None of this unfairness, as in the case of Sarah Palin, is to suggest that Cain is ready to be president. He may well not be, or should not be, electable. But over the next year, who knows what will have happened? Americans are so sick of the status quo and its technocracy that anything that suggests authenticity, even eccentricity, apparently is preferable to long political résumés. In short, in this present climate — in which the corrective for borrowing $4 trillion under Bush in eight years was to borrow even more under Obama in three — the unimaginable might become the inevitable.
We have already seen Cain derided nonstop as a puppet dancing from his white conservative masters’ strings. He refutes the notions that the Tea Party is racist, that race is essential rather than incidental to one’s character, and that a sizable percentage of African Americans must by supported by a government umbilical cord attached by liberal community organizers and technocrats.
Again, the comparison with Obama is volatile: Cain is authentically African-American and of an age to remember the Jim Crow South; Obama, the son of an elite Kenyan and a white graduate student, came of age as a Hawaiian prep-schooler, whose civil-rights credentials are academic. Cain’s lack of experience and seemingly embarrassing ignorance about the right of return or nuclear China are amplified by his unaffected style, whereas Obama’s similar gaffes (57 states) and buffoonery (inflating tires to preclude drilling for oil) are mitigated by metrosexual cool. After all, we live in an age when Herman Cain, with his black hat, his deep Southern cadences, and his ease among tea-party crowds, is suspect, whereas Barack Obama booms on about “millionaires and billionaires” while golfing, jetting to Martha’s Vineyard, and shaking down demonized corporate-jet owners at $35,000 a pop.
In short, Cain’s ascendance — and ongoing descent — are as fascinating to watch as they will soon be tragic in their denouement.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.
This is the ending of VDH's ruminations about Herman Cain's current quandary. Unlike Obama, Cain is an authentic child of the South and not a product of elite Hawaiian boarding schools and colleges.