It’s Thursday, September 29th, 2011….and here’s the Gouge!

First up, we agree with the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger when he suggests it’s time we began….

Taking Cain Seriously

Why isn’t a successful business résumé presidential material?

You hear the same thing said about Herman Cain all the time: Herman Cain has some really interesting ideas, but . . . I love Herman Cain, but . . . But what? But he can’t win.

Why not? At best, the answer has to do with that cloudy word “electability.” Or that Mr. Cain has never held elected political office.

In 2004, Mr. Cain ran for the GOP’s U.S. Senate nomination in Georgia. He lost to Johnny Isakson. Last weekend, Mr. Cain ran away with the Florida straw poll vote, winning with 37%. He torched both the “Southern” candidate, Rick Perry of Texas, who worked hard to win the vote, and Mitt Romney, who in 2008 campaigned everywhere in Florida.

The time is overdue to plumb the mystery of Herman Cain’s “interesting, but” candidacy. Let’s start at the top—in the top-tier candidacy of Mitt Romney. Though he’s got the governorship credential, Mr. Romney’s emphasis in this campaign is on his private-sector experience. It’s good, despite the knock on Bain Capital’s business model. But measured by résumés, Herman Cain’s looks deeper in terms of working on the private sector’s front lines.

The details of his career path are worth knowing.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Cain was recruited from Coca-Cola in Atlanta, his first job in business, to work for Pillsbury in Minneapolis. His rise was rapid and well-regarded. He joined the company’s restaurant and foods group in 1978 as director of business analysis. In the early 1980s, Pillsbury sent him to learn the hamburger business at a Burger King in Hopkins, Minn. Then they assigned him, at age 36, to revive Pillsbury’s stumbling, franchise Burger King business in the Philadelphia region. He succeeded. According to a 1987 account in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pillsbury’s then-president Win Wallin said: “He was an excellent bet. Herman always seemed to have his act together.”

In 1986, Pillsbury sent the 41-year-old Mr. Cain to turn around their Godfather’s Pizza business, headquartered in Omaha. The Herman Cain who arrived there April 1 sounded like the same man who roused voters last Sunday in Florida: “I’m Herman Cain and this ain’t no April Fool’s joke. We are not dead. Our objective is to prove to Pillsbury and everyone else that we will survive.”

Pillsbury sold Godfather’s to Mr. Cain and some of his managers in 1988. He ran it until 1996 and served as CEO of the National Restaurant Association from 1996-1999. This June, Mr. Cain visited with the Journal’s editors and put the issue of health-insurance availability inside the context of the restaurant industry. He said the restaurant association tried hard to devise a health-insurance program able to serve the needs of an industry whose work force is complex—executives and managers, full-time workers, part-timers, students and so forth. Any conceivable insurance system would require great flexibility in plan-choice and design.

It’s from this period that one finds the famous 1994 video, now on YouTube, of Herman Cain on a TV screen from Omaha debating Bill Clinton about his national health legislation during a town-hall meeting. After the president estimates the profitability of Mr. Cain’s company, suggesting he can afford the legislation, Mr. Cain essentially dismantles the Clinton math, in detail. “The cost of your plan . . . will cause us to eliminate jobs.”

None of this can be put across in the televised debates’ explain-everything-in-30 seconds format. Nor is there any chance to elaborate his Sept. 7 debate remark that he admires Chile’s private-public social security system. Or his flat-tax “9-9-9” proposal. (Or any of the candidates’ policy ideas for that matter.) So voters get nothing, and Mr. Cain flounders.

When Mr. Cain talked to the Journal’s editors, the most startling thing he said, and which he’s been repeating lately, was that he could win one-third of the black vote. Seeing Herman Cain make his case to black audiences would be interesting, period. Years ago, describing his chauffeur father’s influence on him in Atlanta, Mr. Cain said: “My father gave me a sense of pride. He was the best damn chauffeur. He knew it, and everybody else knew it.” Here’s guessing he’d get more of this vote than past GOP candidates.

