A pattern has emerged in the ongoing saga that is the Borat, er Herman Cain campaign. Basically, Pizza Man TM takes an outrageous position, then gets lambasted and reverses course, and then a day later, he doubles down on "teh stewpit" (sic).
It doesn't matter if we're talking about Libya, an electrified border fence with Mexico, abortion, trading hostages with Al Qaeda or anything else. Cain suffers from know nothingism, but in the Republican Presidential Primary that doesn't seem to be a negative as I would him put in the same pool of ignorance as Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry.
Cain is so uncurious that he makes Sarah Palin look like a deep thinker. He doesn't care about the information skill set one needs to be President and he thinks he can learn on the job. He also doesn't believe in what he is saying or he's so schizophrenic that the voices in head are confusing him.
Follow me below the fold for more details.
A few days ago Cain had his Jan Brewer/Rick Perry cringeworthy moment — actually it seemed like an eternity — at the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Watch the train wreck as it slowly unfolds. It's seriously painful.
At first, Cain's meat-headed campaign tried to pass off the blunder as the result of Cain only having four hours sleep. BFD. Welcome to the club. Every day wage slaves, often toiling in two or three jobs (if they are lucky) only get by on four or five hours of sleep a night. Most of them don't have the luxury of sleeping in a comfortable hotel bed. Most of them have to worry about putting food on the table and making sure they have money for rent and that their heat, electricity and telephone are not shut off.
Then again, none of those people are running for President, which is an extremely stressful and difficult job. Hillary Clinton was onto something with her 3 am phone call commercial in 2008. The line of attack failed against Barack Obama because he comes across as cool under pressure and doesn't fluster.
Cain on the other hand is a study in panic. There was the time in the early days of the sexual harassment story when he got testy with reporters and his goon squad started pushing and shoving so Cain wouldn't have to answer any more questions.
“Don’t even go there,” Cain interrupted when a Washington Post reporter began asking a question about the sexual harassment allegations at a press conference following the two-man debate. “Where’s my chief of staff? Please send him the Journalistic Code of Ethics.”
Reporters pressed Cain as he tried to leave the room, asking him why he was avoiding answering questions about the accusations, but aides shouted over reporters, yelling “No gossip.”
“Are you not going to answer any questions ever again, Mr. Cain, this sexual harassment stuff, is that what you’re saying,” one reporter asked.
Then there's his 360 on the electrified fence with Mexico. He makes the statement, and is laughed at. Then he says it's all a joke, but the next day he reverses course again and doubles down.
His advisers say that misstatements occur in any campaign and that Mr. Cain’s willingness to correct himself is proof that he is not a scripted politician.
But at least with one issue — abortion — signs are mounting that Republican primary voters may not be so forgiving. His pattern of revising himself has alarmed some social conservatives, who are disproportionately represented in the early-voting states of Iowa and South Carolina.
Stating and restating his views on abortion in recent days, Mr. Cain has added to conservatives’ confusion on his position.
Reporters are starting to see some similarities between Cain and Willard Romney in that both will say whatever they feel that the audience wants to hear. Of course, that opens them up as opportunists running a political campaign's version of the movie Say Anthing.
The danger for Mr. Cain is that as voters take a closer look, they may find in his flip-flops the signs of someone unsure of his convictions.
“I saw him as not a politician — that really stood out to me,” said Jake Dagel, who volunteered in Mr. Cain’s Iowa office this summer. On Wednesday, Mr. Dagel, a college student, posted on his Facebook page that he was switching his allegiance to Newt Gingrich because of what he saw as Mr. Cain’s waffling on abortion. “He is more of a politician than people say,” Mr. Dagel said.
Another example of Cain's insincerity was his fake apology to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi after the former conservaJerk radio host called her "Princess Nancy."
"I apologize for calling her 'Princess Pelosi,' if that's the biggest story you all have, OK?" Cain told reporters after addressing supporters at a diner in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
When asked why he apologized, the former pizza executive said, "So you all will stop asking me about it, OK?" [...]
The scary thing about these reversals is that Cain perhaps believes they make him a better more colorful candidate.
Another explanation was offered by Pete Spriggs, Mr. Cain’s former boss at WSB radio in Atlanta, who hears in his shoot-from-the-hip statements on the campaign trail the kind of hyperbolic sound bites that Mr. Cain would make as a talk-show host and that the station used in promotional spots.
“You want to say something where half the people chuckle and say ‘Yea,’ and the other half gag,” Mr. Spriggs said.
Gagging. Just like one would gag when they bite into some of Cain's fake Godfather's Pizza, which taste testers proclaim was so bad that it gave cardboard a bad name