Cain survives

Robert Stacy McCain has an essay on The American Spectator website titled Campaign Crisis Tests Cain in which he speculates that the debate Wednesday night might have been a turning point for Mr. Cain.

When Wednesday's Republican presidential debate ended, CNBC switched to a post-debate panel featuring Larry Kudlow, who raved that Herman Cain had an "unbelievably good debate tonight" and said Cain's performance "blew me away."

The Atlanta businessman had help from a friendly audience at the debate, held at Michigan's Oakland University. When moderator Maria Bartiromo asked whether sexual harassment allegations against him raised "character issues," the crowd booed the question. And they loudly cheered Cain's answer: "The American people deserve better than someone being tried in the court of public opinion based on unfounded accusations." When Bartiromo's colleague John Harwood tried to get Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to address the accusations against Cain, the crowd again booed the question, and applauded when Romney refused to criticize Cain. People "can make their own assessment," Romney said, and that was the last time the topic was raised all night.

It is far too early to say that Cain has put the accusations behind him, but by the time Wednesday's debate ended, his successful performance had apparently changed the narrative of what seemed a potentially campaign-killing crisis just 48 hours earlier.

[. . .]

The boos and cheers from the audience at Wednesday's debate in Michigan seemed to indicate that Republicans are not ready to abandon Cain, and may be ready to rally behind him. Cain continues to lead the RealClearPolitics national poll average, as he has for the past three weeks. Sometimes the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, and any sense that Cain's campaign is in jeopardy was overshadowed during the debate by the blunder of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who found himself unable to name the third of three federal departments he proposed to eliminate. That prompted one top fundraiser to declare to a reporter that Perry's campaign is "over."

Ten days into the campaign crisis provoked by the accusations against him, Herman Cain is not yet out of the woods, but after Wednesday, he may be able to see sunshine breaking through the trees.

One thing I disagree with is that it is "far too early to say that Cain has put the accusations behind him".  I think that Mr. Cain has successfully moved past all the accusations that have been brought forward to this date.  The primary reason why I do not believe that the current imbroglio will damage Cain's standing before the GOP primary voters - or the national electorate next November, for that matter - is laid out in the afore mentioned Ann Coulter column:

Herman Cain has spent his life living and working all over the country -- Indiana, Georgia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, D.C. -- but never in Chicago. 

So it's curious that all the sexual harassment allegations against Cain emanate from Chicago: home of the Daley machine and Obama consigliere David Axelrod. 

Suspicions had already fallen on Sheila O'Grady, who is close with David Axelrod and went straight from being former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley's chief of staff to president of the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), as being the person who dug up Herman Cain's personnel records from the National Restaurant Association (NRA). 

The Daley-controlled IRA works hand-in-glove with the NRA. And strangely enough, Cain's short, three-year tenure at the NRA is evidently the only period in his decades-long career during which he's alleged to have been a sexual predator. 

After O'Grady's name surfaced in connection with the miraculous appearance of Cain's personnel files from the NRA, she issued a Clintonesque denial of any involvement in producing them -- by vigorously denying that she knew Cain when he was at the NRA. (Duh.) 

And now, after a week of conservative eye-rolling over unspecified, anonymous accusations against Cain, we've suddenly got very specific sexual assault allegations from an all-new accuser out of ... Chicago. 

Herman Cain has never lived in Chicago. But you know who has? David Axelrod! And guess who lived in Axelrod's very building? Right again: Cain's latest accuser, Sharon Bialek. 

Bialek's accusations were certainly specific. But they also demonstrated why anonymous accusations are worthless. 

Within 24 hours of Bialek's press conference, friends and acquaintances of hers stepped forward to say that she's a "gold-digger," that she was constantly in financial trouble -- having filed for personal bankruptcy twice -- and, of course, that she had lived in Axelrod's apartment building at 505 North Lake Shore Drive, where, she admits, she knew the man The New York Times calls Obama's "hired muscle." 

Throw in some federal tax evasion, and she's Obama's next Cabinet pick.  

The reason all this is relevant is that both Axelrod and Daley have a history of smearing political opponents by digging up claims of sexual misconduct against them. 

John Brooks, Chicago's former fire commissioner, filed a lawsuit against Daley six months ago claiming Daley threatened to smear him with sexual harassment accusations if Brooks didn't resign. He resigned -- and the sexual harassment allegations were later found to be completely false. 

Meanwhile, as extensively detailed in my book "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America," the only reason Obama became a U.S. senator -- allowing him to run for president -- is that David Axelrod pulled sealed divorce records out of a hat, first, against Obama's Democratic primary opponent, and then against Obama's Republican opponent. 

One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was way down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader. 

But then The Chicago Tribune -- where Axelrod used to work -- began publishing claims that Hull's second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.
  

