"If I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man."

 

 

Herman Cain ended his campaign for the Republican nomination December 3.  The donor money dried up.  A bourgeois politician can weather nearly any storm or fiasco except decline in income.

 

Until the revelations about his personal life and its serial misfortunes, Cain was part of a field of idiosyncratic and at-best marginal figures competing for the Republican nomination.

 

Why was Cain singled out for such rough treatment?  [After all, the skeletons in Newt Gingrich's closet could form their own Rotary Club.]

 

I polled a few comrades for their reading of the issue earlier this month, and want to share their responses.

 

The first wrote:

 

If its white women he's accused of harassing, I can't think of a better way to discredit him to the Republican rank and file of racists.

  

I recall in 2006 they accused a Black democrat running for office in Tennessee of being "lose with women."

  

They ran a TV ad of white playboy models winking and saying "call me!"

  

Nothing discredited the Republicans more.

  

This could be an internal Republican thing.

  

It could also just be classic "skeletons in the closet" politician stuff.

  

Let's be honest, do we really believe the GOP would run a Black candidate against Obama? It would lose them the racist votes they are depending on.

  

It's all fascinating in light of the ideological right-wing drumbeat though.

  

A lot of talking points among Beck folks are things like:

  

Hitler was a leftist.

  

Liberals want to divide us by saying racism exists.

  

Abortion is a plot to murder Black people for eugenics.

  

It helps to have a Black candidate (other than Alan Keyes, LOL), who can reinforce this new discovery that liberalism is an anti-racist, yet racist plot.

 

The second wrote:

 

The question that I think needs to be analyzed in this story is , "Why are the Republicans vetting this candidate, even in the presidential primaries, when this bit of history is virtually certain to be exposed and derail his campaign?"

 

What comes first to mind:

In general contracting, particularly in Ohio, Black contractors, when their bids are considered at all, are often selectively steered to projects that are expected to fail because of the shoddy, incompetent, nefarious, etc history of earlier contractors  (of the "White" persuasion, and who have already sucked up most of the loose cash)  on the project. Responsibility for the failure is then shifted to the new Black contractor (who took the wrong end of the stick for small change).

 

So in this case, perhaps the reasoning is that Cain is a safe choice for a Black candidate in that he provides window dressing but can't possibly be elected. His eventual exposure also serves to reinforce the racist stereotypes that have been the fall-back position of Republican presidential campaigns for several decades, i.e., it also supports (from a racist perspective) a narrative such as, "Obama is not fit to govern because he is Black, and therefore morally degenerate."

 

I hope Marxist Update readers will feel free to add their own thoughts about Cain, and about the current period in the election market.

 

20111206