I think Herman Cain is an idiot and I agree with Chauncey DeVega that a lot of Cain’s shtick is putting on a race minstrel show to make conservatives feel good about having a new black friend. That said, is Cain really that much more ridiculous than Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney? I’m not seeing it. And why is it some joke that he was a CEO of a pizza chain? Fast food needs Galtian geniuses too. I don’t think Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich (let alone Sarah Palin) could run a pizza chain successfully.
I’m struggling to understand what makes one Republican candidate a serious GOP daddy and another a joke. Sure, Cain has never held office, but neither did he quit halfway through a first term.
Zifnab
Pizza is for poor people. That makes Cain the restaurant equivalent of a slum lord. The GOP has a place for slum lords and porn barons and the rest of the lower-crust mega-rich. That place just happens to be at the back of the bus.
Herman Caine doesn’t come from the same “stock” as Donald Trump or Mitt Romney. If you catch my meaning. *Wink*, *Nudge*, *Racist Dog Whistle*
psycholinguist
Because he doesn’t look like a republican president. I’m not being snarky, I really think at some level, that is a real thing – He’s black, and who in their right mind thinks that a black guy would win a republican primary?
Doug Harlan J
@Zifnab:
Yeah, that’s probably it.
KG
I’m pretty sure none of them could run a single franchise, let alone a chain.
I’m not sure who is suppose to be the serious candidates anymore, either. I get that Romney is, because, well, he’s run before and won some primaries. Otherwise… I don’t get it.
Jewish Steel
Virgil, quick, come see/There goes Tim Pawlenty
KG
@psycholinguist: Powell could have won in 2000 if he wanted the job. Otherwise, yeah, you’re probably right.
stuckinred
Boortz loves him!
cat48
I guess his wanting to go back to the Gold Standard sorta freaks me out. I’m sick of “taxbreaks” when taxes are at a 60 yr low.
Also, too, he didn’t have any idea what “right of return” was and had to be told. He doesn’t know what he’d do about Afghanistan, but would come up with “a plan.” I’m just not real sold on him managing our Foreign Policy.
The “minstrel act” is disgusting.
Doug Harlan J
@cat48:
Pawlenty has talked about going back to the gold standard too.
cervantes
Well this is pretty simple. Having a new Black friend gives conservatives cover, but most Republican primary voters are just too fundamentally racist to actually vote for the guy. They have already spent the past 2 1/2 years suffering the torment of the damned because the president has elevated melanin. They certainly aren’t going to subject themselves to at least 4 years of an even darker guy. QED.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
The permanent GOP nomenklatura don’t really want a successful businessperson at the top because they might not take as well to being told what to do by the likes of Dick Cheney compared with somebody more helpless and manageable. It wouldn’t do to have somebody get the wrong ideas into their head about who is really calling the shots.
cat48
@Doug Harlan J:
I hate TPaw, too. I just want Obummer to be my prez. I’m used to him now.
sukabi
EJ Dionne was on Hardball yesterday talking about Romney and how “presidential” he looks… the thing to remember about “presidential looks” as described and interpreted by our ‘betters’ in the media, is that what they think is ‘presidential’ are the following characteristics: tall, slim athletic build, a full head of straight, well coiffed hair, proportionately angular face with the right complexion, male, “from a ‘good family’ (code for ‘one of us’) with an education from one of the ‘chosen’ universities — and money, lots of money.
JGabriel
DougJ:
To the extent that Pawlenty and Multiple-Choice Mitt have at least held office before, yes, Cain’s ambition to be president is a little more ridiculous.
However, Cain is probably a less ridiculous choice than Trump. And Cain’s radio experience makes him a little less ridiculous than Palin — whose ability to speak extemporaneously remains roughly on par with that of a particularly stupid junior high cheerleader.
.
rikyrah
Cain is a clown, plain and simple.
Gin & Tonic
Love the Robbie Robertson hooks.
shortstop
Do the wingers who truly think that this guy can win the nomination also think that he’ll siphon black votes from Obama? Christ, they’re clueless.
Nothing wrong with running a pizza chain, but the fact that the Village focuses on this instead of all the stupid-ass stuff that comes out of Cain’s mouth shows that it really is all about class and aristocracy for these guys.
Yutsano
@sukabi: I never got who came up with the notion that Willard looks presidential. He always looked like a slicked up MBA type to me. I got that vibe way back when he was “saving” the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.
