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This thirst for easy solutions has clearly given Cain a terrific boost. They’re what every motivational speaker is peddling beneath the “success strategies” and “leadership principles.” This is also why Mitt Romney’s 59-point, 160-page economic plan has failed to register with anything like the force of 9-9-9. Romney’s mistake was to produce a plan that actually tried to meet the challenge of running the country in a serious way. By now, many Americans have become acculturated to thinking about the world and its challenges as Herman Cain does—some of them by attending the same high-energy motivational seminars where Cain and politicians including Rudy Giuliani, Steve Forbes, and George W. Bush regularly appear.
This same culture is just as obviously the source of Cain’s deficiencies as a possible President. Take his foreign policy. He has declined to state a position on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan because he has not yet been briefed by military leaders. Instead, he says he’ll apply his principles to producing a policy that is “bold and clear” once he is elected. He has invoked John Bolton and Henry Kissinger as masters of foreign policy whom he admires, although the two men view America’s role in the world very differently. What Cain really offers is a Zig Ziglar foreign policy: Optimistic, resolute, and devoid of substance.
He brings this same combination of self-confidence and willful naiveté even to his 9-9-9 plan, which must first pass Congress before it can be signed into law. Congress’s stubborn refusal to pass most of Barack Obama’s agenda has been the abiding frustration of the President’s first term. To Cain’s way of thinking this does not present a political problem, but a personal challenge to be overcome through sheer force of will. “They will pass it,” he insisted, when asked what would happen were Congress to keep up its obstructionism. “Let me tell you real quickly why. No. 1, I’m gonna be at the top of the ticket. Secondly, I’m gonna get the Republicans together and get them on board rather than shoving it down anybody’s throat. Then the American people are going to be demanding it because they understand it. That’s where inspirational speaking comes in, thank you. That’s what’s gonna be different.”
The difficulty for Cain and his growing legion of supporters is that no matter how colorfully he frames his books and speeches with superfrogs and catchy numbers, the power of positive thinking doesn’t get you very far in politics these days. Just ask the many disillusioned supporters of the guy currently occupying the Oval Office. Cain may have discovered his own limits in the Las Vegas debate. He could try to recast himself as a serious candidate—assemble some respectable advisers, develop weighty policies and equip himself better to defend those he has already laid out, quit the ad-libbing and joking around. But that would mean sacrificing what his supporters find so appealing: the Hermanator Experience.
Cain shows no sign of doing any such thing. To the contrary, he has finally achieved the celebrity he seems to have been seeking all along, and it’s hard to imagine him giving this up willingly. He has inspired frustrated conservatives unwilling to reconcile themselves to Mitt Romney, and while this may not bring him the nomination, he stands to reap many handsome rewards. “Outspoken personalities like Cain are tailor-made for the media age,” says Jonathan Klein, president of the digital strategy company @Media, and the former head of CNN. “If he’s able to perform, books, radio, television, Twitter, and Facebook, even commerce—Glenn Beck sells gold—all of that will be wide-open to him. It’s almost a can’t-lose scenario. He’s already sold pizza. So why not everything else?” The thought must have occurred to Cain that there are much worse fates for a failed Presidential candidate than popular multimedia pitchman and conservative icon. In fact, that may have been the idea all along.
Green is senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek in Washington.
