Sunday, October 30, 2011 4:35:10 PM
As Cain Promotes His Management Skills, Ex-Aides Tell of Campaign in Chaos
Herman Cain prepared for a television interview during a Tea Party rally at the Roane State Community College in Harriman, Tenn., last month.
Josh Anderson for The New York Times
Mr. Cain's book, which some former staff members say he has spent too much time promoting.
Josh Anderson for The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: October 26, 2011
If Herman Cain [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/herman-cain ] feels his management skills are up to any challenge, some of his former staff members think he should have started with the disorder in his own campaign.
Mr. Cain has hardly shown up in New Hampshire and Iowa, they said, spending the bulk of his time on a book tour through the South. He occasionally mishandled potential big donors or ignored real voters. His campaign churned through the small staff; last week, his campaign announced the appointment of the veteran campaigner Steve Grubbs, his third Iowa leader in four months.
Even bumper stickers have been hard to come by.
And then there was that e-mail to the staff about traveling in a car with Mr. Cain: “Do not speak to him unless you are spoken to,” the memo said.
“I found it odd,” said a former staff member who liked to prep Mr. Cain for appearances while driving. The aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, quit not long afterward, citing the e-mail as one of the deciding factors.
Mr. Cain’s campaign has generated much promise since it began over the summer. A former business executive rises improbably from anonymity to the top of the polls, using the strength of his speechmaking, folksy charm and catchy policy plans.
But Mr. Cain’s campaign may have undermined itself with questionable decisions and a series of missteps, which have led to the impression that the candidate lacks focus and preparation.
Mr. Cain has made several contradictory, and sometimes befuddling, remarks on abortion and foreign policy, which have forced him to spend days clarifying and defending himself.
This week, an online video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6VnTqpTqvQ ]
All presidential candidates make mistakes — including experienced candidates like Mitt Romney — and campaigns are chaotic and unruly by nature. For its part, the campaign acknowledges that it has been hard to keep up with Mr. Cain’s explosive growth in popularity. “We’re working overtime to make it all happen,” said J. D. Gordon, a spokesman.
But interviews with Mr. Cain’s former staff members, volunteers and supporters give a glimpse of a candidate who appeared to show ambivalence toward basic campaign management, which led to problems in hiring, scheduling, fund-raising and messaging.
Together, these problems are at odds with a central theme of his candidacy. Because Mr. Cain does not have a legislative or political track record, his campaign rests heavily on the contention that he would bring proven, executive-level expertise from the business world to the White House.
Several former workers interviewed for this article said they were directed by the campaign not to speak with reporters. (Two said they had signed nondisclosure agreements, a rare demand within political campaigns, and they had been reminded, they said, by the campaign not to speak with the news media.)
Mr. Cain, a former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, has announced that he will increase the number of staff members in Iowa and New Hampshire as well the number of his appearances in the early voting states. Mr. Cain now has a total of six paid staff members working in Iowa and New Hampshire, with 44 more workers across the country.
Some former aides said they had longed to see the problem-solving side of Mr. Cain, or to see Mr. Cain at all. Over the spring and summer, he did not spend much time with workers. He did not plan conference calls or staff meetings and was given to changing his mind about appearances, sometimes with little notice, a tendency that angered his field workers.
“It was frustrating because we couldn’t get him here as much as I was led to believe he was going to be here,” said Kevin Hall, who worked for Mr. Cain in Iowa in June.
“Everything we tried to do was like pulling teeth to get accomplished,” said a former staff member in Iowa, who asked for anonymity. “I’ve never been involved in a job that was as frustrating as this one. We couldn’t get an answer on anything. Everything was fly by the seat of your pants.”
Some of Mr. Cain’s staff was put off by his devotion to publicizing his newly released memoir, “This Is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House.” His book tour took him mainly through the South, where primaries will not be held until February at the earliest. The tour helped increase his name recognition and has been “very successful for us,” Mr. Gordon said.
Not everyone agreed. “When I found out about the book in June, I thought, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” said the same aide who found the e-mail troubling.
“That approach alienated some of his former staffers,” said Chris Buck, an unaffiliated Republican strategist in New Hampshire who said he considered working for the Cain campaign earlier this year, but changed his mind. “I think everybody was bewildered.”
Setting up offices was also something of a trial. “When I told people, ‘You’ll be getting offices and phone lines,’ I’d have to postpone that,” the former staff member in Iowa said. “It was like they were running for sophomore class president.”
Mr. Hall added, “We couldn’t even get our own e-mail addresses,” for the campaign.