Brachiator
I don’t get it either, but I haven’t been paying much attention to the attempts to raise Cain. The GOP supposedly thinks that government should be run like a business, so Cain or Trump or Mittens Romney should all be equally likable to the supply siders.
@Jewish Steel:
Good one.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Jewish Steel:
“Take what you need and leave the rest” sounds terribly soshulist now, doesn’t it?
Nice title DougJ, BTW.
shortstop
@Yutsano: Agreed, but to them, he does. He’s a very non-threatening white guy with non-ironic Mad Men hair.
sukabi
@Yutsano: well, yeah… he looks “too slick” to me as well, I think it’s the dead, shark eyes… but to the folks that are controlling the dialog in DC from the current crop of candidates, he’s got the exact “look” they have in mind… except he’s not properly Christian.
wrb
Ain’t no more Cane on the Brazos
ooo–ooo-ooo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njRWa8LLsKE
Mark D
And if you’ve ever eaten at a Godfather’s, you know Cain wasn’t able to, either.
That pizza is horrific on numerous levels.
Zifnab
@KG: I honestly don’t know. John McCain could have won in 2000, too. But Bush played hard and dirty in South Carolina, and scuttled his chances. I doubt Powell would have done much better. Once the long knives came out, he’d have been torn to shreds.
MattF
I agree with you about Cain– being a CEO of a large company is a tough job. My test for “leadership” (the one that Steve Forbes failed) is “Could this person lead a class of third-graders across the street?” Cain passes, Pawlenty fails.
Cerberus
Top of the list: He’s black.
Oh sure, they’ll be glad to use him to shore up some “we’re totally not racist, how could you even think that when we have our own special black friend”, but this election in particular is getting out the paranoid racist white vote, the KKKers and the people who moved to the suburbs to escape all that “urban” crime wink wink nudge nudge say no more.
It’s what has been the main motivator of their most successful media ad campaign so far (the Tea Party). It’s what has been the thing that has best united their fractious branches after the black creature dared rise up and place itself in the Master’s House (this is their view, not mine). It’s the reason that the word Libertarian was first used as a mask.
This election in particular, there is simply no way a black person is getting the Republican nomination because for a substantial majority of Republican primary voters, a black Republican candidate is an admission of defeat on the racial fight they’ve been fighting since before their was a country.
They might accept a woman under duress because they assume that liberals are as stupid as they are and they believe that PUMAs were a real meaningful movement that they can harness as a necessary evil to expunge the black devil. And besides the female candidates playing at the edges make their dicks hard and love the Patriarchy as much as they do.
But a black candidate? In this election?
Well, a dog whistle is needed for that.
And thus, after over a decade of pimping the “CEO President” and how the only experience that should matter is being a “businessman” who has his eye on “business”, Herman Cain is, for reasons ill emphasized, “unserious” and a “joke candidate”.
And that’s exactly how it is.
Jewish Steel
Deep in the comments of the post Doug links to, Chauncey says:
Amen to that.
@Brachiator: @ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Thanks. I know you’ll believe me when I tell you this song is a blast to strum and do your best Levon Helm impression.
Joel
@Zifnab: It doesn’t help when the pizza joint in question is basically a less widespread version of Little Caesars.
Maybe if Cain ran a respectable joint like Pizza Hut, we’d be talking…
Console
Cain has better credentials than people give him credit for. He was also chairman of the Kansas City federal reserve board of directors and i’d imagine has good national political connections (was an advisor for dole, was a lobbyist). On paper I think he’s less of a joke than say Alan Keyes.
ChrisNYC
Cain has never held public office! He’s a joke because he thinks you can walk into the WH and just pick it up as you go along. Geez, even Palin has gotten her feet wet with dealing with a legislature. And, for a smarty pants like Obama, his state leg experience especially in IL, counts for a lot.
Look what happened with Arnold “government is easy” Schwarzenegger (sp?) in CA. (Reagan, I know. But that was a long time ago when things actually were simpler and slower.) Compare that to Brown — that guy is steeped in the governance of that massive, complicated state.
It shows how little Cain gets it that he says, “Hey, I know zero about actually doing the work of government but I can hack being Pres.”
ETA – I see someone’s already made this point. My bad.
