You're going to wait, and wait, and wait for the sarcastic kicker.
Well, it ain't comin. Read ahead. See?
Ha. Joke's on you. These are nine things I legitimately like about Herman Cain and his presidential campaign. What that's now? Yes, I know he's a Republican, shut up already.
1. He offers a solution to our taxation quagmire. His 9-9-9 plan isn't just an inspiration for this babblefest I call "blogging." It's an actual alternative to the mess in which we find ourselves today, wherein:
One party won't raise taxes or cut benefits;
The other wants to cut taxes but not the benefits;
Meanwhile, the deficit continues to mount, health care costs continue to rise and the safety net gets more and more expensive.
Say what you want about 9-9-9. It's gimmicky. It's too simple. It's regressive. Fine, whatever. But at least Cain is contributing to the discussion in a positive way, detailing a plan of attack, rather than delivering the same empty promises I like to call "lies."
2. He is not easily ruffled by white people calling him "brother." He's not even ruffled by white people with questionable race-related incidents in their past calling him "brother," over and over, on a national stage. In fact, if one of his rivals for the GOP nomination had once leased a hunting ranch called "N*ggerhead" for a decade, using it with his family, and that same rival had called Cain "brother," over and over, in a kinda douchey condescending sort of way, and this had all happened on October 19, 2011 during a debate in Las Vegas, Cain would have remained unruffled throughout.
That was a purely hypothetical exercise, of course, right.
3. He is pro-choice. Not personally, no -- he's on record as being strongly opposed to abortion, but he also adamantly made the case this week, in an interview on CNN, that abortion is a choice best left up to the woman, not the government.
His actual words: "It's not the government's role or anybody else's role to make that decision."
After clarifying that he considers himself pro-life, he followed up: "I can have an opinion on an issue without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn't be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make."
Asked if a woman should be forced to carry a fetus to term after being raped, he answered, "That's her choice. That is not government's choice. I support life from conception."
(He backtracked the next day on his website. That's kind of what politicians do, though.)
4. Although I just called him a politician, he's really an outsider, which is good. Politics needs these guys. Like a '92 Perot or a Ralph Nader of any vintage, non-career politicians serve an extremely important function: they tether the lifelong insiders to the real world. Sometimes they use graphs. I like it when they use graphs.
5. Cain is black. (I know, you're colorblind, you hadn't even noticed.) Your political correctness notwithstanding, the man's race is somewhat of a coup for the Republicans, whose base, according to the latest official numbers, is:
--->103.7 percent white
--->.00002 percent Latino (that's counting W's Spanish-speaking skills and Marco Rubio, who's Cuban anyway)
--->That rich Asian-American guy
--->Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and a 99-year-old former actor in a nursing home somewhere who's still wearing blackface.
If the Republican Party is going to survive at all, and outgrow its current rift with minorities, it needs, well, nonwhite faces. And it would be good for the country, somehow, if the right-wing party was still in existence a generation from now. So, yeah.
6. He's a successful businessman. Wildly successful. He's a multi-millionaire! He was president and CEO of Godfather's, a chain he saved from extinction in the 1980's and 90's. When Cain talks money, you have to at least listen. And money troubles are kinda exactly what the nation's going through right now.
7. He legitimately thinks he has something to offer the nation, so he's following through with that notion. He didn't have to run for President. He's not on his third campaign for the Oval Office. I get the feeling he's not necessarily chasing power for power's sake, although to run for this office in the first place, it does take a certain amount of self-esteem.
8. His family story is compelling. He was raised in a lower-middle-class home, in which hard work, education and faith were paramount. Check his wiki page. And then, imagine this: his childhood values seem to have stuck. He's been married to the same woman for 43 years, he owns a master's degree in computer science from Purdue and is an associate minister at his church.
(Lots more money in the Cain household this time around, though. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
9. He beat cancer. Stage Four cancer, in his colon and liver, five years ago. He was given a 30 percent chance of survival; now he says he's in remission. You have to respect someone who takes on death, and wins. (My advisers just whispered that beating cancer constitutes merely a temporary victory. Screw that. Any effort that forestalls death is a win in my book.)
Done. Nine items, no sarcastic kickers. Granted, there is no chance I would ever cast a vote for Herman Cain, and I could just as easily make a list twice this long about things that turn me off about him. Maybe some other time.
(P.S.: I found this after finishing the post, so call it 9a. In 2009, Cain founded something called "Hermanator's Intelligent Thinkers Movement," an activist program that fights for conservative causes. Forget the agenda. The acronym spells Hit 'em, and you get to use the term "Hermanator"? Legen. Dary.)
