Herman “Soul Pizza” Cain is a third-rate pizza chain executive who apparently once guest-hosted for one of right wing talk radio’s most popular human-anal cysts. So by the glue vapor logic of the current Republican Party, of course he should also be president of the United States.
But to quote my favorite old white man (Lee Corso): Not so fast, my friends.
First of all, Soul Pizza barely can name another country that isn’t Muslim (he hates all Muslims ever). Actually, he can’t even name Muslim countries, either.
He has some, uh, unusual racial views too! He regularly states that his fellow blacks are “brainwashed.” Soul Pizza’s entire argument about his electability is that somehow 30% of the black vote will go his way.
Blitzer responded, “That’s a strong word to talk about your fellow African Americans, brainwashed?”
“For two-thirds of them, Wolf, that is the case,” Cain said. “Now, the good news is I happen to believe that a third to 50 percent of the black Americans in this country, they are open-minded. I meet them every day. They stop me in the airport. And so this whole notion that all black Americans are necessarily going to stay and vote Democrat and vote for Obama, that’s simply not true. More and more black Americans are thinking for themselves. And that’s a good thing …. I do believe a third (of African-Americans) would vote for me, based upon my own anecdotal feedback,” he said. “Now, they won’t be voting for me because I’m black they’ll be voting for me because of my policies.”
Soul Pizza has never been elected to public office. Soul Pizza is not even a particularly accomplished business executive! His main business experience has been to show that he’s good at running a really shitty pizza chain into the ground. Oh, and this is a guy who couldn’t even win the GOP primary in Georgia to fill a Senate seat in 2004.
I think Yglesias does a good job explaining the Soul Pizza phenomenon:
So, okay, Herman Cain’s not going to be president. Who cares? But it drives me nuts that the guy can get taken seriously by some conservative activists and voters without him taking the process seriously at all. The president of Uzbekistan is Islam Karimov. Maybe Cain doesn’t know. Fine. It’s a trivia question. But say, I dunno, something about American foreign policy in Central Asia. Try to demonstrate some command of the issues. But Cain is transparently running for talk radio host or something. If it wouldn’t make a good subject for a 10-minute drive time segment, he doesn’t want to talk about it.
Much like the snowbilly grifter-queen before him, Cain is acutely aware that the real spoils of political involvement have nothing to do with getting into office. It’s about getting on TV.