Bobby Thomson
@Gin & Tonic:
Try Levon Helm.
gnomedad
@Console:
I agree, but, other issues aside, am I wrong to feel that a candidate for POTUS should have held some state or national elective office?
ETA:
@ChrisNYC:
Oops, you said it better:
I assume he didn’t literally say that, but, yeah, exactly.
Brachiator
@psycholinguist:
I agree with KG that Powell had a good chance in 2000.
But the GOP has poisoned their wells with their deference to and exploitation of racial anxiety since Obama’s election. But even here the GOP is schizophrenic. If you swear everlasting obedience to the Baby Jebus and the Invisible Hand of Everlasting prosperity, as with Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, then some Republicans can not get past their simple minded ethnicity tests.
shawntos
I see him more as a Vice Presidential Candidate you know in the Palin Model to draw in some of the black vote but never really having any real power. We all know how well that turned out…
Gin & Tonic
@Bobby Thomson: Sorry, but no.
Doug Harlan J
@ChrisNYC:
I think Arnold was better than most Republicans would have been, as bad he was. You think Duke Cunningham or Darrell Issa would have been a better governor?
PanAmerican
A not insignificant portion of the GOP voter pool will vote Obama over Cain strictly on skin tone. That was why Keyes got that bed rock crazy 27% rather than a standard 56/43 drubbing.
Bobby Thomson
@Gin & Tonic: Robbie is known for taking undeserved credit for things. See generally The Last Waltz.
BlueDWarrior
That reminds me of Lawrence O’Donnel’s brutal evisceration of the entire theme behind Ahnuld’s first Cali Gov run and Trump’s pseudo-campaign for president
Console
@gnomedad:
I think it’s a bit wrong headed. The president’s chief of staff is unelected but would be more conducive to being a president than being a Senator or something. But I don’t think it’s completely off base to want someone that’s been in the public spotlight as an elected official.
Gin & Tonic
@Bobby Thomson: Still, he is officially credited as the songwriter, and even Levon is quoted as referring to the historical research Robbie conducted in writing the song.
Kirk Spencer
@Console:
May I say here how much it concerns me that a FAIRTax and gold standard supporter was chairman of the KCFed?
stuckinred
Joanie covered it too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnS9M03F-fA
ChrisNYC
But I’m guessing you think Arnold was better because of his moderate policy stances, no?
Whatever happened in CA with the budget (which I don’t pretend to understand), was inexcusable, in a state that rich. Tourism, tech, entertainment, farming. MI or PA or OH would kill for just one of those industries. CA is rolling in money. And I get that their system of governance is bizarre with the referendums and all but that’s the gov’s job, to navigate that stuff.
Dennis SGMM
@Doug Harlan J:
It cracks me up when these people advocate a return to the gold standard. There is roughly $855.2Bn worth of US currency in circulation. Divide that by the current price of gold ($1542/oz) and the gov would have to pay a staggering amount of money for sufficient gold to back all of our currency – and that’s not even allowing for the inevitable rise in price that would attend to the gov’s buying gold hand over fist. Going back to the gold standard would also strengthen the dollar which would lead to cheaper imports and more expensive exports. The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency so what’s the point (Other than contrarianism) of going backwards?
Martin
Discipline and whether the party can build off of them. They felt they could build off of Bush. He’d bring in money, he’d bring in a certain voter demographic, and they’d build off of him. Look at what they did with Reagan.
Parties build off of icons – the party of Lincoln, the party of Kennedy, the party of Reagan, the party of JFK. Obama will be an icon. You could tell that from the outset, and not because he’s black. He has a clear identity that is beneficial to the party. Who in the GOP right now looks like an icon – someone with a clear identity that in a generation you could look back and invoke their name and have that stand for something positive? I don’t see it in Cain. Most don’t see it in Palin, though the first woman president will always have that to some degree.
And it’s something that needs to be built up. Obama started back during the 2004 convention and went from there, but he suffered early on because only those that pay attention knew him – the general public didn’t, so that had to be built up even further. Even people that pay attention don’t know who the fuck Cain is.
Cerberus
@sukabi:
Yup, “looks presidential” basically means “looks like what you’d send out to Central Casting when looking for a generic president for your low-budget movie”.
Well, that and white rich Christian straight male.
Great thing about speaking only in dog whistles is that you can basically argue for rule from one specific subset of the population while only sounding like a complete idiot.
