The Basics
As the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, Herman Cain touts himself as the “non-politician” candidate of the 2012 race. He impressed viewers in the first GOP debate [2], but he has struggled recently to remain in the picture.
Cain, 65, is a staunch conservative who promises to use “common sense” business solutions to revive the U.S. economy. He wants to [3] dramatically reduce taxes, cut government spending and cut back on government regulation of business. He also opposes legalized abortions and affirmative action and says he “supports traditional marriage [4].”
Cain is also one of the most colorful Republican candidates. Known to friends as "The Hermanator," he has trademarked the phrase “The Hermanator Experience [5]” and occasionally talks about himself in the third person [6]. (“Let me tell you something about Herman Cain!”) In a detailed piece on Cain’s political rise [7], Slate’s David Weigel describes how the Tea Party has embraced Cain because he’s a political outsider. “That's the oddity of the Cain campaign: He's a man out of time,” Weigel writes. “In the 1990s and 2000s, there was no easy way to transition from The Man Who Invented the Hot Slice into politics. In 2011, the Republican electorate wants to hear from anyone who's not a politician.” The Atlantic reported that Cain attended more than 40 Tea Party rallies [8] last year. But while Cain won the first Tea Party straw poll [9] in February, a recent Gallup poll shows Cain’s Tea Party support has fallen to 6 percent [10].
His background:
Cain first grabbed the national spotlight in 1994, when he was credited with taking down Bill Clinton’s health-care reform plan. During a town hall meeting, Cain publicly challenged Clinton’s estimate [11] of how much the employer mandate, which would have required all employers to provide their workers with health care, would cost businesses. Cain then wrote an open letter with his calculation [12] of the cost of an employer mandate to Godfather’s Pizza.
At the time, Cain was president of the National Restaurant Association and held a seat on the board of directors of the Kansas City Federal Reserve [13] [PDF]. He went on to work as an adviser to the vice-presidential campaign of Jack Kemp in 1996. Kemp described Cain as [7] “a black guy who stands up with the voice of Othello, the looks of a football player, the English of Oxfordian quality and the courage of a lion."
In an interview with the National Review, Cain cited Kemp as a major influence in his political life [14]. In 2004, Cain ran for the GOP nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia, coming in second [15] with 26.2 percent of the vote.
Cain points to his success bringing Godfather’s Pizza back from the verge of bankruptcy as a sign that he’d come to Washington with practical solutions for economic recovery. PolitiFact found that, while Godfather’s wasn’t literally filing for bankruptcy, Cain did help [16] stabilize the company financially “by uniting the franchisees, overhauling the chain's advertising, and getting his team focused on its core mission: pizza.”
There's a basic lesson that Industry (and the public) continue to ignore. A person with private sector management experience is not necessarily better at anything unless he's demonstrated that he/she can turn a failing company around. Mitt has business experience with successful ventures. Herman has this experience with formerly unsuccessful companies. Same goes for Steve Jobs at Apple.
ReplyDeleteIf Steve were still alive, who would you rather run this country, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs? Sit and think on this a while.
A great point, Harvey!
ReplyDeleteObama had 2 years when both the house and the senate were controlled by democrats and he failed miserably. The economy went to hell, unemployment rate shot up and the housing market went bust. Obama has no excuses. He very ignorantly concentrated on his health care bill which has turned into a fiasco.