Latino Rights Activists Seek to Sabotage GOP Primary

I saw your post.

Whew!

LOL!!!!

Cain was polling in single digits for the first half year of his campaign. I’m guessing you didn’t think he was a loser then.

Your boy crashed down into the single digits after being at 30%. Cain has gone straight up from Day One.

Big difference.

You conveniently omit Cain’s two degrees in the sciences, his stellar career at Pillsbury and his work as a ballistics expert for the Navy. You then disparage his time at Godfather’s by focusing on sheer size when what he did was take a failing company and return it to profitability.

Cain has gone straight up from Day One.

Actually, day 150 or so. Yes, if Perry hadn't started out with a high poll numbers, but had instead come in with 4%, he'd look a lot better now, theoretically.

But as I said in another post, McCain was high in the polls, dropped to single digits, and came back up when people started really paying attention, which they are not today.

In a typical poll, 68% of the respondents say they are not committed to the candidate choice they report, which means they could easily change their minds. In one recent Iowa poll, only 30% of those who chose Cain said they were committed to his candidacy -- meaning of his 31% number, only about 10% was firm.

Polls are interesting snapshots into the minds of voters. Anybody who makes decisions on which candidate to support based on a poll is an idiot.

who's biggest previous job was running a $40 million business with a few hundred employees, as an appointed CEO.

Where do you come up with this crap? When Cain left, Godfather's was a nearly $300 million dollar business with over 10,000 employees.

I didn’t post that for your benefit.

Just as a warning to others not to believe your uninformed rhetoric.

IF you can point me to a chart showing what years Godfather's was unprofitable, that would be interesting.

He's also an associate minister at his church.

I guess getting a math degree in college is an "acheivement" -- I didn't include it because it was a rather ordinary acheivement, as is a masters in computer science. I don't HAVE a masters in computer science, because it would be a useless degree for me, being as I've worked 30 years in the field often doing computer science; I didn't have a math degree, it was electrical engineering, although I needed a lot of math for my Graduate certificate in Signal Processing.

I don't know enough about the specifics of his work to know how much of an acheivement it was to be a ballistics analyst. I know he's said his job was important enough that the Navy asked him not to enlist in the military. But being good at calculating trajectories is hardly an applicable acheivement to the job of being President.

I tried to list the acheivements that were in any way at all germaine to the job he was applying for. I know that might have been confusing, because none of what I listed is really an accomplishment or acheivement that applies to the job either, but it's all we have for Cain, so I gave it my best shot.

He was a successful salesman and middle manager at Pillsbury -- at one point being put in charge of 400 Burger King stores. I read somewhere he improved their performance, but can't find financial data that gets specific enough to single out regions for a subsidiary of Pillsbury for 30 years ago. Again, being good at managing some burger franchises doesn't seem very applicable to the question of conservative acheivements that relate to being President of the United States.

As for his record at Godfather's, I'm loathe to use Wikipedia, but it gives a quick summary that looks somewhat like the detail numbers I've found in my research, and I'm in a hurry here: "Cain arrived on April 1, 1986, and told employees, "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." Cain, over a 30-month period, reduced the company from 640 stores to 563. As a result of his efforts, Godfather's Pizza sales were reduced from $275 million in 1986 to $242.5 million in 1988. Godfather's Pizza was performing poorly, and had slipped in ranks of pizza chains from 3rd in 1985 to fifth in 1988. In a leveraged buyout in 1988, Cain, Executive Vice-President and COO Ronald B. Gartlan and a group of investors, bought Godfather's from Pillsbury. Godfather's sales remained level with Cain as CEO, ending at $265 million for 540 stores in 1996, when he resigned."

So, did he "turn them around"? They were supposedly doing poorly, but after his "turnaround" their sales and rankings were worse, and Pillsbury sold them off at a loss, to Cain and company, where while he promised to make them a 1200-store company, they never grew revenue, and lost market share.

