Posted on 10/31/2011 12:42:02 PM PDT by markomalley
With questions swirling about whether Politico’s Sunday night article exposing allegations of sexual harassment against GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain in the 1990s was an attack from the left or the right, Texas Governor Rick Perry’s campaign emphasized to The Daily Caller on Monday that the candidate now trailing Cain in the polls had nothing to do with the story.
“Not true,” Perry spokesman Mark Miner wrote in an email to TheDC when queried about speculation that the Perry campaign had anything to do with the report which charges that as CEO of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s Cain was accused of sexual harassment by two unnamed females.
Some observers are already pointing out that with GOP candidates jockeying to position themselves as the anti-Mitt Romney, Perry — who is currently trailing Cain in national polls and even slightly in his home state of Texas – would be the most likely to benefit from a Cain downfall.
Sunday night, following Politico’s publication of the article, on Fox News Channel’s “Geraldo at Large” conservative pundit Ann Coulter and liberal commentator Juan Williams gave dueling hypotheses over who was behind the article.
Coulter alleged that it was liberals who fear “strong, conservative black men.” Williams asserted that it is the Republican establishment.
“The negative research is in overdrive right now. Here is where Ann Coulter and I are going to go head to head,” said Williams. “She points to the liberals; they have been after Herman Cain. They have been saying he’s a bad apple….The news here is not about the liberal establishment. This is coming out of conservative precincts. This is the conservative Republican establishment going after Herman Cain because he’s lasting too long and is too much of a threat.”
Whoever was behind the story, the Perry camp is explicitly denying that it had anything to do with the Sunday story that Cain panned as “baseless” on Monday.
The Perry campaign added that it does not plan to issue a statement on the allegations against Cain.
Update: Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul firmly denied that the Romney campaign had any involvement with the story to TheDC Monday afternoon.
It still smells of Romney and Rove.
After thinking about this, I think it has Team Obama’s fingerprints on it. They have the time and resources. They don’t even have to make a big deal out of it if they are caught.
I believe that Obama has a strategy to deal with Romney, and the the OWS stuff is part of it. If they have something on Romney’s time with Bain that looks bad, they can try to ride that to victory. In Perry’s case, they would try to paint him as the second coming of George W. Bush. Neither of these work with Cain.
Has the Cain campaign been ruled out - just asking
In one of the other threads, I uncovered a top Perry supporter pushing this story.
Smells of LBJ Texas style politics.
Good. I despise Romney, but even so I can’t imagine him doing something like this, and I definitely can’t imagine Perry doing it.
On top of that, even leaving aside ethical considerations, there’d be no benefit in it to any of the top runners. I suspect that Cain has peaked and his inexperience is becoming a little too apparent, so simply letting him go on and make a few more silly statements will probably be sufficient to make him evaporate during the nearly 2 months between now and the first primary.
Also, the people who are fervent Cain fans are like the really rabid Palin fans, they’re very personally oriented and it’s not likely that they would transfer their affections to anybody else at this point.
Actually, the only person who stands to gain from this is Cain, who will get a lot of sympathy. After all, he had three weeks (from the time that Politico told him that they were going to release this and asked if he had any response) to prepare or even to preempt it by coming out first. But he didn’t, meaning he was either very naive or pretty certain it wouldn’t affect him with his followers.
That said, I think it’s an Obama attack. This is exactly what Bambi did to a rival in Chicago: he leaked dirt about the man’s ugly divorce just before the election. And I can see Obama being both vindictive enough and short-sighted enough to do something like this.
I bet that Romney is behind this...
Its just his style...
The knowledge of the Perry lease was known and it was true but the real story behind it was unknown. People knew of the lease as did Perry and it was coming out sometime.
This accusation actually happened and had a paper trail. Doesn't mean Cain did it but the accusation happened with some kind of small payout with the understanding this would be kept quiet.
This was not an underhanded move by anyone but just another nothings really there story on a skeleton Cain had in his closet.
Yeah, it's a classic, and it fits. After all, Perry himself claims he's a doer, not a talker.
Cain’s sin is being black and republican. Anita Hill redux. She was a fraud also.
It reeks of Romney.
Yes, but Lady Bird died.
I'll bet he has a file on every candidate running and will put out the smears on any of them that threaten to have a chance of getting the nomination.
That evil bastard can't be trusted. There was good reason that all the candidates running last time didn't like him.
You think Perry is above pulling a stunt like this? You don’t know his political “go to” team very well.
Don’t want to get into an argument here but it was the republicans who tried to destroy Perot with a bogus story that his daughter was lesbian and that he was paranoid that the Viet Cong was trying to kill him. None of the leaked stories were true. Just saying I wouldn’t put it past a republican elite.
As for obama, he doesn’t need a research team. He has the media in general.
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