Did Cain lie? I don’t acknowledge this. I can be persuaded, so feel free to correct me if you think I’m wrong, or am missing some pertinent facts, but as an attorney, if I’m “prosecuting” Cain, I know I have to show by other than hearsay that he knew what he said was false when he said it (“mens rea”), if I want to prove a lie, and I can’t do that with the stipulated facts.
For example, if he says there was no settlement, but he was aware of the payout of a marginal severance package, is it a lie to say there was no settlement? If one is strict with the meaning of words, you don’t have a settlement unless you have a lawsuit ready for hearing. To my knowledge, that never happened. Therefore, no lie.
My theory on why he didn’t prepare for or respond to these things all that well? He is a computer/math guy, not a politician with years of experience being up to his elbows in other people’s dirty tricks. He never imagined his enemies willingness to use and the broader electorate’s willingness to believe a string of forcefully presented but unproven lies. He underestimated Axelrod and overestimated the rest of us.
Remember that the Alynski school of politics designs an attack at precisely that point where your opponent enjoys his greatest strength among his own supporters. People quote the “isolate” principle all the time but they fail to recognize it when it is used against them. Isolation comes when you take a target whose strength is integrity and “show” he has none, whose strength is family values and you “show” him to be a cheater, or not really prolife, who strength is intellect and you amplify some single mental error all out of proportion to reality. By this you separate, or “isolate,” the target from the one group that could give him strength. Now he’s a sitting duck. Very effective. Evil, yes, but effective.
Bottom line, for me, is any of these front-runners (including the “also rans” and the “almost rans”), with the exceptions of Paul & Romney, would be infinitely better than what we have now, but because we are so willing to believe what we are told, and so haphazard in our analysis even when we do “question authority,” that we can be bamboozled into chasing ourselves into a cage from which we will not be able to escape.
Unfortunately, Cain started off denying something he had discussed only a few years earlier as a possible problem (the employment suits) and then went to half admissions and finally “recalled” the events in question once people emerged with documented witnesses.
I don’t care about his relationship with his wife; that’s their problem. But he should have been more honest. He probably didn’t expect to get that far and he also had a terrible campaign adviser or manager (don’t recall which) who most likely told him that the best approach would be a blanket denial followed by grudging admissions, ala Clinton. But the people who believed in him deserved better, I think.
In any case, there seem to be three left (leaving out Paul and Romney): Gingrich, Santorum and Perry. They all have their strengths, but I think the one who is most likely to get things done is Gingrich. I’d vote for any of these three, although I like Santorum the least simply because he doesn’t seem to have a lot of ideas and I honestly don’t think (based on his career as Senator) that he could get much done or would even try. However, he’d be better than Romney (and I think Paul will run 3rd party anyway).