From then until Election Day, Hull was embroiled in fighting the allegation that he was a "wife beater." He and his ex-wife eventually agreed to release their sealed divorce records. His first ex-wife, daughters and nanny defended him at a press conference, swearing he was never violent. During a Democratic debate, Hull was forced to explain that his wife kicked him and he had merely kicked her back. 

Hull's substantial lead just a month before the primary collapsed with the nonstop media attention to his divorce records. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote. [Given that this happened in Chicago we also have to consider that the accusations and controversy served to shield the effects of massive voter fraud as well.  No one would think to question the numbers so the Democrat machine was free to stuff the ballot boxes as much as they wanted to - LC]

Luckily for Axelrod, Obama's opponent in the general election had also been divorced. 

The Republican nominee was Jack Ryan, a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard law and business schools, who had left his lucrative partnership at Goldman Sachs to teach at an inner-city school on the South Side of Chicago. 

But in a child custody dispute some years earlier, Ryan's ex-wife, Hollywood sex kitten Jeri Lynn Ryan, had alleged that, while the couple was married, Jack had taken her to swingers clubs in Paris and New York. 

Jack Ryan adamantly denied the allegations. In the interest of protecting their son, he also requested that the records be put permanently under seal. 

Axelrod's courthouse moles obtained the "sealed" records and, in no time, they were in the hands of every political operative in Chicago. Knowing perfectly well what was in the records, Chicago Tribune attorneys flew to California and requested that the court officially "unseal" them -- over the objections of both Jack and Jeri Ryan. 

Your honor, who knows what could be in these records! 

A California judge ordered them unsealed, which allowed newspapers to publish the salacious allegations, and four days later, Ryan dropped out of the race under pressure from idiot Republicans (who should be tracked down and shot). 

With a last-minute replacement of Alan Keyes as Obama's Republican opponent, Obama was able to set an all-time record in an Illinois Senate election, winning with a 43 percent margin.

And that's how Obama became a senator four years after losing a congressional race to Bobby Rush. (In a disastrous turn of events, Rush was not divorced.) 

Axelrod destroyed the only two men who stood between Obama and the Senate with illicitly obtained, lurid allegations from their pasts. 

In 2007, long after Obama was safely ensconced in the U.S. Senate, The New York Times reported: "The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece (on Hull's sealed divorce records) later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had 'worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the story." 

Some had suggested, the Times article continued, that Axelrod had "an even more significant role -- that he leaked the initial story." 

This time, Obama's little helpers have not only thrown a bomb into the Republican primary, but are hoping to destroy the man who deprives the Democrats of their only argument in 2012: If you oppose Obama, you must be a racist. 

I have to disagree with Miss Ann on that last point.  In the fever swamps of liberal/progressive thought supporting Cain is absolute proof positive that one is a racist!  Because Cain is black and doesn't have his snout stuck down deep in the trough of of government entitlement that other black "leaders" feed upon.  Rather Cain had fled the liberal plantation and rejects the patronage of the Democrat party.


He is unwilling to sell out the nation and his fellow African-Americans for a place at the table of the current power structure.  He is unwilling to work for policies that keep black people ignorant and dependent upon the state.


This makes him a mortal enemy (as all conservatives are) to the political left, but because he is black he occupies a place of extraordinary vilification in that by his very existence, he disproves the left's narrative of American life.


Mr. Cain (like Clarence Thomas, another blood enemy of the left) achieved success without relying on the mechanisms of the state and so can serve as an example to other blacks that they do not need to either subsist on welfare, turn to crime or rely upon affirmative action to get and keep jobs for which they are not qualified.  Rather by rejecting the handouts of the left and applying themselves they can be excellent in their own right.  They can earn a place at the top by staying in school and working hard, by practicing self-discipline and believing that success is possible for those who toil to achieve it (in other words doing all the things that get black kids derided for "acting white").


This is to the Democrat party what sunlight is to a vampire.  If even 20% of black Americans voted Republican the Democrats would never win a presidential election and would win damn few congressional contests.


Democrats know this and they are desperate to keep blacks in their place.


It is also why they are so desperate to open America's borders and get amnesty for the millions of Mexicans illegally in this country.  They need a replacement minority that can be controlled in the event that the black population (or even a large minority of it) wises up and realizes that the white liberals they have been voting for are responsible for much of their misery and the black "leaders" they have been trusting have in fact sold them out.

This is the essence of the furor to destroy Herman Cain as it was the driving force behind the attempt to destroy Clarence Thomas.  It is why every black conservative who dares to step forward and declare him or herself is attacked is attacked and smeared.

This is why the Chicago machine bestirred itself to vomit out a small parade of women who were willing to falsely claim that Mr. Cain "harassed" them.  This is why Republicans have been unwilling to play along and boot him out of the race.  We know that they are trying to play us and we ain't going along.