovery, my first thought was: “That may be true, but neither does any other Republican.”
The facts are in the election results, and Cain is delusional if he thinks he has a shot at winning the GOP presidential nomination.
Call it racism if you must, but the numbers just don’t add up. Not only are the vast majority of African American voters Democrats, but the few who are Republicans don’t comprise a sizeable enough voting bloc to have any influence in the primary race. And even the hypothetical and purely idealistic scenario of Cain winning a third of the black vote in the general, which he thinks he can – or could, if he were nominated – is unrealistic considering that less than 13 percent of Americans are black.
When Cain met with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editors, he raised eyebrows and inspired the deputy editor, Daniel Henninger, to write a column titled, “Taking Cain Seriously,” which asked, “Why isn’t a successful business résumé presidential material?” (Sept. 29, 2011).
Before delving into his executive experience and making the case that, compared with President Obama, Cain has an airtight record of turning “a large failing enterprise” into a success, Henninger begins his column with this:
You hear the same thing said about Herman Cain all the time:
Herman Cain has some really interesting ideas, but...
I love Herman Cain, but...
But what?
But he can’t win.
Why not?
Throughout the nearly 900-word column, Henninger fails to provide the honest answer to his own question, which is: he’s a black Republican.
There are other issues with Cain – the fact that his 9-9-9 tax proposal would bankrupt the government; his anti-Muslim stances; his belief that black Americans who vote Democratic are “brainwashed”; his confusion between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; his claim that Planned Parenthood’s early objective was to “kill black babies”; and his belief that China owns a quarter of the U.S. debt – but none of these reasons for disliking Cain has anything to do with the real reason he won’t win the GOP nomination. After all, every candidate has a record of factual gaffes just as controversial as his.
The real reason is that he’s a black Republican, and Republicans don’t historically vote for black candidates.
Cain is such a long shot in the 2012 presidential election that I’m actually ashamed to dedicate these few precious moments of my life acknowledging his candidacy, but it’s time we stop acting like Cain’s campaign issues are anything but race-related.
His candidacy is a joke, and though the mainstream media won’t acknowledge that the combination between race and party affiliation is his biggest fault, everyone knows the truth nonetheless. Republican voters won’t vote for a black man as president. They didn’t in 2008, and they won’t in 2012.
Cain will be lucky if he wins a single primary race. He’ll be luckier still if he never has to acknowledge that, as history shows, Republicans don’t like black people.
[Cross-posted at MuddyPolitics.com and AngryBlackLady.com]