I really hate to admit it, but Herman Cain is done. Just like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry before him, he has risen to the top of the pack and is now declining to the bottom. I do not see anyway for him to repair his campaign now. The last month has been very rough for him.
Starting with the smear campaign run against him, where former sexual harassment claims were brought up, Cain’s camp went into overdrive to defend against the onslaught of attacks against him. The problem is they did an awful job defending him against the claims. Shortly after Sharon Bialek came forward claiming Cain sexually assaulted her, a story was run at CBS Atlanta which put the speeches on Cain and Bialek through a voice lie detection software package that cops across the country use to determine if someone is lying or telling the truth.
The problem is the Cain camp didn’t push that story to the media. It got lost in the fray and barely anyone knew about it. That is strike one.
Strike two was a series of gaffs that has recently plagued Cain. The first was over a question about Libya in which Cain did not seem to understand what had happened in Libya. The question was straightforward, and anyone paying attention to the news in the last several months should have been able to answer the question. Instead Cain looked painfully stumped. A smaller gaff came a few days later when he was campaigning in Miami. There he was stumped when asked a specific question about the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy that deals with Cuban immigration. If he were campaigning in North Dakota and was asked that question I would understand if he was stumped, but when you are in Miami, you have to be prepared for Cuban specific questions to be brought up. His lack of preparedness made him look quite ignorant about the issues most important to the people in the region he was visiting. It also did not help that he asked, “How do you say ‘delicious’ in Cuban?”
Strike three came when Cain blew off an interview with the Union Leader in New Hampshire. After the last few strikes against Cain, his ‘damage control’ strategy was to avoid sit down interviews being taped. That backfired. The story about him pulling out of the interview with the most important conservative newspaper in the first of the nation primary state of New Hampshire took off.
Erick Erickson of redstate.com wrote an open letter to Herman Cain well before strikes two and three. He said in it that Cain must fire his staff and start over if he wanted to become President of the United States. Unfortunately Cain either didn’t read his letter, or ignored it. Erickson was right. His staff failed him. Because of this Cain is now finished.
