But his chief of staff, Mark Block, has done Herman, and the Republican party, a disservice with the way this campaign is being run. This is amateur hour. It has to be textbook for how NOT to run a campaign. The only reason why Cain is neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney is because of Herman, period. Certainly not because of any credible advice from his advisors.
The main litmus test I use to judge a person is the quality of people they surround themselves with. Have they hung out with people who accomplished great things themselves? Do they hang with others who are "yes" men or those who bring vibrant life experiences to play and can (and do) challenge the person when they say stupid things? The world is not black and white, but has pastels and shades of every color. The fact that people can tune in to opinions that validate their world view means there's a rich set of material out there that has to be debunked, challenged, or accepted at face value and wrestled with (the fact that Liberals are more prone to do this than Conservatives is an issue I'll discuss in another post, but it's why they can't articulate a coherent Conservative issue to logically refute). I see Herman has surrounded himself with a win-at-all-costs-damn-the-principles characters, and this disappoints me. Not that Barack has surrounded himself with stellar advisors of high quality (even ones that had some life experienced have been relegated to radicals who've come through academia, rather than the crucible of the private sector, where ideas are put to the test every hour of every day).
So I felt this article begins to scratch at the surface of some of my complaints against the Cain campaign. Liberal or Conservative, I think it raises some truth that one can walk away with, namely the double-standard of the media, and the lack of standards being applied by Herman's team.
By Carl M. Cannon - November 9, 2011
Herman Cain has met the enemy and he is us. The media, that is.
Not his libido. Not his lack of impulse control. Not his changing stories. Not his flaky campaign manager. Not the “Mad Men” environment of the restaurant business, or the evolving standards of male-female behavior -- not even the sometimes ephemeral standards of sexual harassment.
No, his problems stem from the First Amendment. He’s the victim, not the growing roster of women who have accused him of boorish behavior. Anonymous sources! Hidden agendas! Sensationalism in the Fourth Estate! Yes, that’s the true scandal here. That’s his story, anyway, and he’s sticking to it. So is his lawyer.
“Herman Cain finds himself on trial in the court of public opinion . . . where there are no rules except those made up by the media,” Lin Wood, Cain’s high-dollar defense lawyer, groused on Tuesday.
“Don’t even go there,” Cain scolded a reporter who tried to ask him about the accusations a day earlier.
“Can I ask my question?” the surprised reporter asked.
“No!” Cain replied, before adding, bafflingly: “Where’s my chief of staff? Please send him the journalistic code of ethics.”
Say what? It’s hard to know what Cain had in mind, just as it’s hard to fathom what campaign manager Mark Block was doing when he breathlessly told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he had “confirmed” that the son of one of Cain’s alleged victims worked for Politico, the news outlet that broke the original story.
Except that the journalist in question, Josh Kraushaar, is not related to Karen Kraushaar, the former National Restaurant Association employee who brought sexual harassment claims against Cain and was given a cash settlement for her troubles. Nor does Josh Kraushaar work for Politico. He works for Hotline, a rival news outlet owned by Atlantic Media. Josh did work briefly at Politico, but that was 16 months ago -- before anyone had ever heard of Herman Cain.
Let’s return to that “journalism code of ethics” crack of Cain’s for a minute, though. I’m going to pull rank on him here.
Herman Cain made his reputation working for Burger King and Godfather’s Pizza. I like hamburgers as much as the next man (Big Macs more than Whoppers), and I ordered a carryout pizza for my kids the night of Cain’s latest press conference. And although I worked in a pizza parlor and a burger joint in high school, I don’t presume to know as much about the fast-food business as Cain. And he damn sure doesn’t know as much as I do about journalism.
I was born and raised in the news business. My father was -- and is -- a highly respected reporter and presidential biographer. I have a college degree in journalism, and have worked for 35 years as a reporter and editor, and covered every presidential campaign since 1984. I’ve worked on newspapers, magazines, and online organizations, including this one. I’ve written books, done investigative reporting, won several of the prestigious journalism awards, lectured at colleges, been a writing coach, and done in-depth media criticism.