Does a résumé like Herman Cain’s add up to an American presidency? I used to think not. But after watching the American Idol system we’ve fallen into for discovering a president—with opinion polls, tongue slips and media caprice deciding front-runners and even presidents—I’m rewriting my presidential-selection software.

Conventional wisdom holds that this week’s Chris Christie boomlet means the GOP is desperate for a savior. The reality is that, at some point, Republicans will have to start drilling deeper on their own into the candidates they’ve got.

Put it this way: The GOP nominee is running against the incumbent president. Unlike the incumbent, Herman Cain has at least twice identified the causes of a large failing enterprise, designed goals, achieved them, and by all accounts inspired the people he was supposed to lead. Not least, Mr. Cain’s life experience suggests that, unlike the incumbent, he will adjust his ideas to reality.

Herman Cain is a credible candidate. Whether he deserves to be president is something voters will decide. But he deserves a serious look.

Any man that could reduce Der Schlickmeister into asking for his numbers deserves consideration; the fact he’s the only GOP candidate to actually formulate and present a plan for tax reform merits merits serious consideration.  And absent any other options, i.e., candidates currently in the race, Cain appeals to us far more than the originator of Romneycare or the Texas bumbler.

In a follow-up to yesterday’s item detailing Bev Perdue’s call for suspending the Constitution, Townhall.com‘s Guy Benson informs us the Tarheel Governor isn’t the only prominent Progressive espousing a little tyranny as the way out for the economic morass in which Team Tick-Tock has us mired:

Pete Orszag’s claim to fame is his recently-lapsed tenure as a powerful unelected federal bureaucrat.  More specifically, he was Barack Obama’s budget director:

To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic…Our polarized political system has proved incapable of reaching a consensus on this common-sense approach. What we need, then, are ways around our politicians…

And by “our politicians,” of course, he means “the people’s duly elected representatives.”  In case you were wondering, he’s building the case for de-democratizing America in the context of pining for more deficit spending.

As for Purdue’s claims she wuz jus’ goshin’, here she is in her own words; we report, you decide:

If it were laughs she was after, the joke fell on totally deaf ears.  Three other aspects of Perdue’s gaffe are worth noting; first, it reveals the true level of regard in which many, if not most, Progressives hold the Constitution.  Second, guess who’s up for reelection next year and currently enjoys an approval rating under 30%?  Finally, we were curious why a recording of the Governor’s words wasn’t available at the time news of her brief moment of honesty broke.  Turns out it did in fact exist….in the hands of the very same reporter from the Raleigh News & Observer who told everyone to trust him, it was all a joke.  Pretty funny, eh?!?

Turning from suspending the Constitution to the suspension of belief, the NRO’s Andrew Stiles calculates the true cost of The Obamao’s Second Stimulus, courtesy of Conn Carroll and the Morning Examiner:

Obama’s Jobs Plan: $1.6 Million Per Job

A Bear of a Problem for Obama

“You woke the bears! Why did you do that?”

The Obamao….personified!

That’s from one of my favorite scenes in “Anchorman.” In the Oscar-robbed film, Ron Burgundy (played by Will Ferrell) loudly leaps into a bear pit to rescue his girlfriend and then falsely blames her for waking them up.

Watching President Obama these days reminds me of that scene. In March 2010, liberal columnist Peter Beinart argued that, for decades, Democratic politicians treated America’s innate conservatism like a slumbering bear: If you make no sudden moves and talk quietly, you can get a lot done. But if you wake the bear, as Democrats did in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the ursine silent majority will punish you.

But Obama promised to change that. He was tired of the timid, almost apologetic talk. He was going to be an FDR, or at least a Reagan for liberalism. He was going to “fundamentally transform” the country. And to those who counseled that Democrats can’t govern that way, Obama and his followers responded with shouts of “Yes, we can!”