Mr. Cain’s workers said basic supplies, like signs and bumper stickers, were hard to find. In many cases, they have to buy their own, said Donald L. Overman, a retired marketer who is a loyal volunteer for the campaign in New Hampshire.
He thinks the campaign can do better. “You can’t go out and buy bumper stickers,” he said.
Management problems extended to important events. In July, a businessman and Tea Party [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/tea_party_movement/index.html ] supporter, Bill Hemrick, invited some 200 friends to the private Standard Club in Nashville to meet Mr. Cain. Mr. Hemrick said the Cain campaign had asked him to serve as its financial chairman for Tennessee.
After speaking to the crowd, Mr. Cain was to attend a private club dinner for a select group of conservatives, who were in a position to donate the $2,500 maximum.
But somehow Mr. Cain forgot, or his staff failed to follow through. After his speech, Mr. Cain called to thank Mr. Hemrick for the evening. “I said, ‘I’ll see you upstairs,’ Mr. Hemrick recalled, where the potential donors had gathered. “He said, ‘Well, I’m at the airport.’ ”
“I thought, wow, good communication there,” Mr. Hemrick said.
Mr. Hemrick, a founder of the Upper Deck trading card company, said that shortly afterward, the Cain campaign named someone else as its Tennessee financial chairman — which he first learned from his replacement.
Mr. Hemrick, who is now a fund-raiser for Representative Michele Bachmann, likes Mr. Cain’s conservatism and bears him no hard feelings. But he is a bit mystified by the candidate’s lack of attention to detail. He also figures Mr. Cain left a pot of cash at the Standard Club.
“This is his first rodeo, so people make mistakes,” Mr. Hemrick said. “But I wish he would have called and said ‘Bill, I’m going in another direction.’ But he never did.”
As the months have passed and Mr. Cain has continued to rise in the polls, his attitude toward retail politics seems not to have changed much. “He can’t be everywhere at once, but we are doing everything we can as best we can,” said Mr. Gordon, the spokesman.
On a trip to Iowa last weekend to participate in the Faith and Freedom Forum, a meeting of evangelical conservatives, Mr. Cain stayed on his campaign bus until it was time to take the stage, while other candidates worked the crowds. Shortly after he finished speaking, he left the room.
Trip Gabriel contributed reporting.
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Related
The Long Run: Cain, Now Running as Outsider, Came to Washington as Lobbyist (October 23, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/us/politics/herman-cain-running-as-outsider-came-to-washington-as-lobbyist.html
Behind Cain’s Humor, a Question of Seriousness (October 19, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/us/politics/behind-herman-cains-humor-a-question-of-seriousness.html
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© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/us/politics/as-cain-touts-management-skills-ex-aides-tell-of-chaos.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/us/politics/as-cain-touts-management-skills-ex-aides-tell-of-chaos.html?pagewanted=all ] [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/us/politics/as-cain-touts-management-skills-ex-aides-tell-of-chaos.html ]
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In accusing administration of deferring to pro-Islamic groups, Bachmann exaggerates directive
By Associated Press, Published: October 28, 2011
DAVENPORT, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said Friday the Obama administration is striking all references to Islam from Justice Department training manuals, exaggerating a directive from federal officials to evaluate procedures for religious and cultural sensitivity.
Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, equated the effort to strike offensive references to Islam from material to removing suspicion of Islamic terrorism from department policy.
A conservative popular with tea party activists and evangelical conservatives, she later linked President Barack Obama with “4,400 American lives” lost in Iraq. However, the death toll in the 8-year-old war that began under President George W. Bush had already reached 4,229 when Obama was inaugurated in 2009. It now stands at no fewer than 4,481.
As she campaigned in Iowa, now the focus of her effort to win the Republican nomination, Bachmann accused the administration of making changes in training manuals under pressure from pro-Islam groups with terrorist links.
“And now Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual,” she told about 75 Republican activists in an eastern Iowa hotel conference room.
The FBI has not removed Islam from training material, said an FBI official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and requested anonymity.
The FBI has been conducting a comprehensive review of its training materials after it was revealed that what officials termed an inaccurate description of Islam, one that linked the religion to terrorism, was being used in some of the bureau’s training programs. Last month, FBI officials said the agency was undertaking the review in light of an analyst’s criticism of Islam during a lecture last spring.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole said last week he had asked that all aspects of the department be broadly re-evaluated for “sensitivity for all peoples of faith” in its training efforts.
