Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Cain: My flavor is Black Walnut

October 1st, 2011
Sarah Palin called Herman Cain the “flavor of the week” when he won a closely-watched straw poll in Florida, but the former Godfather's Pizza executive said Friday his particular flavor has substance.
“I happen to believe there’s iced milk, and then there’s Haagan-Daas Black Walnut,” Cain said on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno". “Substance, that’s the difference. I got the substance. I’m the Black Walnut. It lasts longer than a week.”
[...]
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/01/cain-my-flavor-is-black-walnut/ [with comments]


===


Excerpts From Herman Cain's Strange New Memoir


Reuters

If elected president, the former CEO insists he'll redefine the office as no one else has -- and invite the common man to state dinners

Conor Friedersdorf
Sep 30 2011, 1:30 PM ET

If Herman Cain is elected president, he explains in This Is Herman Cain: My Journey To The White House, he's going to expect certain things from the people he hires. For example, "From the most junior clerical person to my chief of staff, White House personnel will be expected to have a copy of the Constitution of the United States nearby," he writes. It's a nice sentiment if, like me, you're charmed by CEOs of a certain generation. You know the type: they rose to the top prior to the Internet age, always had an executive assistant or secretary to help them manage their email, and talk about documents like the Constitution as though keeping hard copies on hand is important. What do the kids these days think, that the text of the founding document can just be called up at a moment's notice without even making any prior arrangements?

What those Cain staffers will surely notice, if they peruse their Constitution, is Article 2, where the office of the presidency is defined. But if Cain's forthcoming book, due for release October 4, is to be believed, their boss may decide to do the job differently than the framers intended. "I will define the office of the president; the office will not define me," Cain states. "As in every executive position I've ever undertaken, I will determine the parameters of my activities. And while I respect those who have served before me, I will not follow in their footsteps."

The alternative approach he'll take?

"I will create new footsteps."

Lest you worry that these footsteps might be created somewhere other than the Oval Office, relax. "Despite my high regard for the professionalism of those assigned to protect me, I and only I will in -- God forbid -- moments of national emergency determine when, where, and how I can best perform my duties as chief executive, because I happen to believe that the people want to see their president working in the Oval Office," he promises. "I believe that they are comforted and reassured by having him at the very center of presidential authority and responsibility."

In that office, fresh footprints in the carpet, there will be much work to do, so "I will reduce the number of protocol-oriented events that presidents are seemingly required to attend," Cain says. "At a time of deepening national crisis, I simply cannot afford to allocate valuable time to things that do not advance solutions to this nation's problems. That's why I have decided to sharply decrease the number of inaugural night balls." But don't those already only take place on one single night?

"Instead, Mrs. Cain and I will host a series of celebratory occasions, and they will be spread out during my first months in office." But won't that result in more time spent on "protocol-oriented events"?

Then there's this: "My guest lists for state dinners and other important occasions will be light on A list celebrities and heavy on normal Americans who work each day to restore our nation to greatness." What better way to spur productive diplomatic relations with foreign heads of state than inviting a lot of "normal" working class Americans to dine with them at formal state dinners held in their honor.

Of course, if Cain seems like he's departing from protocol, it's only because his aims are unique. "I will not come to Washington to do the usual, anticipated, accepted things," he writes. "Rather, paraphrasing the time-honored words of Abraham Lincoln, I will bring the nation a new birth of freedom, one that will be dedicated to the people who, together with me, will ensure that the American dream, one that patriots have pursued in good times and bad, will not perish from this earth."

That's what is great about having a CEO candidate instead of a regular politician. They're so practical and grounded, always offering specific, solution-oriented action items rather than vague, airy rhetoric. If only we'd elected a political outsider years ago we'd probably have had a new birth of freedom already.

Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/09/excerpts-from-herman-cains-strange-new-memoir/245928/ [with comments]


===


Herman Cain Picks Fight With Ron Paul
October 01, 2011
http://nation.foxnews.com/herman-cain/2011/10/01/herman-cain-picks-fight-ron-paul [with comments]


===


Herman Cain loses campaign mouthpiece Ellen Carmichael
10/2/11
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/64896.html [with comments]


===


Cain: 'Too bad' if black voters offended by ‘brainwashed’ comment
10/02/11
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/184965-cain-too-bad-if-black-voters-offended-by-brainwashed-comment


===


Herman Cain Is No Booker T. Washington



Ta-Nehisi Coates
Oct 2 2011, 12:00 PM ET

Hmmm [ http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2011/10/01/herman-cain-and-the-ghost-of-booker-t-washington/ ]:

The history teacher in our family recently completed a tour of the Martin Luther King Jr. complex on Auburn Avenue. Throughout the King memorial site, she noticed, a pantheon of civil rights greats throughout U.S. history are lauded -- with one glaring omission.

Booker T. Washington, the first great leader of African-Americans in the post-slavery era, who emphasized economic self-reliance above all else -- including the immediate pursuit of social equality -- is a nonperson at the King Center. He is an invisible man.

Some might consider the historical slight to be inconsequential. But it goes some distance toward explaining the hurdle that still faces Herman Cain and his -- so far -- surprisingly successful quest for the GOP presidential nomination.

