Go back a couple months. Romney and Perry were right where they are, at the top of the realist’s leaderboard. And along comes Herman Cain, A Republican Idealist’s wet dream… A Black Conservative “Pulled Myself Up By My Own Bootstraps” millionaire willing to run for President. Herman Cain was everything the Republican Party needed, someone they could hang out there and tout their non-racism over, all the time knowing, hell they HAD to know, that in the end there would be some serious issues that would push him out of contention. At that point they would always be free to tout their inclusiveness and the fact thet he didn’t work out was most certainly not THEIR fault. Of course that requires our suspension of belief that somehow the  horde of lawyers that is the republican party prime, couldn’t dig up a multitude of civil settlements, and were so incompetent as to not have the good sense to ask to back-check at least a month’s worth of phone records for suspicious activity… Sorry I don’t buy it. Just as much as I don’t buy that they actually think that newt Gingrich has a snowball’s chance in hell in a Primary season against Pres. Obama. It’s all just chaff, a distraction, a way to keep the investigative focus on the frontrunner, and not digging too deeply into the two who in the end, one of which will be the party’s choice come the convention. Ignore Newt, he’s not the threat., dig into Romney and Perry while they sit back in the pack and are overconfident in their long-range strategy. Right now they are playing a Chinese 5-year plan to the press’s 5-minutes-of-fame obsession with the top poller-of-the-week.
After all, what other justification can you find for the incontrovertibly data-driven fact that virtually every single polling point that Herman Cain has lost due to his infidelity went to the only other candidate that publicly acknowledges multiple instances of infidelity? Unless of course you were to take the rather paranoid opinion that an African American cheating with a European American is not as forgivable as a candidate cheating within his race.
I’m sure I’ll write more about Newt in the days and weeks to come, but in the interim, let me leave you with a qoute from Newt in 1985 when the Wall Street Journal asked him about his shirking of responibility to serve his country in Vietnam,
“Part of the question I had to ask myself was what difference I would have made.â€
So. True. as President, what difference would you make? might as well not run.