“Examples include the efforts of our law enforcement components to ensure that their interactions with the community — whether in responding to an attack on a mosque or arresting a suspect in a counter-terrorism investigation — convey a sense of basic respect to the rule of law and the rights of all who have made this nation their home,” Cole said.
In her remarks Friday, Bachmann broadly painted the effort as trying to remove the link between Islam and anti-American terrorism sponsored by radical Islamic extremists.
“And so now the White House has scrubbed all Islamic terms from the national counterterrorism strategy. The White House has removed all Islamic terms from the Pentagon’s report on the Fort Hood shooting. And now, Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual,” she said.
The White House declined to respond to Bachmann’s criticism.
In an interview with CNN on Friday, Bachmann said Obama’s foreign policies were worse than his economic ones and linked Obama to the war’s overall death toll as well as its cost.
“Under Barack Obama’s watch, we’ve expended $805 billion to liberate the people of Iraq and, more importantly, 4,400 American lives,” she said.
Bachmann is on the first leg of a three-day campaign trip to the leadoff caucus state.
Sullivan reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Pete Yost in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-accusing-administration-of-deferring-to-pro-islamic-groups-bachmann-exaggerates-directive/2011/10/28/gIQAlMtSQM_story.html [with comments]
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In N.H., technocrat Romney vs. preacher Perry
By Dan Balz, Published: October 29
MANCHESTER, N.H. — They have debated on the same stage five times, but rarely have the contrasts between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry been more in evidence than during separate appearances here Friday night. It was Romney the careful technocrat versus Perry the unplugged preacher.
Their dueling appearances came in disparate forums. Romney held a well-attended town hall meeting, a traditional New Hampshire testing ground for candidates. Perry appeared at a dinner of social conservatives, a constituency that has played a small role in New Hampshire politics but is highly influential in other states.
At this point in the campaign, Perry has lost his standing as the principal challenger to Romney for the Republican nomination, eclipsed by Herman Cain and perhaps others. His early missteps as a candidate have left him with enormous obstacles to overcome, though if he has as much capacity to continue to raise money as he demonstrated initially, those resources will assist him in trying.
The Romney and Perry appearances came at the end of a difficult week for both. Romney was again accused of changing or hedging his positions on climate change and Ohio’s collective-bargaining referendum. The dust-ups played into a character vulnerability that caused him so much trouble four years ago and gives him little room this time for such miscues. Many Republicans still doubt his convictions.
Perry unveiled an economic plan last Tuesday but stepped on that message by wading unexpectedly into the issue of whether President Obama was born in the United States. By Friday, the Texas governor inexplicably suggested that such “birther” talk was being kept alive by people who were trying to distract attention from his economic message, apparently forgetting that it was he who refused to take the issue off the table when given the opportunity.
At his town-hall meeting, Romney appeared in casual pants and an open-collar shirt. He looked weary from nonstop debates, fundraising appearances and campaign events. His opening statement included stories about his father and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His message bent heavily in the direction of the tea party, with much talk about government spending, regulation and the burdens of big government, rather than job creation.
The first question from the audience made reference to Obama and what the questioner described as Obama’s “Marxist and socialist beliefs.” Romney was asked to address the questioner’s concerns about the president’s ideology.
Mindful of the land mines ahead, Romney deftly steered clear of embracing such characterizations. Instead he turned to Ronald Reagan for inspiration. “He said, ‘It’s not that liberals are ignorant, it’s just that what they know is wrong,’ ” Romney said. “And I happen to think that the president’s philosophy and that of the people around him is extraordinarily misguided. I think they take their inspiration from those who believe government knows better than free people how to run our lives and how to build an economy.”
That wasn’t the only care Romney took in responding to a generally friendly audience that nonetheless directed some pointed questions at the candidate.
One such question came from a man who told Romney that “everything you said in your introduction was wonderful” but who questioned some of the details of the former Massachusetts governor’s priorities.
He noted that Romney is promising to dramatically reduce federal spending, but without cuts in defense spending, with the preservation of major entitlement programs and with no new taxes.
“I’m just not seeing how that adds up,” he said.
Romney didn’t make clear that it does add up. He said the country will save money on defense by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On entitlements he said that Medicare and Medicaid “need to be reformed.” He said he would turn Medicaid into a block grant to the states at the same level of spending as last year, plus 1 percent, but gave no hints as to how he would change Medicare.
He said repealing Obama’s health-care law will save about a trillion dollars. On domestic spending, he said he would “take a whole host of programs” and eliminate them or combine them but offered few details. He said he would cut federal employment by 10 percent “immediately by attrition.”