Jim Galloway, the author of the column, doesn't really bother to explain what, specifically, Washington can tell us about Cain. It's implied that Cain has no black following because African-Americans have turned away from the self-help model of leadership, and more toward a protest model.

I can't speak for the King Center, but in the black pantheon, Booker T. Washington is anything but an invisible man. There are scores of schools [ http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&ix=c1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=booker+t+washington+school ] named after him across the country, and parks stretching from Charlottesville to Harlem. There are statues of him in Cleveland, Franklin, Virginia and Tuskegee, Alabama where he founded an HBCU.

The black poet Dudley Randall, wrote a really bad poem [ http://www.huarchivesnet.howard.edu/9908huarnet/randall.htm ] about his debate with W.E.B. Du Bois which black kids, like me, were forced to recite at the point of the bayonet. My middle school divided groups of classes into teams, each named after a black hero. Only Booker T Washington got two teams (The "Booker T" team and the "Washington" team.)

Moreover, the ideas advanced by Washington, surely contested in his time, weren't exactly heretical in the history of black education. No less than Frederick Douglass once argued against sending black freedman to learn "Greek and Latin" in favor of more practical vocations:

Accustomed as we have been to the rougher and harder modes of living, and of gaining a livelihood, we cannot and we ought not to hope that in a single leap from our low condition, we can reach that of Ministers, Lawyers, Doctors, Editors, Merchants, etc. These will doubtless be attained by us; but this will only be when we have patiently and laboriously, and I may add successfully, mastered and passed through the intermediate gradations of agriculture and the mechanic arts. Besides, there are (and perhaps this is a better reason for my view of the case) numerous institutions of learning in this country, already thrown open to colored youth...

We must become mechanics; we must build as well as live in houses; we must make as well as use furniture; we must construct bridges as well as pass over them, before we can properly live or be respected by our fellow men. We need mechanics as well as ministers. We need workers in iron, clay, and leather. We have orators, authors, and other professional men, but these reach only a certain class, and get respect for our race in certain select circles. To live here as we ought we must fasten ourselves to our countrymen through their every-day, cardinal wants. We must not only be able to black boots, but to make them. At present we are, in the northern States, unknown as mechanics. We give no proof of genius or skill at the county, State, or national fairs. We are unknown at any of the great exhibitions of the industry of our fellow-citizens, and being unknown, we are unconsidered.

Sound familiar? Douglass was, at that point, attempting to raise funds for a vocational school, a dream which Washington would fulfill.

Black Republicans like to reconcile the fact that belong to the party of Obama Waffles and birtherism, but citing Booker T. Washington as a model. But whereas these Republicans tend to draw their support almost entirely from whites, Booker T. Washington was the dominant black leader of his time. Washington, much like the dominant black leader of our time, was biracial. He built a black institution, that educated black people, and took his message to black audience. In short, Washington was a legitimate organic black conservative, rooted in the black community, propelled forth by his relationship to that community.

The actual roots of Herman Cain's "brainwashed" critique lay not in the words of Washington, but in another political tradition--the tradition of telling white populists what they like to hear [ http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/thomas/thomas.html ]:

I am firmly rooted in the conviction that negroism, as exemplified in the American type, is an attitude of mental density, a kind of spiritual sensuousness...

The negro not only lacks a fair degree of intuitive knowledge, but so dense is his understanding that he blindly follows weird fantasies and hideous phantoms. So great is his predilection in this direction, that he appears incapable of understanding the difference between evidence and assertion, proof and surmise. These facts warrant the conclusion that negro intelligence is both superficial and delusive, because, though such people excel in recollections of a concrete object, their retentive memories do not enable them to make any valuable deductions, either from the object itself, or from their familiar experience with it.

That's William Hannibal Thomas a black man, who in his time, had seen his share of racism and sacrifice. But Thomas ultimately decided to side with the white populists of his time, as opposed to against them. Thomas enjoyed about as much black support then, as Herman Cain enjoys now. He found no quarter in the black community--least of all from one Booker T, Washington-- "It is sad to think of a man without a country," Washington wrote of Thomas. "It is even sadder to think of a man without a race."

Within black leadership, the span of Washington's political progeny is rather stunning. It includes black nationalists like Marcus Garvey (who cited Washington as influence) and Malcolm X (whose parents were Garveyites.) It includes Bill Cosby and Barack Obama (as I argued here.) And it includes my Black Panther father, who used to force-feed us doses of Up From Slavery. There is, as there always has been, a large number of black conservatives. That they largely happen to vote Democratic says more about the GOP then it does about "brainwashing."

The notion of self-help and economic power is deeply seductive and has always had strong appeal in the black community. It's comforting to think that black people abandoned it because they were seduced by wild-eyed activists. In fact no one did more to discredit Washington's ideas than the white populists who answered his call for conciliation with the worst wave of home-grown terror in American history, and the government officials who, at every level, either looked away or joined in.

And yet when you look at the debates over how Obama addresses black audiences, it's clear that Washington endures.

Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/herman-cain-is-no-booker-t-washington/246002/ [with comments]


===


(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=67609604 and preceding (and future following)