Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Gotta Cain 'em all! (click to view)
Date: December 6, 2011
So the Cain Train came to a screeching stop this weekend, as former one-time GOP presidential front-runner Herman Cain announced he would be permanently "suspending" his primary campaign. (There has been some confusion as to why he declared it a "suspension" rather than a more definitive "end." From what I understand, it has mostly to do with taxes. Supporters can keep making deductible donations to help pay off his campaign debt so long as the campaign itself remains in some state of zombified half-life.)
The move was hardly unexpected. Over the last month Cain has been endlessly hounded by campaign-stalling allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from multiple documented cases of sexual harassment in his former workplace, to, most recently, a highly credible and lurid claim
of a 13-year romantic affair. In justifying his resignation, Cain claimed all this sex talk was inflicting a "tremendous, painful price on my family" that only abandoning his presidential ambitions would salve. He also made his standard hand-wave over the allegations themselves, declaring them to be "false and unproven," end of story. The rarely-seen Mrs. Cain looked timid and tired standing behind him.
It was, in all, an enormously predictable and cliched photo-op, save one notable quirk that much delighted the press. For some reason, Cain made the bizarre decision to choose, in his words, "the Pokemon Movie" as the source of his final inspirational parting quote.
"Life can be a challenge. Life can seem impossible. It's never easy when there's so much on the line. But you and I can make a difference. There's a mission just for you and me,"
he said, quoting the lyrics from a particularly
schmaltzy pop song featured in the 1998 under-12 blockbuster.
I suppose this now makes Cain the most video-gamey presidential candidate of all time, considering some geeks had previously alleged that his 9-9-9 taxation plan was
ripped off from Sim City.
The departure of Herman Cain now makes it increasingly likely that Newt Gingrich will score a number of upset primary victories this winter, possibly even prying the nomination itself from Mitt Romney's cold, robotic grip. Though he's yet to formally endorse any of his former competitors, the odds that Cain will back anyone other than Gingrich seem incredibly remote, considering that Cain had previously described Gingrich as his preferred choice for running mate, and that both he and Newt have largely defined their candidacies through the shared ideological principle of not-Romneyism. Though this fact has been largely lost through much of the breathless media coverage of the various flavor-of-the-month candidates, if you check out the
USA Today's very cool interactive poll tracker, you can see that Newt began as the main anti-Romney candidate, and the entire Cain-Perry-Bachman triumvirate was, in practice, just a split of the Gingrich vote. With Cain gone, the numbers are now free to begin correcting themselves.
All of this is of course quite ironic on some level, considering that Cain's departure — on account of philandering — will serve to help the political career of one of America's most famously promiscuous politicians. In case you haven't already pieced it together from the late night talk shows, Gingrich cheated on both of his first two wives, with wife number three being the mistress he used to cheat on the second. So the family values candidate he ain't.
More than anything else, the conclusion of the Cain candidacy hopefully signals the beginning of the end of the silly season of the GOP primary. Though I have a lot of serious reservations about Mr. Gingrich (which you can read in my
November 24 post), he is unquestionably a much saner and more qualified man than most of the other not-Romney
cause celebres of previous months, and a Mitt-Newt matchup has the potential to revive some shred of dignity to the Republican brand in these final pre-Iowa days.
At least until the
Donald Trump debate, that is.
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