On immigration, he said securing the border, which has defied presidents of both parties, could be done with relative ease and used the question to take a shot at Perry.
“Some problems are hard,” he said. “How to stop al-Qaeda and the jihadists from attacking us around the world. That’s hard. How to stop people coming into our nation illegally, that’s not so tough. Build a fence. Have enough people to patrol it and turn off the magnets that draw people here illegally, like giving them in-state tuition or letting them go to work in companies where people don’t have the information they need to know who’s legal or not.”
He ended with a question about the Occupy Wall Street protests and turned it into an attack on the president. Romney said he sympathized with those protesters who are out of work and can’t find jobs. He has less sympathy, he said, with those who have “less benevolent sentiments.”
The problem, he said, is Obama’s failure to reboot the economy and recalled that Obama had said long ago that if he couldn’t do that, he might be a one-term president. “We’re here to collect,” Romney said. “Hold him to his words.” With that, he was done.
An hour later, Perry took the stage at a downtown hotel ballroom in Manchester. He appeared to feel totally at home, more so than in many other settings during the campaign. He was loose and extremely animated, even playful.
He sprinkled words like “awesome” and “cool” into his opening remarks and he played off the New Hampshire state motto, “Live free or die.”
“I come from a state where they had this little place called the Alamo and they declared ‘victory or death,’ ” he said. “We’re kind of into those slogans. Live free or die. Victory or death. Bring it!”
He extolled the virtues of freedom, saying that single word sums up his presidential campaign. He promoted his new economic plan that includes a flat tax with a 20 percent income tax rate for individuals and, with a dramatic flourish, pulled a postcard-size paper from his pocket to illustrate how simple the filing form would be for most taxpayers.
He talked about his upbringing in rural Texas and the values that were instilled in him there. He highlighted his credentials as a strong opponent of abortion. “The bottom line is this, if you want to stop Washington’s many violations of the 10th Amendment, especially when it comes to the most basic principle of protecting life, then we must make President Obama a one-term president. We must!”
The audience gave him a standing ovation.
He talked about his energy policy and said he looked forward to the day he could “salute to the south” to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and declare that America would no longer be dependent on oil from that hostile nation. As the audience broke into applause, Perry added with a growl, “Or maybe I won’t salute him.”
Closing out his remarks, he said, “Let’s let America be America and again be the land of the free.”
The two performances, even accounting for different settings, could not have evoked more stylistic differences. In the space of three hours, New Hampshire saw the essence of these two Republican candidates. If the nomination battle comes down to a contest between Romney and Perry, their clash will reverberate across the party.
© 2011 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-nh-technocrat-romney-vs-preacher-perry/2011/10/29/gIQAeq1nSM_story.html [with comments]
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Michele Bachmann has fuzzy math on cost of doctor visit
Jason Noble 4:13 PM, Oct 29, 2011
Oskaloosa, Ia. — In a campaign speech to potential caucusgoers here this afternoon, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann colored her calls for the repeal of the federal health-care law passed in 2010 with a brief history of health care.
When she was a child, she said, a visit to the doctor in Waterloo, Iowa, cost just $5, and people who couldn’t afford that often would receive free care at the physician’s discretion.
Such prices and charity care are impossible today, she argued, because of government intervention into the health-care system and the threat of lawsuits.
It’s an anecdote — and a political argument — Bachmann has made repeatedly on the campaign trail recently.
Some analysis, however, calls into question whether that specific health-care cost today is actually more than what Bachmann recalls from several decades ago.
The $5 doctor’s visit Bachmann cites, for example, leaves out the effect of inflation. Five dollars in 1961 (the year in which Bachmann turned 5 years old) actually has the same buying power as $37.94 in 2011. And that, according to at least one study, is substantially more than what an average worker now pays for a doctor’s visit.
A statistical brief compiled last month by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that the average co-pay for a physician’s office visit under employee-sponsored health-care programs in 2010 was $22.82 — 40 percent less than the inflation-adjusted cost of Bachmann’s 1961 doctor’s visit.
(The Register noted yesterday that Bachmann’s proposal for a “liability shield” for doctors providing charity care is similar to a program already in effect in Iowa.)
Copyright © 2011 www.DesMoinesRegister.com
http://caucuses.desmoinesregister.com/2011/10/29/michele-bachmann-has-fuzzy-math-on-cost-of-doctor-visit/ [with comments]
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Herman Cain prepared for a television interview during a Tea Party rally at the Roane State Community College in Harriman, Tenn., last month.
