The Telegraph
Hounded by a muckraking press and divided by personal ambition, the American conservative movement is becoming its own worst enemy
By Tim Stanley
Another week and another Republican presidential campaign is imploding. Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and now Herman Cain have faced an extraordinary degree of scrutiny into their private lives, some of it so brutal that it borders on the sadistic. All this innuendo and bad-mouthing has accomplished is to splinter the Right and elevate Mitt Romney – a candidate who is, himself, potentially primed to implode in a general election against Obama. It’s time for the Republican candidates to stop the name-calling, stop spreading gossip about each other and get back to talking about the issues. Otherwise they could end up giving Obama a second term by default.
In the case of Herman Cain, never has a scandal been spun out of so little. As of writing (at midnight GMT), here’s what we know about this latter-day Casanova. Three women have claimed that he behaved inappropriately towards them while head of the National Restaurant Association. Two officially complained and at least one received a substantial severance. Neither of these two says that Cain made a move to seduce them, or that he engaged in inappropriate touching. In one instance, Cain’s crime was to comment that the woman was the same height as his wife. The third lady has claimed that Cain told coworkers he thought she was beautiful and that he invited her to his corporate apartment. She never filed a complaint and (as of writing) remains anonymous.
Is all this really enough to sink a man’s hopes of becoming leader of the free world? If one of the women speaks openly about what happened, perhaps it will. But, for the moment, it remains a collection of unsubstantiated rumours that makes the National Restaurant Association sound about as happening as a Methodist picnic. If Cain is not innocent, then it is proper that his case be used to demonstrate that there is no excuse for predatory behaviour in the workplace. But Cain has been treated as if he is guilty from the moment this story broke. What is worse, it is commonly speculated that the scandal was leaked by another Republican candidate.
Cain’s disgrace has been part of an unpleasant pattern this primary season. Consider Newt Gingrich, a heavyweight politician who once served as Speaker of the House of Representatives. When Gingrich said he was preparing for a presidential run, Josh Marshall of Talking Point’s Memo reminded his readers who Gingrich was thusly:
Newt famously dumped wife #1 for wife #2 while wife #1 was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. As in literally went to the hospital to present her with divorce papers while she was recovering from surgery for uterine cancer. He eventually dumped wife #2 for wife #3 shortly after wife #2 was diagnosed with MS back in 1999.
Esquire scooped an interview with wife #2, who recalled his obsession with his weight, his complex relationship with his “drugged up mother” and the charming way that his own staff referred to him as a “sociopath”. “There’s no way [Newt will become president],” wife #2 told Esquire. “When you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don't like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are.” Of course, it also doesn’t help when newspapers rehash decades old stories by interviewing bitter ex-wives only too keen to dish the dirt. Again, whether or not the stories were true is beside the point: the serious candidacy of a serious man has been crippled by an obsession with his private life.
The same prurient innuendo has been attached to Michele Bachmann (Slate asked of her husband, “Is Marcus Bachmann Gay?”) and Rick Perry ( the San Francisco Chronicle’s blog asked “Is Rick Perry Gay? Did Governor Perry have sex with strippers?”). As the Telegraph’s US editor, Toby Harnden, 113 Comments, “the winner in all this is Mitt Romney”. The media obsession with the antics of those contenders associated more with the Tea Party Right has, so far, deflected press attention from the establishment’s preferred candidate.
However, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Mitt Romney is making mistakes – plenty of them – and all the while that the media is talking about Herman Cain’s alleged misdemeanours, the Democrats are building a big, thick file of Romney errors to use against him in the general election. On Thursday, pressed by New Hampshire reporters about his flip-flopping on healthcare, guns, gay marriage and abortion, Romney said (on camera): “I've been as consistent as human beings can be.” Imagine the attack ad Obama’s team could craft out of that – the clip replayed over a scrolling list of every single issue that Mitt has done a 180 on. It’s a line full of Romney’s folksy, bendy, flip-floppy kind of truth telling: “Aw shucks, maybe I did cut down the cherry tree, maybe I didn’t. But even if I did, golly, I’m only human.”
For a serious, winnable Right-wing candidate to emerge by the January 3 Iowa caucus, we need to see two things happen. First, any candidate who is spreading gossip about anyone else has got to stop. Second, all the Republicans need to pull rank against the mainstream media and call it out for distracting the public from the real issues. Otherwise the 2012 presidential election is going to become Romney v Obama: the gadfly v the incompetent. And that's a choice no one wants to have to make.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100115515/hounded-by-a-muckraking-press-and-divided-by-personal-ambition-the-american-conservative-movement-is-becoming-its-own-worst-enemy/
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