You might think it was those shouts that woke the bear, but that’s not what happened. After all, Obama enjoyed stunning popularity when he entered the Oval Office. No, it wasn’t words but deeds that roused the beast. The poorly crafted, deeply partisan stimulus was like a sharp stick to the bear’s belly. But it was “Obamacare” that ended the hibernation.

Despite his deployment of every rhetorical weapon in the progressive arsenal, Obama could never make the thing popular. At town hall meetings, the bear growled and snorted, in a posture that the experienced psephological woodsman understands means “leave the bear alone.” The Democratic response was to mock the grizzly. Nancy Pelosi even called the town hall protesters “un-American.” (An incredible affront Rick Perry unaccountably saw fit to duplicate.)

By July 2009, Gallup found Americans had attitudes that were “conspicuously incongruous with the results of the 2008 elections.” The 2010 midterm elections showed just how incongruous.

Of the myriad miscalculations made by Obama, among the most fateful has to be his assumption that a repudiation of George W. Bush was synonymous with a repudiation of conservatism. By Election Day in 2008, Bush’s approval rating was at 25 percent. You cannot get that low without losing a sizable slice of your base, particularly when self-described conservatives outnumber self-described liberals by roughly 2 to 1. It was their opposition to Bush’s big-government conservatism that made them the feedstock of the “tea parties.”

Obama probably understands this dynamic better as his own poll numbers sink not only among independents but with his base, which has convinced itself that his — and the country’s — problems stem from appeasing the conservative bear. Obama’s bizarre harangue of the Congressional Black Caucus on Saturday — “Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying” — was a testament to the cratering enthusiasm of his biggest supporters.

The dilemma for Obama is that non-liberals don’t see the situation the same way. As nearly every poll shows, more than 70 percent of Americans believe we’re on the wrong track, and the number of people calling themselves conservative continues to grow, as does the number of moderates who say they lean to the right. According to Pew, the average voter places himself twice as far from Democrats as he does from Republicans.

Moreover, notes Brookings Institution scholar William Galston, a domestic policy advisor under President Clinton, the average voter thinks the Democrats are much more liberal than the average liberal does. “So when independents, who see themselves as modestly right of center, say that Democrats are too liberal, average Democrats can’t imagine what they’re talking about.”

And it’s not just about labels (though labels matter). According to Gallup, Americans believe 51 cents out of every dollar sent to Washington is wasted. That’s rough terrain for selling more spending and higher taxes.

So here’s Obama in a very rough spot. He needs more than just his base to win, yet he can’t win without his base. But he can’t secure it without slapping the bear even more. And unlike Ron Burgundy, he’s really got no one to blame but himself.

Speaking of Bears, in today’s Sports Section, courtesy of G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors, we learn that a….

Member of ’85 Bears snubs Obama invitation

Former Chicago Bears defensive tackle Dan Hampton says he will not be joining his fellow teammates when they visit the White House next month. Hampton, a member of the Bears 1985 Super Bowl championship team, made the comments on Chicago’s Mully and Hanley radio show Monday.

“It’s my personal choice,” the four-time Pro Bowler said. “I don’t choose to go.”

Hampton said he was bothered that the invitation did not include players’ wives and children and added, “Secondly, I’m not a fan of the guy in the White House, and third, it was 25 years ago. Let it go.”

Obama, an ardent fan of his hometown team, extended an invite to the 1985 Super Bowl Champions last week. The team is scheduled to visit the White House on Oct. 7. Super Bowl champions are traditionally honored with a visit to the White House. But plans for the 1985 Bears to come to Washington were scrapped when the space shuttle Challenger exploded just days after their victory in January 1986.

“It basically just rolled off our backs, and now, 25 years later to say, ‘Let’s put the band back together.’ No, I’m not in,” Hampton said.

Which raises Hampton yet another notch on our Esteemometer!

On the Lighter Side….

Mañana!

Magoo