Cerberus
@shawntos:
I highly doubt that, simply because they have way too many “dumb photogenic puppets” in the Race right now so the Party will need its VP slot for its Dick Cheney, power behind the throne candidate if they manage to successfully steal the election.
Bubblegum Tate
@Doug Harlan J:
Agreed. Not defending the guy or saying he was good, but man, he really could’ve been awful. He came into office threatening to go full metal wingnut, but when he got slapped down very emphatically in that special election dealie, he did something that no wingnut ever does: He admitted he was wrong, and he changed course.
But anyway, this Herman Cain fella? I bet very few of the teabaggers who are wanking over him would actually vote for him in a primary.
aimai
@Doug Harlan J:
I agree that this is underlying the “Cain can’t be serious” argument. But you can’t discount race. Who is the religious nut/fat white guy who is also a Pizza king? Can’t remember his name but he used to be huge, as it were, among the evangelicals. He was pudgy and friendly and overflowing with CEO and sentimental “values” style charm. If he were Cain I think he’d be getting the same treatment that Romney got before the tea party savaged him. (ie pretty favorable).
aimai
Marmot
This thing with Cain reminds me of when I worked for a medical association — the old-school doctors on its board rotated through various positions of power each year. When it was time for the Chinese guy to become president, the others kind of snickered and treated him as a joke. He did a fine job, though. Naturally.
I’m usually against knee-jerk accusations of racism, but I think that’s the only explanation for how they treat Cain. If one of those other Repub nominee candidates was somehow less crazy, more articulate, or more presentable, I’d feel differently. But they’re all terrible.
The Other Chuck
I remember Godfather’s Pizza when I was a kid, but everywhere I’ve been from Nebraska to New York to Colorado to California, I haven’t seen a Godfather’s Pizza in almost 30 years.
The guy took a national chain and turned it into a forgotten regional one. But the GOP rewards failure above all else, so hey, feel the Cainmentum.
Paul in KY
@Bobby Thomson: Levon sings it, but Robbie wrote it (at least his name is on as the writer). I think Levon would have had quite a fight going on if he’d wrote the song & Robbie had stolen it from him.
KG
@Zifnab: My guess is if Powell got in the race early, he’d have picked up the establishment support and there’d be no room for GWB. Nowadays? Not so much, because, well, crazy.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Brachiator:
I think there is a John Mitchell being brought in to play football at Alabama in after they got stomped at home by USC and Sam “Bam” Cunningham the previous season effect going on here. It is fine to have some of them on your team if that is what it takes to win. But just how acceptable that is it depends on the position. Running back is OK, quarterback, not so much. So the GOP today is in a state with regard to minority candidates something like early 1970s college football was in the south.
Martin
@Bubblegum Tate: Well, Arnold was pretty devastating on the budget front. Restructuring things is going to painful as hell because he neglected the problem for so long. Davis was recalled for finding proper solutions to the issue, and Arnold pretty much had to find improper solutions given how he got into office.
Citizen Alan
So since I can’t bring my self to listen to the insane dribblings of anyone who want the nomination of the Psychotic Death-Cult Party, can someone tell me what they think Cain’s deal is? Is he a mentally unbalanced, self-loathing black man (ala Clarence Thomas) who is a Republican because he despises all African-Americans? Or is he just an incredibly rich guy who ultimately favors a plutocracy and doesn’t care about race except where he can use it to his advantage? Or somewhere in between?
chaunceydevega
Thanks for the link love. Here is a follow up that was ill timed. If I waited a week or so it would have circulated more widely (a few places were going to run it, but backed out because it was too “provocative”. Maybe folks can resurrect it…
āAwww Shucky Ducky!ā Herman Cain Plays the Black Buffoon as He Announces his 2012 Presidential Campaign Run
Peace.
PhoenixRising
Cain is a less ridiculous choice than Ross Perot, in that he has ever HAD a position in which he was responsible to something other than shareholder value (Fed KC and probably the Western MO Boys and Girls Club or somesuch)
And the main difference between the two besides race is that he’s not ridiculous, i.e. delusional, enough to start his own party. Instead he’s working through the existing channel for “self-made” capitalist winnah! to reach the voters for the very first time: the GOP primary.
