For a professional writer, Mr. Caruba would seem to be forgetting his grade-school spelling and the repetitive drills everyone suffers through (for about twelve years, it seems) on recognizing and differentiating homonyms in the English language. I suspect he might also confuse "there" with "their" and "they're", "through" with "threw", "except" with "accept" and "week" with "weak".
It's really risky to just run an article through a spell-checker before it's to be published on the Web. If it gets read at all, it's likely to be copied, emailed, snipped and shipped to parties with potentially sharper eyes for usage and spelling errors than the author's own.
If by chance Mr. Caruba was using someone else's transcript of the Cain interviews he quoted in his column, it would be permissible to insert "(sic)" after any misspelled words; otherwise it tends to cast the subject as uneducated or illiterate, and we know Mr. Cain is neither.
I know, Caruba's defenders will contend this is not as bad as the out-of-context sound bites that are the stock-in-trade of TV newsrooms. I agree. That kind of "journalism" reflects poorly on all those reporters, editors, producers and talking heads that employ that method of generating higher ratings.
Regardless, writers need to make sure that a quote represents the best estimate of what the subject actually said, hems and haws included as appropriate--but not misspellings. Leave that for the candidates' media releases, where you'll likely find many.
Cain uses improper English (and I don’t mean the intentional lapses for dramatic effect). Am I nitpicking now? Well, the Founders used too many commas, so maybe it is OK.