Josh Anderson for The New York Times
Mr. Cain's book, which some former staff members say he has spent too much time promoting.
Josh Anderson for The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: October 26, 2011
If Herman Cain [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/herman-cain ] feels his management skills are up to any challenge, some of his former staff members think he should have started with the disorder in his own campaign.
Mr. Cain has hardly shown up in New Hampshire and Iowa, they said, spending the bulk of his time on a book tour through the South. He occasionally mishandled potential big donors or ignored real voters. His campaign churned through the small staff; last week, his campaign announced the appointment of the veteran campaigner Steve Grubbs, his third Iowa leader in four months.
Even bumper stickers have been hard to come by.
And then there was that e-mail to the staff about traveling in a car with Mr. Cain: “Do not speak to him unless you are spoken to,” the memo said.
“I found it odd,” said a former staff member who liked to prep Mr. Cain for appearances while driving. The aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, quit not long afterward, citing the e-mail as one of the deciding factors.
Mr. Cain’s campaign has generated much promise since it began over the summer. A former business executive rises improbably from anonymity to the top of the polls, using the strength of his speechmaking, folksy charm and catchy policy plans.
But Mr. Cain’s campaign may have undermined itself with questionable decisions and a series of missteps, which have led to the impression that the candidate lacks focus and preparation.
Mr. Cain has made several contradictory, and sometimes befuddling, remarks on abortion and foreign policy, which have forced him to spend days clarifying and defending himself.
This week, an online video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6VnTqpTqvQ ]
became an instant punch line, so untraditional that Mr. Cain faced questions about whether the video was a parody, given its low production values and a sequence in which Mr. Cain’s campaign manager takes a long drag on his cigarette and the candidate grins.
All presidential candidates make mistakes — including experienced candidates like Mitt Romney — and campaigns are chaotic and unruly by nature. For its part, the campaign acknowledges that it has been hard to keep up with Mr. Cain’s explosive growth in popularity. “We’re working overtime to make it all happen,” said J. D. Gordon, a spokesman.
But interviews with Mr. Cain’s former staff members, volunteers and supporters give a glimpse of a candidate who appeared to show ambivalence toward basic campaign management, which led to problems in hiring, scheduling, fund-raising and messaging.
Together, these problems are at odds with a central theme of his candidacy. Because Mr. Cain does not have a legislative or political track record, his campaign rests heavily on the contention that he would bring proven, executive-level expertise from the business world to the White House.
Several former workers interviewed for this article said they were directed by the campaign not to speak with reporters. (Two said they had signed nondisclosure agreements, a rare demand within political campaigns, and they had been reminded, they said, by the campaign not to speak with the news media.)
Mr. Cain, a former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, has announced that he will increase the number of staff members in Iowa and New Hampshire as well the number of his appearances in the early voting states. Mr. Cain now has a total of six paid staff members working in Iowa and New Hampshire, with 44 more workers across the country.
Some former aides said they had longed to see the problem-solving side of Mr. Cain, or to see Mr. Cain at all. Over the spring and summer, he did not spend much time with workers. He did not plan conference calls or staff meetings and was given to changing his mind about appearances, sometimes with little notice, a tendency that angered his field workers.
“It was frustrating because we couldn’t get him here as much as I was led to believe he was going to be here,” said Kevin Hall, who worked for Mr. Cain in Iowa in June.
“Everything we tried to do was like pulling teeth to get accomplished,” said a former staff member in Iowa, who asked for anonymity. “I’ve never been involved in a job that was as frustrating as this one. We couldn’t get an answer on anything. Everything was fly by the seat of your pants.”
Some of Mr. Cain’s staff was put off by his devotion to publicizing his newly released memoir, “This Is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House.” His book tour took him mainly through the South, where primaries will not be held until February at the earliest. The tour helped increase his name recognition and has been “very successful for us,” Mr. Gordon said.
Not everyone agreed. “When I found out about the book in June, I thought, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” said the same aide who found the e-mail troubling.
“That approach alienated some of his former staffers,” said Chris Buck, an unaffiliated Republican strategist in New Hampshire who said he considered working for the Cain campaign earlier this year, but changed his mind. “I think everybody was bewildered.”
Setting up offices was also something of a trial. “When I told people, ‘You’ll be getting offices and phone lines,’ I’d have to postpone that,” the former staff member in Iowa said. “It was like they were running for sophomore class president.”