Bottom line, based on past performance and present day ability to speak three coherent sentences in response to a question, he’s far more capable than at least 3 of the “serious” candidates (Palin, Bachmann, T-Paw). Capacities that, G-d willing, will be wasted on flat-out racist Republican primary voters (but I repeat myself).
Brachiator
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I think that people have gone overboard in making the GOP entirely racist. There is a core of the Republican Party that is driven by ideology and the belief in corporations uber alles. But just as Nixon cynically exploited race with his Southern Strategy, the GOP has been even more craven in exploiting racial anxiety.
But most of what I’ve read indicated that the GOP was eager to embrace Colin Powell as a presidential candidate, but they were more concerned about his ideological purity than his ethnicity.
Similarly, there are conservatives and evangelicals who view Bobby Jindal, a Roman Catholic, more favorably than they view Mitt Romney, a Mormon. And anyone who downplays Nikki Haley’s victory in South Carolina just isn’t paying attention. I mean, how else can you explain the fact that Haley has won the “Strom Thurmond Excellence in Public Service and Government” Award?
Svensker
@Gin & Tonic:
Robbie wrote it with Levon in mind and of course, Levon sang it. Real good, too.
Bubblegum Tate
@Martin:
I wasn’t a huge Davis fan, but man, that recall was a gigantic load of horseshit.
alwhite
How do you define “successful pizza chain”? Years back there were 30-40 Gutfathers around here, today there is one that I know of and another 80 miles away. If he did that all by himself I would not say he is a producer.
The Tim Channel
From all outward appearances, he’s a smart guy who ran a successful business. There’s only one problem. He’s Black.
This ends today’s lesson on why not all the candidates are given equal stature, PARTICULARLY within the circle of racists running the Tea Party GOP. Fundamentalist religious folks are convinced that the Black people are being punished for killing Abel, figuring God turned Cain (of the Bible…lol) Black as punishment. That is actually Mormon doctrine, although I know it’s not exclusive to them. Romney’s Mormon contingent will never vote for a Black guy. They only let Blacks into the Mormon church something like ten minutes ago in historical perspective (1970’s).
Don’t suppose it helps that the only Black guy in the Republican primary shares such a sensitive Biblical name.
Enjoy.
Brachiator
@Martin:
California budget problems simmered long before Arnold became the Governator. He was as much stymied by the 2/3 rule and standard Sacramento gridlock as were his predecessors.
Davis got thrown out more for his failure to deal with California’s energy crisis even more than for anything having to do with the California budget.
Paul in KY
@The Tim Channel: As others have been saying, how successful has he been? I haven’t seen a Godfathers in Central KY, yet years ago I used to see TV ads for them all the time.
El Cid
People should look at his actual business background.
What he is is a guy who worked himself up from nothing, and became a hugely successful executive famed for rescuing Pillsbury corporate branches falling under and bringing them back to profitability.
He may be on the quite far libertarian right (not really more than any such GOP fruitcakes), but as a person he’s incredibly well accomplished.
People who dismiss him as running ‘a pizza chain’ are ignorant of the facts and frankly quite asses.
That’s not a fucking joke career, and if someone wants to make fun of Cain, it should be for the crazy shit he says and writes and broadcasts and promises he would do; and the way he completely kisses ass (like Hannity), literally contradicting his own points if the caller or interview subject says some different right wing thing.
He was associated with Godfather’s pizza at first because the owner of the chain, Pillsbury, fucking sent him there to save it, and he did.
And it was doing so well, he and others bought it, and it was pretty damned successful for a while.
So don’t fucking joke around about the guy’s career; he kicked ass and came from ‘nothing’ as far as family wealth.
Clarence Thomas did the same — but Thomas isn’t an ass because of where he studied and ‘worked’ (using that term for a legal & judicial career), but because he’s a complete unprincipled hack asshole.
Cain isn’t a joke because he owned a pizza chain — people can’t stand Tom Moynaghan of Domino’s because he owns Domino’s, but because he’s a super-extreme right winger funding all sorts of anti-choice nutbag asses.
I can’t stand the Coors family not because they are beer magnates, but because they’re ultra-right wing fuckers.
Besides thinking it’s wrong to make so silly light of his business career, it just comes off pretty wrong for anyone who actually knows anything about the guy.
Don’t get me wrong, I can’t stand him and wouldn’t let him near any public position (thank god the influence of a single director of a Fed can’t send the whole thing crashing down in flames) much less in one.
