Their eventual Cain Gang rebrand was also clumsy. A since-deleted Aug. It was as if Cain, still somewhere on the campaign trail, had been caught in a bad gaffe. The virus has reached the highest level of government and Republican circles, infecting the president himself earlier this month.
Lost in all the meta-commentary was the story of Cain himself. To rewind just a few years to the peak of his fame on the right is to be reminded that he played a key role in priming the Republican base for a Trump-like leader.
Along with Sarah Palin and Ron Paul, Cain, in both his compelling successes and his failings, helped create the stage for conservatism in — a populist and media-centered politics, slogan-friendly and written off as a joke by the people who were supposed to be in charge. Early on in the pandemic, according to Melanie, he convened a meeting with his staff to set down protocols for handwashing, social distancing, and wearing masks.
He also got in the habit of opening episodes of his daily video show by reminding viewers to take the virus seriously and follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He encouraged wearing masks and keeping a distance of 6 feet around strangers, as he said he did. He was a good guy. Every time, Cain and the other kids would scramble into the wagon, climbing atop the pile of potatoes. And every time, their grandfather would avoid the smooth center of the road, driving instead on the rough dirt, where ruts and bumps would jostle the kids and send the potatoes bouncing beneath them.
One day, Cain would tell the crowd, he finally asked why his grandpa always drove on the rough part of the road. Cain was new to this, a first-time candidate in Georgia who had made the jump from the restaurant world to a three-way Republican primary for the Senate in , but he had confidence and a natural way with people.
Matt Wylie, the campaign manager for the race, said Cain learned quickly as a first-time candidate and particularly loved retail politics; he was eager to get out and shake hands.
We would have crowds of people wanting to talk to him. He enjoyed playing with people's expectations, aides said. He launched a political action committee called the Hermanator PAC, and began speaking at events for conservative candidates running that cycle, including now-senator Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican.
Cain on stage on stage during the Republican presidential debate in Greenville, South Carolina, on May 4, Cain made his debut at the first Republican debate of the primary, appearing in Greenville, South Carolina on May 5, , alongside two former governors, a former US senator, and a member of Congress. Backstage before the debate started, he turned to his top aide. The candidate appeared often in non-primary states, and employed only a handful of people in Iowa; three months before voting began, he spent much of October away from the campaign trail to promote his book This Is Herman Cain!
Cain did plenty to distract from his own success: He made hateful and inflammatory comments about Muslims on the trail. At the end of November , Ginger White, an Atlanta woman, came forward with allegations that she and Cain had had a year-long affair. Cain denied this, but his campaign quickly collapsed. In the years after his presidential bid, Cain's public presence seemed to shrink to the fringes of the party.
But in his early seventies, he became one of President Trump's most reliable supporters and remained a familiar face on the Fox News circuit as he traveled the country for speaking engagements. For the most part, you found him in daily videos on The Herman Cain Show , or writing in the pages of his own lo-fi website, HermanCain. On the evening of Wednesday, July 1, the day Cain was admitted to the hospital, one such tweet appeared on his account.
At p. Calabrese declined to name the person responsible for the tweet, saying they had since moved on to another job. He absolutely recognized the necessity of it — and I know he was careful. Cain had already been traveling in the lead-up to the rally — there was a trip to Las Vegas and a stop in Dallas before the Tulsa rally for the premiere of Uncle Tom , a documentary about Black conservatives.
Current and former staffers who were watching the public reaction sensed in it something they had observed for years — a familiar reflex, they said, to caricaturize Cain. But it still bothers some of them that even during his rise to the top of the polls in the Republican primary, Cain was covered as half frontrunner, half joke.
He liked to be kind of goofy and loud. And he wasn't gonna stop doing that because some political image consultant somewhere thought that he would get disrespected by Politico. When his dad was hired to be the chauffeur for the head of Coca-Cola, the family moved to Atlanta, where Cain would graduate from Morehouse College. He then completed his graduate studies at Purdue University after civilian service in the Navy.
His was not a typical career in his post-C. Cain became a sought-after motivational speaker, an unsuccessful presidential candidate in and a Senate one in When the election cycle began, Cain decided to run the scrappiest of campaigns focused on an untraditional travel schedule that often seemed more like a book tour than an organizing effort. Antipathy toward frontrunner Mitt Romney proved sufficient to give Cain a chance to rise in the late summer and fall of , until his personal life just proved too much.
Instead, he became a ubiquitous voice and reliable critic of Democrats. Write to Philip Elliott at philip. He Also Set the Stage for Trump. I got as far as his idiosyncratic chief of staff, Mark Block, whom I spotted in an Atlanta traffic jam , of all places. Block had been smoking a cigarette, just as he did in an online campaign ad that had recently gone semi-viral.
Additional women would subsequently make similar accusations against him. Soon afterward, Cain would speak at the Defending the American Dream Summit, which was put on by the Koch brothers and featured many of the Republicans hoping to take on Barack Obama in Cain had particularly strong support from the Tea Party wing of the Party; he received a roaring ovation. Many of his supporters drifted toward Newt Gingrich.
I attended his valedictory rally, which took place at his campaign headquarters, just off Interstate 85, next to a patio-furniture store. He was seventy-four.
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