I was certainly no Herman Cain supporter in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, but I have to admit one thing. Somebody sure wanted this guy out of the race, and badly. Last Saturday Cain announced that he was indefinitely suspending his campaign. In late October, he’d been rising sharply in the polls. The Oct. 24 edition of Newsweek magazine even had a cover photo of him giving quite the ham-handed thumbs up atop the headline: “The Unlikely Rise of the Anti-Obama: Yes We Cain!”
Then came the sexual harassment allegations. Sharon Bialek claimed that Cain sexually assaulted her in the late 1990s, but her credibility was strained when she called it “sexual harassment.” (I’d have found her a bit more believable if she didn’t have an annoying smirk on her face every time I saw her on TV.)
A woman named Karen Kraushaar also made sexual harassment claims against Cain. She gave no details and, to her credit, managed to keep a smirk off her face.
Then came Ginger White’s allegation that she was Cain’s mistress and had a 13-year affair with the man. Cain eventually admitted that he provided “financial support” (wink, wink) to White for years, but tried to justify it by saying the he has provided financial support to plenty of people over the years.
Sure you have, Herman. And I’m betting all those “people” have two X chromosomes and names like Ginger and Candy and Diamond and Precious.
So – still proclaiming his innocence and hinting that he was the victim of dirty political pool – Cain bowed out. I’m not sure about the innocence claim, but was Cain the victim of dirty political pool?
I’ve already theorized that it was some Republican in the race that was behind the sexual harassment and affair allegations. My theory went something like this:
Democrats couldn’t be behind Cain’s woes, because it would have been to their advantage to have Cain be the Republican nominee. An Obama vs. Cain 2012 presidential race would have insured Obama’s re-election.
Americans, I reasoned, would never vote for Cain over Obama. True, in 2008 Obama didn’t bring much more than Cain did to the table when it came to qualifications for president, but I’m betting he knew the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and that China had been a nuclear power since 1964.
So a Cain nomination would have been to Obama’s advantage, but. …
Cain got heavy support from members of the Tea Party movement. And what has been the Democrats’ mantra about the Tea Party movement almost since it started?
That members of that movement, and the movement itself, are racist.
Say what you want about Obama, but the guy isn’t a race baiter. His party, on the other hand, is a race-baiting party. (When is Obama going to recognize that he’s in the wrong political party?)
If Democrats plan to race bait in the 2012 presidential race — and they do, and they will, because, when it comes to race baiting, the poor dears simply can’t help themselves — it wouldn’t look good to have a black Republican candidate backed by members of the Tea Party movement. Such might tend to weaken the effect of the race baiting.
So there you have the reason why Democrats might have wanted to torpedo Cain’s campaign: get the black Republican candidate backed by members of the Tea Party movement out of the race, then, next year, once again trumpet how the white Republican candidate is backed by the racist Tea Party movement.
Of course, I can’t prove that; but I won’t dismiss it either.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