El Cid
@Bubblegum Tate: What I fucking loathe these recall assholes — not just Issa and the other backers but the god-damned voters — is that the major public issue was the big raise in the vehicle fee.
Because, you know, you couldn’t raise income or property taxes and yet people don’t want their precious services cut, so you need fucking revenue from somewhere.
And the budget was like $17 billion (I’m not Googling for it) and they were anticipating a $10 billion deficit already.
And Arnie gets in there and triumphantly gets rid of that vehicle fee that all the outraged voters for the recall hated.
Instantly it blows a $7 billion hole in the budget, increasing the deficit by say 2/3rds or more.
And suddenly all these dumb ass jerkwad commentators (I’m leaving out the manipulators who use deficits to destroy programs they don’t like) and fuckwad voters somehow are shocked that now they have a gigantic budget deficit to make up.
What did you think, mother fuckers? I don’t give a shit how ‘low information’ you are — if you people hate a government fee, you have no excuse whatsoever to not understand that removing a fee loses the budget whatever money that fee took in.
What’s more, voter or not, if you’re going to open your loud mouth on how much you hate it (and not just because the amount you’re paying, and omigod it’s so much worse if you pay it in one chunk rather than split up in a million less obvious fees), then you have no excuse not to know two simple fucking things (given that state’s can’t run budget deficits):
(1) Know how fucking much that fee was going to take in for the budget;
(2) And know in advance — i.e., at the very time you are screaming to stop all da dam’ spendin’ and gubmit waste — what you’re going to cut at the same god-damned time to make up the amount you’re losing from the fee revenue.
But, no, people (and I don’t mean just CA) want to be god-damned idiots and think that they’re still going to get all the stuff the state and indirectly the state-backed local governments are doing for them, but do so without all the revenue you just cut off.
And for me, in this case, it’s so damned offensive because you had the actual number of dollars so that you knew exactly what chunk would be taken out of the budget revenue.
Instead the punditariat and so many damned people acted shocked when they discovered they were now in ‘a budget crisis’.
Yeah, no shit, morons.
jl
@Brachiator: I disagree. Arnold made any promise and any plan (including his own promises and plans) impossible by allowing tax cuts to occur when he entered office, particularly the vehicle license fee.
What was advertised as a big government tax increase in the vehicle license fee, was actually part of a plan to even out the CA tax receipts over the business cycle. And the unevenness of the CA tax receipts over the business cycle was a well known problem before Arnold was elected, even though Arnold himself whined about the problem, like he discovered it, after trying to solve the budge crisis, with no success for several years.
I just pulled up a news article from when Schwarzenegger was elected, and one of the first things he did was to repeal the vehicle license fee increase by executive order, and opposed any return to the previous license fee setting policy that was used as a tool to deal with the state deficit.
That single policy sabotaged his plan to deal with the deficit for the first couple of years in office.
I think Arnold is semi good on some issues, like climate change, health and recreation, and energy, though he is flawed in those areas because I think he weasles around to get things done exactly his way, no matter what compromise was passed.
But on fiscal policy and taxes, Szwarzenegger is a reactionary extremist, and he gets no excuses whatever for his failure at solving the CA budget crisis. He destroyed any possible for any plan to fix it as part of one of his first acts in office, and continued that policy without exception. His policies in that area were a complete failure and he deserves a large part of the blame.
Edit: I live in CA and own a care in CA. The vehicle license (or registration) fee is so low its a joke. The only real money you have to worry when you register your car is if you forgot about paying a couple of parking tickets. Anyone who can own a good car can pay a higher fee, and it would be worth it, considering the damage the CA fiscal crisis is doing to public safety, education, and health care programs.
Chuck Butcher
Why would Cain be a joke candidate? Why would the joke have anything to do with his resume?
GOP Primary – Black Guy
Joke
ruemara
mmm I don’t really think the pizza thing is a joke, and El Cid has posted excellent summations of the fact that Herman Cain is great business type. I think the point that should be made is that government is not business and this man is simply not knowledgeable about government and law. He’s not stupid, he’s ignorant of things outside his field.
and the gop black guy thing? I once did a cartoon, back when we (my partner & I) were still doing cartoons. “diversity means just like me, only browner”
Brachiator
@jl:
The vehicle license fee was and is a trivial part of the larger structural deficit that California faces.
