DES MOINES, IOWA — Republican presidential contender Herman Cain, hoping for a strong finish in the Iowa caucuses, is hoping to follow the lead of another candidate who came from nowhere to win the caucuses and, eventually, the White House: Barack Obama.
Like President Obama in 2007 and 2008, Cain is presenting himself as the anti-Washington, anti-establishment candidate who is such a long shot to win the Republican nomination that even his most egregious public flubs — whether it’s his threat to electrify a fence on the border or his flip-flops on abortion — are insufficient to rattle his momentum.
And like Obama, Cain, who is the lone black in the race much as Obama was in 2008, adheres to a social-media-driven strategy that will “rewrite the rules” for campaigns of the future, says Steve Grubbs, Cain’s Iowa campaign chairman.
Now with less than 10 weeks before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses the Cain campaign is reflecting on how Obama captured the Hawkeye State in 2008.
“If you think about Obama in 2008, Iowa made him president,” Grubbs told The Washington Examiner.
In 2008, candidate Obama, a little-known one-term senator from Illinois, catapulted into the national spotlight after winning the Iowa Democratic caucuses with 38 percent of vote, 9 percentage points ahead of rival candidates John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. As Clinton surged in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Iowa kept Obama’s momentum alive, Grubbs noted.
“What you get out of Iowa is the media coverage and the recognition that you are a real player in the campaign,” Grubbs said, acknowledging that Cain badly needs that bump. Until his recent surge in national polls, Cain’s campaign has largely been perceived as a glorified book tour by a businessman with no political experience.
Political strategists attribute Obama’s Iowa victory to his efficiency in mobilizing unlikely caucus-goers — albeit on a freezing Midwest January night — to participate in the state’s unconventional nominating process, which relies on raised hands and head counts rather than ballots or electronic voting machines. Roughly 239,000 Iowans voted in the 2008 caucuses compared to the 125,000 in 2004.
“What Obama did well, was reaching a whole new audience in Iowa,” said Bob Haus, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s top Iowa adviser.
“There’s never going to be another Obama,” Haus said over breakfast one recent morning in West Des Moines. “Obama in 2008 was an empty vessel into which everybody projected their hopes and dreams and desires.”
Cain is starting to look like that vessel for 2012, according to interviews with a variety of Iowa political strategists.
“Herman Cain is doing so well because he is anti-Washington, he’s a likeable guy, and he can give one hell of a speech,” said David Kochel, a top Iowa adviser to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. “There is a bloc of Tea Party voters moving around that can’t quite seem to get comfortable with anyone else, and he might not give them anything to run away from.”
But Grubbs warned against underestimating the power of the “Cain train.”
“I have never seen the dramatic groundswell of support as I’ve seen for Cain here in Iowa,” Grubbs said.
“The mechanics of this campaign are phones, social networking, mail and email — but that doesn’t get someone out of their home on a 0-degree Iowa night,” he said. “The advantage for Cain is he is so passionate and he is even more unorthodox than Obama was [in 2008].”
