The problem with Cain’s changing stories—but is it a problem?

It would be hard to disagree with this, by Maureen Dowd:

If your appeal lies in being refreshingly plain-spoken, you can’t turn into a verbal corn maze.

However, I think it would also be hard to disagree with this, by me:

If you are offering yourself as a candidate for president of the United States, you can’t be stone-cold ignorant of basic domestic and foreign issues.

Yet Cain is so ignorant, and it hasn’t hurt him with his adoring Republican base. Therefore, it is reasonable to guess that his turning himself into a verbal corn maze will also not hurt him with his adoring Republican base.

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Jim C. writes:

Cain’s problem is that his mediocre intellect is being revealed in all sorts of ways: his ignorance of China’s nuclear capability, his lame handling of the harassment controversy, and most of all by his inability to explain his 9-9-9 plan.

If Cain is the nominee, Obama will win. Count on it.

Alexis Zarkov writes:

Maureen Dowd, author of the book, Are Men Necessary? provides us with a hit piece on Herman Cain. While much of what she writes (with the possible exception of the “unsavory pattern with young women”) about Cain is accurate, I think she fails to discern the core problem with Cain: the Dunning-Kruger Effect. From Wikipedia we get this:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.

As I have said before, Cain is an intelligent man, but he evidently suffers from an over confidence that leads him to think that he can “wing it” in an arena where he has little knowledge or ability. That’s why we got those bogus factual assertions about China’s nuclear weapons capabilities. He can’t see his own limitations. Given his lack of knowledge, he should have answered the China question with philosophical banalities like other politicians. I know he wants to come across as a straight-talking, refreshing type, but he’s not a polymath, and he can’t get wing it with a hostile press. With Obama we have the Dunning-Kruger Effect on steroids, and our fawning press let him get away with it. One long and probing interview, where he couldn’t run out the clock, would have left him in shambles. Now I have to ask, are black men particularly prone to the Dunning-Kruger Effect? Especially in our affirmative action world?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 02, 2011 11:53 AM | Send