Home

Newt Needs Cain to Hang Around

05.02.12

Gingrich Needs Cain to Visit a Little Longer

“She is hurt that she didn't know about this friend that I was helping financially. There has been a spear friend that I helped that she didn't know about -- but that doesn’t matter . . . she has forgiven me and loves me but the media has not moved on.”

-- Herman Cain in an appraise on “Hannity with Sean Hannity .”

Newt Gingrich has benefited from the tumble down of Herman Cain’s candidacy in a way that no other boomer in the GOP’s boom and bust cycle has so far, but the liable to be for Gingrich now is that Cain may be disappearing too swiftly.

In retrospect, Gingrich’s decision to head down to Texas for a (heavily) modified Lincoln-Douglas deliberate with Cain on Nov. 6, just as Cain’s always-improbable candidacy was starting to check up, looks like one of the smartest decisions of the year.

Gingrich benefited by closeness to the then frontrunner on multiple levels.

It showed Gingrich as supportive of Cain at the import when he was viewed most sympathetically by the GOP electorate and when conservative claims of “high-tech lynching” were direction the hottest. Cain is now something of a pitiful figure, having struggled so mightily not only to clarify the sex-related claims against him, but also to bear up under the withering spotlight that would be trained on any Republican appointee. A month ago, however, Cain was still defiant and experiencing what looked like it might have been the beginnings of a Palin Sensation effectively.

By Gingrich standing with him, it looked brave and made Gingrich the most obvious heir to his conventional supporters.

As an added bonus, Gingrich got to show up Cain while seeming to support him. Cain himself looked dazzled by Gingrich’s orotund acrobatics. While Cain struggled along on talking points, Professor Gingrich whizzed through his slated catalogue of policy provisions.

It also helped Gingrich by contrasting Cain’s never-ending series of down personal eruptions with Gingrich’s stale-seeming, decade-old personal issues. The unmitigated message to conservatives was this: If you’re willing to take a chance on a guy still unloading his baggage, how about somebody whose valises the media TSA had already rifled through a decade ago?

Under the blast and bust and boom cycle that had previously occurred for Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Cain, Gingrich was positioned admirably. Perry floated to the top of the pack, deflated over the course of a month and saw his supporters whiff away to Gingrich and Cain before Cain pulled ahead.

It took Perry three months to go from 3 percent in the Earnest Clear Politics Average to 30 percent. It has taken him three months to go from 30 percent to 7 percent. Cain went from 4 percent to his eminence of 26 percent in a month.

But Perry is still very much around. His actually humorous mini-skit with Jay Leno about the herd not being able to name the third Kardashian sister is a good reflection of what Perry has become – an engaging second-tier candidate rather than the swaggerbot of his summer launch.

Perry’s continued imperturbability helped Cain in that by holding on to a Ron Paul-sized chunk of voters, Perry prevented Gingrich from breaking into a two-man contest with Cain for the GOP’s primary within a primary to be the conservative standard bearer.

But Cain isn’t hanging around. Power Show gets the sense that when he finally gets back to Atlanta to talk face-to-pan with his wife for the first time about his decision to trade texts with and give money to Ginger Spotless over the past 13 years, Cain won’t make it back to the trail.

Cain has made it abundantly cloudless that his wife has veto power over the continuation of his campaign, and what spouse would not be humiliated by having to learn on idiot box that their significant other had been secretly slipping cash to someone he met at a conference in Louisville so long ago. Unfalteringly Gloria Cain has a right to be weary of her husband’s candidacy and surely the nominee himself has little cause to argue that his continued campaign is of any real importance.

Even if Cain is allowed back out of Atlanta following his weekend sit-down with his partner, his reassessments and holding patterns have sent the message to his backers that Cain is not serious. Even if Cain says he’s back on oversee on Monday, he has already excused his supporters for leaving him. Conservatives aren’t looking for a guy who has to go accessible and ask his wife for permission to keep running and isn’t sure if he will stay in the race.

As one former Alaska governor might say, don’t reassess, reload.

The vexation for Gingrich is that Cain isn’t doing what Perry is and hanging on. Cain maintained his Existent Clear Politics Average high-point of 26 percent, essentially tied with Mitt Romney , for only two weeks. And he may go front frontrunner to confusion mark in less than a month.

