For months, even before sexual harassment allegations emerged against him, Herman Cain’s presidential campaign had already been dominated by a series of blunders suggesting an embarrassing lack of knowledge on important issues of the day. His interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel leads to only one conclusion: Cain’s presidential candidacy is a joke. He isn’t making a serious attempt to run for president and shouldn’t be treated as a serious candidate.
In the section of the video from the Monday interview that Joel Gehrke already linked to, Cain struggled to answer a question on collective bargaining, and ended up taking a view widely at odds with conservatives — that he supports collective bargaining power for public sector unions, not only at the state level, but at the federal level. That would put his position to the left of the policy that exists even during the Obama administration, where currently federal employees do not have collective bargaining rights over wages and benefits. In the video, he incorrectly states that federal employees already have that power.
But honestly, his collective bargaining answer is brilliant compared with his response to a simple question about whether he agreed with President Obama on Libya. Cain completely bumbled his way through his answer, with silences and starts and stops, looking to the questioner for affirmation that he was correct about Obama’s position, and eventually drifting off into generalities about why he can’t say what foreign policies he supports because he doesn’t have enough intelligence information in front of him. From his answer, it wasn’t clear he understood that the U.S. had even been involved in military action there. Watch the jaw-dropping video for yourself.
It isn’t uncommon for candidates to have gaps in knowledge of some issues as they gear up running for president, something that’s especially true on foreign policy. But those who are serious about their campaign dedicate time to learning the issues and become more knowledgeable as the race goes on. Yet in Cain’s case, we’ve had a string of controversies that involve him making basic errors — not knowing what the “right of return” was in regard to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, not knowing how to articulate the pro-life position on abortion, not knowing that China already has nuclear weapons, not knowing how Medicare financing works, and countless other examples.
His bumbling responses to the Journal-Sentinel are particularly troubling, because it’s not like they are questions that should have caught him off guard. Collective bargaining was the political issue in Wisconsin this year, so of course he was going to get a question on it. And Republicans just had a foreign policy debate on Saturday. As an aside, Mark Hemingway raises an good point on Twitter: “Why is Cain talking to a Wisconsin editorial board anyway? Shouldn’t he be in Iowa?”
To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that Cain is a stupid man. He was clearly a talented businessman, for instance. But there are a lot of intelligent business people who don’t follow domestic and international politics that closely. And that’s totally fine for most people. But it’s inexcusable for somebody running for president.
It’s unclear whether Cain’s candidacy is just part of his book tour, part of an effort to land a Fox show, or some sort of mere vanity project. But whatever it is, it is not a serious presidential campaign. Cain hasn’t earned the right to be taken seriously, because he hasn’t approached the task of being a presidential candidate with seriousness.