I’ve also seen car dealerships close by the truckloads and those that remain have been temporarily shored up by the federal new car tax credit that expired last year, and some of the federal and state hybrid vehicle credits and benefits that are currently expiring. It is damned odd that people want to talk about increasing the vehicle tax on the one hand while applauding new car tax incentives on the other.
And the notion that the vehicle fee was an easy solution also fails to note the impact of relatively heavy state and local sales tax rates, over 10% in some middle income cities and which impacts poor people more heavily than the affluent.
The larger problem is the ongoing gridlock in Sacramento and also fantasies among Democrats, the Republicans and the public.
For example, some think that you can just balance the California budget by taxing the rich. I am big time in favor of the progressive tax system (as opposed to any flat tax), but I challenge anyone to go to the LA Times California budget balancer and try your hand at balancing the budget.
By the way, this is not to defend the Governator, but only to place his failure to get much done on the budget in the context of decades of failure by our elected leaders to do anything.
Bender
Hey Doug, why don’t you just stop beating around the bush and call him (behind his back, like a coward) an Uncle Tom Oreo House Negro Blackfaced Minstrel, like you and your kind have done to every black Republican from Condi to Watts to Steele to West to Lollar to Cain. It shows you’re all just racists who temporarily suspend their racism for blacks who are useful to you in electing lefty candidates.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Heavens to Murgatroyd, The Greater ABL Thought Police Department will soon be leveling some very serious charges in your direction.
.
.
jl
@Brachiator: The vehicle license fee was just an example of Scwharznegger’s reactionary tax policy that doomed his proposals to balance the budget. That is why I specified that his executive order repealing the increase was the cause of his initial failure.
From what I have read, a policy of periodic changes in the license fee was designed to be, in historical fact, part of package of tax policies that would smooth out the CA budget over business cycles. It cannot alone solve the current budget crisis, but given the magnitude of the 2008 recession and financial panic, it is doubtful that any plan from the early 2000s would be adequate.
Thanks for the link to CA budget balancer page. Some modest tax increases make a substantial dent in the budget deficit, so I am not sure how it supports your point.
My point was not that the CA budget crisis can be solved by tax increases alone. I agree that the total state per capita spending is unsupportable. The problem is the mix of tax cuts and spending cuts that is best.
My point was that Scwharzenegger is an extremist on tax policy, and that position prevented him from making any realistic proposals to solve the CA budget crisis. Arnold was not completely a victim of circumstances before or after 2008, and was in fact one of the major problems preventing a solution before 2008.
Any politician who proposed no program changes or spending cuts at all could not produce a realistic proposal to solve the CA budget crisis, either.
Jim Pharo
I think we’re fools to underestimate Cain. I think he’s their best shot at this point. The fact that he’s both of the Establishment and not of the Establishment is a position that GOP nominees often use to great effect.
Somebody’s gotta win the nomination…I think Cain could be very effective in ridding the field of…just about everyone else.
Cain-menton!
Observer
@Jewish Steel:
Herman Cain is my name
And I worked at my pizza chain
’till Obama’s calvary came
and tore up the business again
in the winter I was 65,
we were hungry just a barely alive
by May the 10 when the deficit fell
it was a time, I remember oh so well
the night they drove Dick Cheney down,
all the bells were ringin’
the night they drove Dick Cheney down,
the people were singin’
They went, “Na, na, na”
back with my wife in tensessee,
when one day she called out to me
“Herman quick come see”,
there’s goes the Tea Party
Now, I don’t mind chopping wood
and I don’t care if my health care’s no good
you fake when you bleed and you leave a mess
but they should never have taken the very best
the night they drove Dick Cheney down
all the bells were ringin’
the night they drove Dick Cheney down,
the people were singin’
They went, “Na, na, na”
Like my father before me, I will vote for Bush
and like my brother above me, who heard the rebel Rush,
He was just eighteen, proud and brave,
but a librul laid him in his grave,
I swear by the crust below my feet
you can’t raise a pizza chain up
when it’s in defeat
the night they drove Dick Cheney down,
all the bells were ringin’
the night they drove Dick Cheney down,
the people were singin’
They went, “Na, na, na”
Jewish Steel
@Observer: Good grief! Well-fucking-done, Observer.
Obviously, Balloon Juice needs a weekly radio show.
EnfantTerrible
Herman Cain is Alan Keyes with money.