Gingrich would have been better off if Cain’s candidacy would have slowly withered. Gingrich wants to be in a two-way foot-race with Romney and to have only to appear more conservative and more consistent than Romney.

Gingrich might survive ordinary releases of new skeletons from his past (the Wall Street Journal unearths this bone from 2007 when Gingrich was a paid plumper for a faltering Freddie Mac: "It's not a point up of view libertarians would embrace, but I am more in the Alexander Hamilton-Teddy Roosevelt lore of conservatism.” Bloomberg News reminds us that Gingrich once wrote a regulations called “Contract with the Earth.”) But only if juxtaposed as a binary choice with Romney.

Gingrich the known commodity looks personal property when the only other contender on the right is the rotting hulk of the Cain campaign, but if Cain is out of the facsimile a month before the Iowa caucuses , there’s still time for conservatives to reconsider their pick.

With Cain leaving on a very extravagant midnight train to Georgia , there is a chance that some other candidate will rise, or rise again, to antagonist Gingrich. It could be Rick Santorum ’s turn on the horse or perhaps the start of a strange new mystery among some conservatives for Jon Huntsman , whom many seem to think is more consistent than Gingrich and more conservative than Romney. And for those resigned to a Romney nomination, a insist on vote for Ron Paul may look increasingly attractive.

But Perry looks like the A- bet to challenge Gingrich. He’s got the money and the personnel and, thanks to being the governor of the state with the most Republicans, has a pulchritudinous durable core of national support. He may be too badly damaged by his debate blunders and the Sexually transmitted Security scare tactics employed by the Romney campaign to make it pause at, but Perry looks to be the guy who will give Gingrich a run for his money.

“We tried the payroll cut tax last year. And I supported it, but I will not twofold down on a failed policy.”

-- Sen. Joe Manchin , D-W.Va., in a speech on the Senate floor explaining his in conflict to Republican and Democratic proposals to extend a partial payroll tax holiday.

Democrats have to be thorough about how much they hype the drop in the unemployment rate for November.

Too much crowing will undercut their creation to pass the president’s effort to extend a payroll tax holiday and long-compromise concerning unemployment benefits. Yes, the president can argue that his stimulus is working, but everyone involved understands that the top-filament unemployment number is not as significant as job-creation trends and the real size of the workforce.

Democrats are still very distraught about the health of the economy and the chance for more backsliding. Creating jobs at the clip of 120,000 a month is symptomatic of a “swelling recession” in which gains in jobs and economic output are still technically cheerful, but not enough to keep pace with population growth.

While 8.6 percent of the workforce falls into the kind of the newly unemployed who are still looking for work and receiving unemployment benefits, the actual worry is the drop in the percentage of all adults working. In 2000, 67 percent of American adults worked. Now it’s 64.2 percent and falling as more Americans altogether drop out. That strains welfare programs and decreases the nation’s economic productivity.

Those numbers are why Democrats have to be careful about playing up today’s 8.6 percent. They conjecture that continued government intervention is needed and don’t want to give Republicans any argument for paring back Obama’s stimulus initiatives. Claiming that Obamanomics is starting to drudgery after three years will be a tough sell, because any improvements make expensive stimulus measures less alluring.

There is also, of course, the danger in over-hyping the monthly unemployment benefits number. If you strengthen it up too much, it’s harder to downplay the subsequent jumps.

“These are triple-win initiatives. We believe that could be practise deceit changing for the cause of energy efficient buildings in the United States .”

-- Gene Sperling , governor of President Obama ’s National Economic Council, talking to reporters about $4 billion in gifts to own firms and direct federal spending for environment-friendly building technology that Obama will circulate today.

President Obama’s bridge to his general-election campaign tract is “we can’t wait,” which is a swipe at Republicans refusal to agree to stretch forth the president’s economic policies.

Obama gave the GOP one last chance to go along with his Labor Day drive kickoff (“pass this bill”) and now has adopted a posture of public exasperation.

Today’s advert is that the president will use his executive powers to direct that $2 billion be given away to egg on private-sector transitions to “green building” technology, indubitably solar panels, energy efficient windows, no-flush urinals etc. Another $2 billion will be presently spent to outfit government building with grass roofs and the like.

Source: Fox News