What other measurement than market share would YOU use to determine if, over the 10-year-period that Cain ran the company, they were "successful"?

Stories that say he brought back "profits" say he did so by closing the franchises that weren't making money.

What little facts are available show this: 2.5 years before Cain took over Godfather's, it had been purchased for $306 million dollars. 2.5 years after he took over, it was sold for $40 million. Is that a "turnaround"?

There is NOTHING in the Godfather's story that suggests Cain was a miracle worker. At best, he was a competent manager, able to recognize stores that needed to be shut down, and to find employees to fire. He wasn't able to grow the business, or achieve his goals, or to perform as well as other pizza companies. Those are the facts. Obviously, being able to do what he did is an acheivement; not everybody could take over a company and do anything but run it into the ground.

But when your ONLY claim to effective leadership is running a 300-person company, and that company essentially tred water during your term in power, that's not a big selling point.

What Cain has, and really about all he has, is that he is a great salesperson. That means he is a slick talker, he smiles a lot, he comes across as someone you would like to do business with. That didn't translate into votes in Georgia. But it might get him a nomination this time around. The question is, will that be enough to get him through a general election for the Presidency of the United States, a job that is quite a bit more complicated than a pizza chain, and that requires someone who can do a lot more than tred water.

You are mixing income with valuation; there is no valuation for the company when he left. We have two valuations for Godfather's on record. 2.5 years before Cain was appointed President, it was purchased for $306 million dollars. Two years later, it was part of a Pillsbury takeover, but no valuation is given. After 2.5 years of Cain running the company, Pillsbury gave up on the franchise, and sold it to Cain and his group, for an amount somewhere between $30 million and $40 million dollars (I said $40 million to put the most positive spin possible on it).

Here is one chart of Godfather's revenue; I cannot vouch for it's accuracy, as it was itself a work product from parsing through various corporate statements. But it's the best one I can find (numbers in millions):

1983: 340 1984: 365 1985: 325 1986: 275 (Cain arrives) 1987: 260 1988: 242 (Cain buys company) 1989: 225 1990: 229 1991: 231 1992: 242 1993: 249 1994: 244 1995: 260 1996: 265 (Cain steps down as CEO) 1997: 270 1998: 280 1999: 280 2000: 288 2001: 280 2002: 287 (Cain leaves board) 2003: 304

In no year that Cain was involved did Godfather's Pizza make as much money as they did in the year before he took over. And the best years with him on board were only 7 million more in sales than the year he took over, when it was supposedly at it's worst.

He was clearly competent, and people liked him, but that is not the record of a company taking off with superior leadership.

And those numbers were not adjusted for inflation -- to match his 1986 numbers under inflation, in 2002 they would have had to make over $500 million.

Note that many other pizza companies managed to grow revenue and get much bigger during the time he was running Godfather's. That's how his company lost market share; other CEOs managed their companies better, and earned more revenue, grew faster.

So sorry, it's a great acheivement to be able to run a pizza company, but he wasn't even the 10th best pizza company executive when he was done. Why aren't we trying to hire the president of Pizza Hut, or Dominoes -- who is also a solid conservative, if I remember correctly?

As to employees, you appear to be counting the employees at the stores, most of which are franchises, and all of which employees report to the store managers, as stores are operated independently. I was counting the employees in the management company. There simply aren't good records from the 80s showing how many employees the individual stores had. If you can find some, I'll be happy to quote them. When I use the 300 number, I usually compare it to the number of direct hires the President is responsible for. For example, the President has 3500 political appointees. And just the executive STAFF has a budget bigger than the entire revenue stream of Godfathers, and 5 times the employees.

And of course, the President is responsible for the entire federal executive workforce, AND the federal military workforce. That's 2.1 million civilian employees, and about 800 thousand military employees. Running a company with 300 staff employees and 10,000 total people really doesn't match up well. My county executive has better executive experience than Herman Cain, and has been charge of a larger budget and a bigger organization. And I would never claim that his job as county executive qualified him for President.