Mr. Hall added, “We couldn’t even get our own e-mail addresses,” for the campaign.
Mr. Cain’s workers said basic supplies, like signs and bumper stickers, were hard to find. In many cases, they have to buy their own, said Donald L. Overman, a retired marketer who is a loyal volunteer for the campaign in New Hampshire.
He thinks the campaign can do better. “You can’t go out and buy bumper stickers,” he said.
Management problems extended to important events. In July, a businessman and Tea Party [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/tea_party_movement/index.html ] supporter, Bill Hemrick, invited some 200 friends to the private Standard Club in Nashville to meet Mr. Cain. Mr. Hemrick said the Cain campaign had asked him to serve as its financial chairman for Tennessee.
After speaking to the crowd, Mr. Cain was to attend a private club dinner for a select group of conservatives, who were in a position to donate the $2,500 maximum.
But somehow Mr. Cain forgot, or his staff failed to follow through. After his speech, Mr. Cain called to thank Mr. Hemrick for the evening. “I said, ‘I’ll see you upstairs,’ Mr. Hemrick recalled, where the potential donors had gathered. “He said, ‘Well, I’m at the airport.’ ”
“I thought, wow, good communication there,” Mr. Hemrick said.
Mr. Hemrick, a founder of the Upper Deck trading card company, said that shortly afterward, the Cain campaign named someone else as its Tennessee financial chairman — which he first learned from his replacement.
Mr. Hemrick, who is now a fund-raiser for Representative Michele Bachmann, likes Mr. Cain’s conservatism and bears him no hard feelings. But he is a bit mystified by the candidate’s lack of attention to detail. He also figures Mr. Cain left a pot of cash at the Standard Club.
“This is his first rodeo, so people make mistakes,” Mr. Hemrick said. “But I wish he would have called and said ‘Bill, I’m going in another direction.’ But he never did.”
As the months have passed and Mr. Cain has continued to rise in the polls, his attitude toward retail politics seems not to have changed much. “He can’t be everywhere at once, but we are doing everything we can as best we can,” said Mr. Gordon, the spokesman.
On a trip to Iowa last weekend to participate in the Faith and Freedom Forum, a meeting of evangelical conservatives, Mr. Cain stayed on his campaign bus until it was time to take the stage, while other candidates worked the crowds. Shortly after he finished speaking, he left the room.
Trip Gabriel contributed reporting.
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Related
The Long Run: Cain, Now Running as Outsider, Came to Washington as Lobbyist (October 23, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/us/politics/herman-cain-running-as-outsider-came-to-washington-as-lobbyist.html
Behind Cain’s Humor, a Question of Seriousness (October 19, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/us/politics/behind-herman-cains-humor-a-question-of-seriousness.html
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© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/us/politics/as-cain-touts-management-skills-ex-aides-tell-of-chaos.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/us/politics/as-cain-touts-management-skills-ex-aides-tell-of-chaos.html?pagewanted=all ] [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/us/politics/as-cain-touts-management-skills-ex-aides-tell-of-chaos.html ]
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In accusing administration of deferring to pro-Islamic groups, Bachmann exaggerates directive
By Associated Press, Published: October 28, 2011
DAVENPORT, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said Friday the Obama administration is striking all references to Islam from Justice Department training manuals, exaggerating a directive from federal officials to evaluate procedures for religious and cultural sensitivity.
Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, equated the effort to strike offensive references to Islam from material to removing suspicion of Islamic terrorism from department policy.
A conservative popular with tea party activists and evangelical conservatives, she later linked President Barack Obama with “4,400 American lives” lost in Iraq. However, the death toll in the 8-year-old war that began under President George W. Bush had already reached 4,229 when Obama was inaugurated in 2009. It now stands at no fewer than 4,481.
As she campaigned in Iowa, now the focus of her effort to win the Republican nomination, Bachmann accused the administration of making changes in training manuals under pressure from pro-Islam groups with terrorist links.
“And now Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual,” she told about 75 Republican activists in an eastern Iowa hotel conference room.
The FBI has not removed Islam from training material, said an FBI official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and requested anonymity.
The FBI has been conducting a comprehensive review of its training materials after it was revealed that what officials termed an inaccurate description of Islam, one that linked the religion to terrorism, was being used in some of the bureau’s training programs. Last month, FBI officials said the agency was undertaking the review in light of an analyst’s criticism of Islam during a lecture last spring.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole said last week he had asked that all aspects of the department be broadly re-evaluated for “sensitivity for all peoples of faith” in its training efforts.