I have delved more deeply into the ethical obligations of journalists than anyone running for president in 2012. Although not a conservative myself, I’ve long been troubled by the pervasive liberal slant of political reporting in the mainstream media. I’ve written about this problem -- and named names -- and strained friendships over it. I was disgusted by the one-sided political coverage in 2008, particularly concerning Sarah Palin, and said so in print.
And yet, my view is that Herman Cain and his conservative defenders couldn’t be more wrong about the
duty of the press corps.
Cain wants to be president of the United States. He’s never held elective office before, has displayed only cursory knowledge of domestic politics and international affairs, has passed others’ words off as his own, and has made several dubious statements about sensitive public issues. These have ranged from suggesting a fence between Mexico and the United States be electrified to asserting that he wouldn’t put a Muslim in his Cabinet. When these statements received critical news coverage, Cain responded: He claimed he was joking about wanting to electrocute illegal immigrants, and issued an abject apology to Muslims.
That’s how self-government works. These candidates say what they’d do as president (“9-9-9”), and we examine their ideas. That’s as it must be. The presidency of the United States is a temporary job but the person who holds it possesses more power than any single person on this planet. So Americans want to know the character and temperament of the individual they are putting into office.
Is the candidate sufficiently worldly? Is he (or she) tough enough, smart enough, empathetic enough? Do their policies make any sense? Will they keep us out of war? Will they help the poor? Do they know anything about the economy? Can we envision their family in the White House? Is the candidate a bully?
These are the questions voters turn over in their minds. Any reporter who doesn’t think sexual harassment is a legitimate area of inquiry ought to turn in his press pass to a younger, hungrier reporter and become a food critic or travel writer. Examining how Herman Cain treated the women at the restaurant association is exactly the role of the press.
Most conservatives know this, but they have issues with the media. I had an exchange of emails about Cain with a movement conservative from my home state of California. His name is Mark Meckler, and he’s co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. He’s uncompromisingly conservative, but a principled guy; and I wondered what he thought about a candidate accused of serial groping.
Mark didn’t speak directly to the Cain allegations. Instead, he compared the feeding frenzy on the Cain story to the almost defiant refusal of the mainstream media to report on the John Edwards sex scandal until after Edwards was no longer a 2008 Democratic candidate. Mark called it an “obvious double standard,” concluding his message with this thought: “The history of journalism of this era will be one of blatant bias and an amazing lack of responsibility and professionalism.”
Those words ought to bother my journalistic brethren more than they do: The double standard is not imaginary, and has helped sustain the career of Rush Limbaugh and his imitators who this week were noisily defending Herman Cain and attacking his accusers and the mainstream media.
But blind partisanship is a distorting instinct, whichever side is doing it, and leads its practitioners to some strange rhetorical places. “Sexual harassment is a political tool of the left to get rid of people, or to score money gains, whatever is most desired,” Rush said last week.
Limbaugh knows better, but it’s the kind of thing that pops out of one’s mouth when partisan points are the goal instead of non-partisan elucidation. Was the press too hard on Sarah Palin and too easy on Joe Biden? Absolutely. Did it take a powder on John Edwards? Yes, but I would suggest that the fate of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a very liberal Democrat, is a more recent and relevant example.
I don’t remember conservative commentators agonizing over the nuances of journalistic ethics in the Weiner case. Acting on a tip (which came in the form of a “retweet” on the social networking site Twitter) of a lewd picture posted via Rep. Weiner’s Twitter account, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart republished a screenshot of the picture (which had since been deleted) in a post raising questions about the Congressman’s claim that his Facebook account had been hacked.* When it soon became clear that Weiner was misbehaving, and lying about it, the mainstream media basically hectored this guy into telling the truth, which he ultimately did — at the cost of his career in Congress.
We don’t have photographic evidence documenting any wrongdoing on the part of Herman Cain, and aren’t likely to find it. We do have the testimonials of an increasing number of women, however. It’s the media’s job to examine these stories carefully, and also to search for other possible victims and witnesses. I’m not nominating Politico for a Pulitzer Prize just yet, but I will suggest that Joseph Pulitzer himself would have approved of the publication’s exposé on Cain.
“There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy,” Pulitzer once told his assistant Alleyne Ireland. “Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away.”
That’s our job.
(*This story was updated to clarify the circumstances surrounding the Weiner case.)
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