What do we know about Cain’s background?

In an article that deals only peripherally with the sex “harassment” charges, Dean Stephens writing at American Thinker takes a critical look at Herman Cain’s career. First of all, he was not an entrepreneur, and he did not build Godfather’s Pizza. He was an employee of a large corporation who was rapidly promoted to the top position, a rise that Stephens suggests was fueled by affirmative action (a policy, he points out, that Cain has defended in the past). Stephens writes: “For the last 20 years Herman Cain has been active in politics. Although he has never won public office, he and his supporters cannot realistically claim he is not a professional politician. He is!”

Yet this professional politicians trumpets his ignorance:

He has shown no interest in our history or involvement in the world or in strategic issues. He was so ignorant that he claimed to not know what “neo-conservative” means. His trite dismissal of the need to understand foreign issues is an insult to voters. If you care about America, how can Cain’s foreign policy naiveté not be a red flag?

Stephens criticizes Cain’s supporters for not wanting to know whether the sex “harassment” charges against him are true. But that desire not to know, he indicates, is part of a larger pattern of not wanting to know anything about Cain’s background. “In summary, voters actually know very little about Herman Cain except his personal interpretation of his own resume. This must end. The office of the presidency is not an entry-level position. People who forget that are making a huge mistake.”

In short, conservatives, after spending three years lambasting Obama for his inexperience and for the fact that too little is known about his biography, are now supporting a candidate who is woefully inexperienced and about whose biography they know very little.

- end of initial entry -

Robert B. writes:

You will recall that when you first posted the YouTube video of the 1993 Cain-Clinton dialogue on the Clinton health care proposal, and all of your other posters were claiming it as evidence of his “genius” [LA replies: I don’t remember anyone calling him a genius, just smart], I wrote to you, “Why am I supposed to be impressed with this man?” and you dismissed it—most likely as knee jerk bigotry.

Unlike the rest of your readers, I knew a bit about Burger Chef and Godfather’s Pizza because Pillsbury and they were local companies here. Burger Chef was a small, regional fast food operation and went belly up while Cain was at the helm. The biggest draw, early on, with Godfather’s Pizza was the name and the tie to the movies by that name. The pizza itself was never very good. A great entrepreneur? Hardly. The guys who founded “Green Mill Pizza” (greenmill.com) at the same time as Pillsbury started Godfather’s Pizza, were genuine entrepreneurs—and yes, I knew them.

But, back to the video of Cain-Clinton. Now that you and others on your site know a bit about Cain, I suggest you go back and review that video clip. In it, you will see Mr. Cain repeat the same vague assertion over and over again. There is no genius in it at all. While I can see him being nervous, this man is supposedly a “genius” and a great corporate leader. I put this down to the white man’s need to find a black man that is the equal of a white man in similar circumstances—so we can all feel better about the giant fiscal and social engineering project that Kersey calls “BRA”. As the author Dean Stevens at American Thinker points out, conservatives said the same thing about Colin Powell (and others) when anyone who paid any attention to Gulf War I knew it wasn’t Powell who was the “Genius” behind the war there, it was a white guy underling named Schwarzkopf who had read Rommel’s book on tank maneuvers and studied his battles in the desert campaign. Just as with Collin Powell, DWC (disingenuous white conservatives) are hoping to find the magical, genius black man who isn’t looking for a handout from whitey and will defend traditional white values and thus prove “our” way to be the correct one. This is because these DWCs have bought into the Liberal mantra that white people cannot justify their own existence and culture on their own. As an aside, it is the same mentality that is always happy and approving of a black man is they simply “speak white” and do not use ebonics. It doesn’t seem to matter what else the man does, if he speaks white (Obama?), he must be okay and he might even be a “Genius”.

LA replies:

As you can see from the entry in which I linked and discussed the Clinton-Cain video, there was only a brief discussion about the video, with a comment by Kristor, one other reader, and me,. What was said, by Kristor, was that Cain was “intelligent” and that he could do “arithmetic,” and, by me, that the dialog contained “not a single extraneous word,” and was extraordinary for its logic and cogency by today’s standards. No one called Cain a genius. I do not see a comment by you in that thread. Perhaps I did not post your comment, because it was as biased and unfair to Cain as your current comment. The fact is, Cain spoke intelligently and to the point in that exchange, and challenged Clinton in a way that Clinton was obviously impressed by and could not answer adequately, until Clinton called off the exchange. This was an impressive dialog. It didn’t mean, and no one said, that Cain was a genius. But you, by repeatedly falsely characterizing Kristor and my comments about Cain as calling him a “genius,” and relentlessly shooting down that straw man, give the unfortunate impression that you object to any black man being called intelligent, even one who gave one of the verbally smartest presidents in American history a run for his money.

Robert B. writes:

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you thought of him as a genius, I was mostly referring to the Republicans on the Youtube site as well as some of your readers. When I use “Genius” rather than “genius,” I am referring specifically to whites who call almost any black man a genius who simply speaks moderately well. Whether that be Obama or Sowell, Steele or Powell and now Cain.

LA replies:

Ok, but no one at VFR described him as a genius.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 03, 2011 07:04 AM | Send