When I was a kid and we played football on the lawn at Virginia Road School, the right sideline was the sidewalk and the left sideline was made of bushes and shrubbery. Every once in a while there would be some kid that for some reason we didn't particularly like. If they crossed the line, we would bush them. Instead of tackling them on the grass near the sideline, we'd smack them wholly into the thorns and briars off the left sideline.
Herman Cain once had a television ad that brilliantly showed his face in close-up turning into a broad smile. That one should be playing in reverse right about now. He has been bushed.
It's marginally sad. I liked Cain's campaign for its iconic 'smoker ad'. Cain himself was (always was now) not slick, stuck to the issues when he could, and never gave the impression that he was entitled to anyone's attention. He wasn't a zealous missionary and he wasn't overly reliant on bunting and baby kissing. But he was no John B. Anderson.
Cain was slow. He hadn't mastered the ability to have a snappy answer to stupid questions, reroute, redirect and command the conversation. This is something Hillary Clinton has to the fault of not being able to answer a direct question with a direct answer. Cain asked us all to take a leap of faith that he was a *doer* and not a *negotiator*. Uh. Wrong answer Mr. Candidate. Because Cain was slow, he could get caught on an overburdened phrase. He needed to churn out more and therefore dilute the impact of his verbiage. Kind of like Romney in 08, except that Romney kept saying the same damned thing. Sigh. I guess I'm going to have to listen to see if he's gotten any better.
As I said before, Cain never impressed me as the sort of person with the deep desire to be a public servant. And so the degree to which he ginned that up in his campaign can now be laid aside, and he can go back to some measure of anonymity. I would suggest the South of France.
--
There are people commenting that race was a big deal in the Cain campaign, and it's only true in a post-modern sense - there is an economy of wish-fulfillment entertained by a wholly impractical electorate. All I can say is that the liberal regime remains in command of that bullshit narrative, which was nicely revealed in the Economist piece I posted the other day.
The short and sweet nut of that is that for some politically defensible reason, all black Americans in politics are assumed to have a great burden of debt to the inflated champions of the Civil Rights Movement and their legacies starring the likes of Congressman Alcee Hastings, an incumbent from Florida going on 19 years. I mean how can you be a legitimate black American politician if you don't have sponsors in the CBC? If Maxine Waters doesn't like you, how can you call yourself black? Such rhetorical questions are written in stone which has yet to be shattered, while Republicans like Allen West are chipping away. But you see those questions are never asked of Asians. Everybody in America and many people around the world have benefited from the American Civil Rights Movement but only blacks are asked to bow down.
There's a great line in the new Starz show 'Boss'. One day the Hispanic alderman takes one of his boys out golfing. He talks about golf starting off with flamboyant sytles of dress, but then becoming conservative over time. That's the mark of progress and sophistication. Are there any sports where the uniforms don't calm down over time? Ice Dancing answers one of this protoges. Yes, ice dancing is the exception that proves the rule. He then talks about the tradition in American ethnic politics. That everybody starts out flamboyant but sooner or later they wear the uniform. The Jews, the Irish, the Italians and now the Hispanics. What about the blacks? The alderman responds, "The blacks are the exception, the blacks are like ice dancing."
Yes. In everything, the blacks are the exception. We're too big to be anything but everything we are. The first mistake is not to recognize that. There is nothing black about Cain and there is everything black about Cain. It just depends on your political definition of 'black', which by the way makes no difference to me and I would guess probably not to Cain. The loose rule is that any black American bold enough to declare for the Republicans against the orthodox liberal narrative, is less likely to care for those very definitions.
If Cain utters a word about the racial context somewhere down the line, you'll hear it on black radio and elsewhere.
Recent Comments