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REMEMBERING HERMAN CAIN. Like everything else these days, the death of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was immediately discussed in a Trump-anti-Trump context. Resistance and NeverTrump commentators with absolutely no knowledge of what happened confidently asserted that Cain contracted coronavirus at the president’s June 20 rally in Tulsa, and was thus a victim of Trump policies on the virus.
Ignore them. Cain’s death is an occasion to remember…Herman Cain. After a long career in business — he had been CEO of Godfather’s Pizza — Cain burst on the Republican presidential scene in 2011. It’s easy to pinpoint the specific day it happened — May 5, 2011, when Republican presidential candidates held a debate in Greenville, South Carolina. It was the first debate of the primary campaign, and only five candidates attended: Tim Pawlenty, Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and Herman Cain.
It was another world and another time. To give you a sense of how removed it was from today, the big question on debate night was whether Pawlenty could move into the top tier of candidates — the ones, like Mitt Romney, who chose not to take part in the debate. The answer: No, Pawlenty could not. Instead, the news of the night was Herman Cain. After the debate, Frank Luntz held a focus group on Fox News. The members overwhelmingly said Cain won.
Huh? It was unexpected, to say the least. I knew almost nothing about Cain before the debate, but was intrigued that voters would choose him as the winner. So I got in touch with Cain and visited him a few days later at his office just off a golf course not far from the Atlanta airport. He was gracious, funny, and charming. I asked him how he felt when he saw that Luntz’s focus group had chosen him. “I was just stunned, shocked,” Cain said. “You know how fickle people’s perceptions can be.”
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CAIN DEEPLY BELIEVED THAT AMERICA NEEDED someone who would bring a businessman’s perspective to the White House. “I’ve actually run stuff,” he told me. “I’ve actually fixed stuff. I’ve actually solved stuff.” As evidence, he cited his turnaround of Godfather’s, which was losing money when Cain took over in 1986. He would do the same thing, he said, with the United States, still suffering from the Great Recession in 2012.
“I spent the first 60 days of my time at Godfather’s listening, to figure out what we needed to do,” Cain said, leaning back at his desk. “It wasn’t complicated: get back to basics.”
“Number one, we had too many products on the menu,” he explained. “We had gotten away from our core product. We had too many crusts. We had the original Godfather’s pizza crust, we had the original Godfather’s pizza, and then we had three imitations that looked like Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and Little Caesar’s. I got rid of the three imitations, and we got back to focus on the one we were good at. Number two, we simplified the operations, because if you simplify the operations, you make it possible for the people in the restaurant to execute exceptionally well every day. When you’ve got too much stuff, they can’t execute. Number three, we instilled in the company that we could, in fact, win again.”
The same approach, he said, would work to shrink and simplify the workings of the U.S. government. “So in your view,” I asked him, “America has too many crusts?” “Yes!” Cain exclaimed, breaking into a long laugh. “America has too many crusts! And we’ve got to simplify things, clarify things so that we can achieve real progress. You get it!”
Cain would have two moments in the GOP race. In the first, in June 2011, he broke into second place, behind frontrunner Romney. Then, in October, he shot up in the polls to briefly lead the race. At the end of that month, though, Politico reported that two women anonymously accused Cain of inappropriate behavior when they worked for him. Other accusations followed, and Cain fell in the polls. His candidacy was over. In the end, his success owed to two things: His own personal appeal and the desire of many in the Republican base to not choose Mitt Romney.
After Romney went on to win the nomination, Cain went into the Herman Cain business. He had a radio show and did some writing and television commentary. But he would be remembered for those five months — May through October 2011 — when he caught the eye of Republican voters, who could not help but like what they saw.
