01.01.70

It is enigmatical amid the most recent clatter, but let’s pretend that Herman Cain was fair an ordinary millionaire, selling pizza, gifted with a radioman’s bent for gab, playing every angle to get attention and sell books. Let’s make believe that he was, in fact, Herman Cain before Rick Perry opened his lips and his brains fell out. No one anticipated that, maybe least of all Cain, whose campaign exceedingly was a book tour. While Perry courted Iowa and New Hampshire, while Rick Santorum—who’d been sharing the take down rungs in the polls with Cain— was on his way to visiting every one of Iowa’s counties, Cain visited a Costco in Virginia, signed books and met football fans in Tennessee and Alabama, sold more books in Texas and had nineteen disclose days on his October schedule.

Bookseller Cain had a couple of sexy harassment settlements in his past, but those were a businessman’s irritant, akin to a fair for toxic waste or any other pesky outgrowth of the regulatory regime that his celebration has sworn to dismantle. Why should he worry? The payouts were relatively small. He had contractual stipulations of quietude and, more important, was welcome in a brotherhood that included Bill O’Reilly. The loofah lothario had panted into a Fox maker’s telephone, disclosing his abrasive fantasies to her secret spool recorder, and then paid handsomely to ditch a harassment suit, but there he was, bullish as ever, ratings definite, presidents honoring him with their time.

Source: The Nation.