“Examples include the efforts of our law enforcement components to ensure that their interactions with the community — whether in responding to an attack on a mosque or arresting a suspect in a counter-terrorism investigation — convey a sense of basic respect to the rule of law and the rights of all who have made this nation their home,” Cole said.
In her remarks Friday, Bachmann broadly painted the effort as trying to remove the link between Islam and anti-American terrorism sponsored by radical Islamic extremists.
“And so now the White House has scrubbed all Islamic terms from the national counterterrorism strategy. The White House has removed all Islamic terms from the Pentagon’s report on the Fort Hood shooting. And now, Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual,” she said.
The White House declined to respond to Bachmann’s criticism.
In an interview with CNN on Friday, Bachmann said Obama’s foreign policies were worse than his economic ones and linked Obama to the war’s overall death toll as well as its cost.
“Under Barack Obama’s watch, we’ve expended $805 billion to liberate the people of Iraq and, more importantly, 4,400 American lives,” she said.
Bachmann is on the first leg of a three-day campaign trip to the leadoff caucus state.
Sullivan reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Pete Yost in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-accusing-administration-of-deferring-to-pro-islamic-groups-bachmann-exaggerates-directive/2011/10/28/gIQAlMtSQM_story.html [with comments]
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In N.H., technocrat Romney vs. preacher Perry
By Dan Balz, Published: October 29
MANCHESTER, N.H. — They have debated on the same stage five times, but rarely have the contrasts between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry been more in evidence than during separate appearances here Friday night. It was Romney the careful technocrat versus Perry the unplugged preacher.
Their dueling appearances came in disparate forums. Romney held a well-attended town hall meeting, a traditional New Hampshire testing ground for candidates. Perry appeared at a dinner of social conservatives, a constituency that has played a small role in New Hampshire politics but is highly influential in other states.
At this point in the campaign, Perry has lost his standing as the principal challenger to Romney for the Republican nomination, eclipsed by Herman Cain and perhaps others. His early missteps as a candidate have left him with enormous obstacles to overcome, though if he has as much capacity to continue to raise money as he demonstrated initially, those resources will assist him in trying.
The Romney and Perry appearances came at the end of a difficult week for both. Romney was again accused of changing or hedging his positions on climate change and Ohio’s collective-bargaining referendum. The dust-ups played into a character vulnerability that caused him so much trouble four years ago and gives him little room this time for such miscues. Many Republicans still doubt his convictions.
Perry unveiled an economic plan last Tuesday but stepped on that message by wading unexpectedly into the issue of whether President Obama was born in the United States. By Friday, the Texas governor inexplicably suggested that such “birther” talk was being kept alive by people who were trying to distract attention from his economic message, apparently forgetting that it was he who refused to take the issue off the table when given the opportunity.
At his town-hall meeting, Romney appeared in casual pants and an open-collar shirt. He looked weary from nonstop debates, fundraising appearances and campaign events. His opening statement included stories about his father and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His message bent heavily in the direction of the tea party, with much talk about government spending, regulation and the burdens of big government, rather than job creation.
The first question from the audience made reference to Obama and what the questioner described as Obama’s “Marxist and socialist beliefs.” Romney was asked to address the questioner’s concerns about the president’s ideology.
Mindful of the land mines ahead, Romney deftly steered clear of embracing such characterizations. Instead he turned to Ronald Reagan for inspiration. “He said, ‘It’s not that liberals are ignorant, it’s just that what they know is wrong,’ ” Romney said. “And I happen to think that the president’s philosophy and that of the people around him is extraordinarily misguided. I think they take their inspiration from those who believe government knows better than free people how to run our lives and how to build an economy.”
That wasn’t the only care Romney took in responding to a generally friendly audience that nonetheless directed some pointed questions at the candidate.
One such question came from a man who told Romney that “everything you said in your introduction was wonderful” but who questioned some of the details of the former Massachusetts governor’s priorities.
He noted that Romney is promising to dramatically reduce federal spending, but without cuts in defense spending, with the preservation of major entitlement programs and with no new taxes.
“I’m just not seeing how that adds up,” he said.
Romney didn’t make clear that it does add up. He said the country will save money on defense by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On entitlements he said that Medicare and Medicaid “need to be reformed.” He said he would turn Medicaid into a block grant to the states at the same level of spending as last year, plus 1 percent, but gave no hints as to how he would change Medicare.
