I doubt if the Herman Cain story is going anywhere. It’s a story without a face, or even a name, and no one outside the media is going to push it.
So my guess is that the Politico story of long-ago allegations of sexual harassment against Cain will turn out to be no more than a blip. Those inclined to vote for Cain, as the latest anti-Romney candidate, are unlikely to see the world differently because of a story from the liberal media. It’s even possible, as some are suggesting, that the story will help to reinforce the idea of him as the antiestablishment candidate — and the only one who sings at campaign events.
Don’t be surprised if in the Cain world, as Cain himself said Monday, it’s just a matter of letting Herman being Herman, whatever that means.
When Cain inevitably does fall from his spot near the front of the Republican field — and I’m assuming he will, even if he now leads Romney in Iowa and Perry in Texas — it will be with the belated recognition that he’s not actually qualified for the job. And 9-9-9 will be a footnote, or maybe, if we do the math, three footnotes.
That’s why the real story here is not what Cain may or may not have done back in the ’90s. And it’s not how Cain’s campaign has bungled the story today. I mean, when your chief adviser spends his time Bogarting your campaign, you expect things to go up in smoke.
The real story here, I think, is the emergence of the race card — and how it gets played in the year 2011.
Everything really is different. The people most likely to yell racism these days are, incredibly, those who most loudly complained, back in the day, when anyone else yelled racism.
Usually, the accusation is to call a minority figure a racist for noting that he/she is, well, a minority figure. And so you have Glenn Beck calling Barack Obama a racist. And you have Tom Tancredo calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist. This is the anyone-whoever-mentions-race-must-be-a-racist school of racism.
It’s so old now that it’s almost become old school. It’s usually accompanied by quoting Martin Luther King about the quality of your character vs. color of your skin, as if that’s the only thing he ever said.
But this is different. The idea that mentioning race is racism is not really racism at all. It’s surely not Jim Crow-style racism. No one has to go to the back of the bus. It’s politics. And it means that talking about, say, affirmative action suggests you can’t let go of the racist past.
But this latest card-playing is different. It’s uglier. It’s the accusation that someone is going after a black man because he’s a black man. Or as Rush Limbaugh put it and Laura Ingraham nearly put it and Ann Coulter did put it and Erick Erickson sort of put it, this is about the liberal media establishment seeing “blacks … getting too uppity.”
That’s what Limbaugh said. Coulter called it a “high tech lynching.” Erickson called it a “sincere effort to destroy the black guy running to be the GOP’s Presidential nominee.”
The logic doesn’t work, of course. Democrats love to see Herman Cain in the race, making things tough for Mitt Romney, who is seen as the greatest threat to Barack Obama. This is not much different than when we heard about liberals being afraid of Palin because she’s a “strong, conservative woman.” The logic didn’t hold then either.
For some on the conservative end, this feels like a reprise of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill story. Except that it’s not. This is not like Hill coming forward at a hearing. These were women who apparently came forward years ago when no one possibly considered Cain to be a presidential candidate. And, in any case, no one is suggesting the women came forward themselves. The best guess for the source is oppo research from one of the competing Republican campaigns.
But in our clearly not post-racial America, Cain told this to the Washington Examiner last May:
“They’re going to come after me more viciously than they would a white candidate. You’re right. Clarence Thomas. And so, to use Clarence Thomas as an example, I’m ready for the same high-tech lynching that he went through — for the good of this country. I’m ready for the same high-tech lynching.”
Of course, you might want to tell that to Bill Clinton when all the accusations came forth against him. Or maybe he really was the first black president.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
