Karl Rove went on the Fox News “America’s Newsroom” show Monday
morning to explain that recent gaffes by Herman Cain have created
the perception that the Atlanta businessman is “not up to the task”
as a Republican presidential candidate. Rove used a whiteboard to
illustrate his verdict on Cain’s inadequacy, citing polls as
evidence that the Tea Party-backed candidate had “peaked” Oct. 6-10
and telling host Martha MacCallum that the impression created by
Cain’s gaffes was “really deadly.”
Republican voters evidently aren’t in much of a mood to
take advice from Karl Rove these days, because scarcely had the
former top Bush strategist pronounced Cain’s doom than new polls
showed the GOP front-runner still going strong. A
CBS/New York Times poll released Tuesday had Cain
leading former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by four points
(25%-21%) and, as if to put an exclamation point on the refutation
of Rove’s verdict, a
Fox News poll released Wednesday showed Cain with the same
four-point margin (24%-20%) over Romney. Both of those polls were
taken after the Oct.
19 debate in Las Vegas and the Fox poll was taken after Cain
had spent several days embroiled in a controversy over his views on
abortion.
Cain’s momentum has clearly slowed since the astonishing
three-week surge that followed his
upset victory in the Sept. 24 Florida GOP straw poll, but such
a pace could scarcely be expected to continue forever. Rather than
saying Cain has “peaked,” however, it would seem more apt to say
that the past two weeks have solidified his status as the 2012
front-runner. As of yesterday, for the eighth consecutive day, Cain
maintained a narrow edge over Romney in the
Real Clear Politics average, despite constant criticism from
Rove and other pundits who never miss an opportunity to declare
that the political newcomer can’t possibly win. And according to
all the standard measures, Cain’s candidacy does look impossible.
But from the beginning, the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO has vowed
to run an “outside the box” campaign and the standard measures may
not be applicable to such an unorthodox strategy.
One expert who isn’t afraid to admit the difficulty of
figuring the odds on Cain is Nate Silver, wizard of political
statistics at the New York Times. Examining the gap
between the weak “fundamentals” of Cain’s campaign and his high
poll numbers,
Silver concluded that “there is either something fundamentally
unusual about this year’s Republican nomination process, or perhaps
that some sort of ‘new normal’ has been established and that the
old rules of how you win a nomination no longer carry as much
weight.” And as far as trying to predict the chances of Cain’s
future success, Silver threw up his hands: “Not only do I not know
how I would go about estimating the likelihood that Mr. Cain will
win the Republican nomination — I’m not sure that there is a
good way to do so at all.” In other words, Cain’s success
represents a journey into uncharted political waters, like an
ancient explorer sailing off toward the part of the map where the
legend reads, “Here Be Dragons.”
At this point, even the campaign’s “gaffes” seem to be
helping rather than hurting Cain. Commentators poked fun at a
YouTube
video in which Cain’s chief of staff Mark Block declares,
“Tomorrow is one day closer to the White House.… We’ve run a
campaign like nobody’s ever seen, but then America’s never seen a
candidate like Herman Cain. We need you to get involved because
together, we can do this. We can take this country back.” The video
ends with Block puffing on a cigarette, a gesture that caused
eye-rolling reactions from critics and helped turn Block’s YouTube
debut into a “viral” online sensation, with nearly a million views
in the first week after it was posted. One Republican consultant
remarked that cable TV news shows seemed more interested in
discussing Block’s video than in talking about Texas Gov. Rick
Perry’s flat-tax proposal.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere at Cain’s Atlanta headquarters
is “crazy, hectic, but fine,” campaign spokesman J.D. Gordon said
in a telephone interview last night. “We’re doing well. We’re
raising a million dollars a week and we’re expanding staff rapidly.
We’re happy with the direction we’re going in.” The increase in
staff includes an expansion of Cain’s much-criticized operations in
Iowa, where the campaign recently
hired former state GOP chairman Steve Grubbs to lead its effort
in the Hawkeye State. Gordon said that Cain, who just returned from
a two-day trip to Iowa, will be soon spending more time in the
state that holds its first-in-the-nation caucus Jan. 3, now barely
nine weeks away.
Complaints about the chaotic conditions inside Cain’s
organization were highlighted in a
New York Times article yesterday, which the
candidate’s spokesman shrugged off. “It was sour grapes for some of
the people who left the campaign,” Gordon said of the complaints.
“The one individual quoted [by name] in the story, he worked for
the campaign for less than a month out in Iowa… in June, so I don’t
know how much insight he had into the campaign, but I’m guessing,
not much.” Staff troubles have plagued the Cain campaign for months
(I
reported on complaints about his Iowa operation in July), but
his rapid ascent to national front-runner status has brought new
scrutiny to those problems.
Well-connected
GOP consultant Ali Akbar, who has heard many complaints about
the Cain operation, wrote yesterday: “To understand this article in
proper context, you would have had to work on a dark horse
longshot campaign. Rules and methods are different.…
Volunteers rise to coordinators and staff positions quickly.… It’s
not a pretty sight, but many tea party readers know exactly what
I’m talking about.” The clashing of egos is routine within all
campaigns. However, as many Tea Party activists have learned in the
past two years, the problems can be worse when the egos involved
are not veteran professional operatives but rather enthusiastic
volunteers new to the game. As much as grassroots conservatives may
loathe the hired-gun mentality of Republican operatives whose
loyalties are for rent to the highest bidder, valuing loyalty over
professional competence creates other problems. And these kinds of
problems — ubiquitous within Tea Party-backed insurgent campaigns
during last year’s mid-term elections — must now be worked out by
Cain’s staff under the media glare of a fast-rising presidential
campaign.
What Cain is doing has never been done before, because
it’s never been tried before. Harnessing the grassroots energy of
the Tea Party movement to propel a political novice to the White
House isn’t the kind of project that a professional operative like
Karl Rove could be expected to endorse, and the odds of Cain’s
success are a mystery even to experts like Nate Silver. And yet the
expedition sails onward, into uncharted seas where dragons
legendarily lurk.