He said repealing Obama’s health-care law will save about a trillion dollars. On domestic spending, he said he would “take a whole host of programs” and eliminate them or combine them but offered few details. He said he would cut federal employment by 10 percent “immediately by attrition.”
On immigration, he said securing the border, which has defied presidents of both parties, could be done with relative ease and used the question to take a shot at Perry.
“Some problems are hard,” he said. “How to stop al-Qaeda and the jihadists from attacking us around the world. That’s hard. How to stop people coming into our nation illegally, that’s not so tough. Build a fence. Have enough people to patrol it and turn off the magnets that draw people here illegally, like giving them in-state tuition or letting them go to work in companies where people don’t have the information they need to know who’s legal or not.”
He ended with a question about the Occupy Wall Street protests and turned it into an attack on the president. Romney said he sympathized with those protesters who are out of work and can’t find jobs. He has less sympathy, he said, with those who have “less benevolent sentiments.”
The problem, he said, is Obama’s failure to reboot the economy and recalled that Obama had said long ago that if he couldn’t do that, he might be a one-term president. “We’re here to collect,” Romney said. “Hold him to his words.” With that, he was done.
An hour later, Perry took the stage at a downtown hotel ballroom in Manchester. He appeared to feel totally at home, more so than in many other settings during the campaign. He was loose and extremely animated, even playful.
He sprinkled words like “awesome” and “cool” into his opening remarks and he played off the New Hampshire state motto, “Live free or die.”
“I come from a state where they had this little place called the Alamo and they declared ‘victory or death,’ ” he said. “We’re kind of into those slogans. Live free or die. Victory or death. Bring it!”
He extolled the virtues of freedom, saying that single word sums up his presidential campaign. He promoted his new economic plan that includes a flat tax with a 20 percent income tax rate for individuals and, with a dramatic flourish, pulled a postcard-size paper from his pocket to illustrate how simple the filing form would be for most taxpayers.
He talked about his upbringing in rural Texas and the values that were instilled in him there. He highlighted his credentials as a strong opponent of abortion. “The bottom line is this, if you want to stop Washington’s many violations of the 10th Amendment, especially when it comes to the most basic principle of protecting life, then we must make President Obama a one-term president. We must!”
The audience gave him a standing ovation.
He talked about his energy policy and said he looked forward to the day he could “salute to the south” to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and declare that America would no longer be dependent on oil from that hostile nation. As the audience broke into applause, Perry added with a growl, “Or maybe I won’t salute him.”
Closing out his remarks, he said, “Let’s let America be America and again be the land of the free.”
The two performances, even accounting for different settings, could not have evoked more stylistic differences. In the space of three hours, New Hampshire saw the essence of these two Republican candidates. If the nomination battle comes down to a contest between Romney and Perry, their clash will reverberate across the party.
© 2011 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-nh-technocrat-romney-vs-preacher-perry/2011/10/29/gIQAeq1nSM_story.html [with comments]
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Michele Bachmann has fuzzy math on cost of doctor visit
Jason Noble 4:13 PM, Oct 29, 2011
Oskaloosa, Ia. — In a campaign speech to potential caucusgoers here this afternoon, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann colored her calls for the repeal of the federal health-care law passed in 2010 with a brief history of health care.
When she was a child, she said, a visit to the doctor in Waterloo, Iowa, cost just $5, and people who couldn’t afford that often would receive free care at the physician’s discretion.
Such prices and charity care are impossible today, she argued, because of government intervention into the health-care system and the threat of lawsuits.
It’s an anecdote — and a political argument — Bachmann has made repeatedly on the campaign trail recently.
Some analysis, however, calls into question whether that specific health-care cost today is actually more than what Bachmann recalls from several decades ago.
The $5 doctor’s visit Bachmann cites, for example, leaves out the effect of inflation. Five dollars in 1961 (the year in which Bachmann turned 5 years old) actually has the same buying power as $37.94 in 2011. And that, according to at least one study, is substantially more than what an average worker now pays for a doctor’s visit.
A statistical brief compiled last month by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that the average co-pay for a physician’s office visit under employee-sponsored health-care programs in 2010 was $22.82 — 40 percent less than the inflation-adjusted cost of Bachmann’s 1961 doctor’s visit.
(The Register noted yesterday that Bachmann’s proposal for a “liability shield” for doctors providing charity care is similar to a program already in effect in Iowa.)
Copyright © 2011 www.DesMoinesRegister.com
http://caucuses.desmoinesregister.com/2011/10/29/michele-bachmann-has-fuzzy-math-on-cost-of-doctor-visit/ [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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