York: Cain's Rise in Popularity

Byron York writes

STOCKBRIDGE, Ga. - Herman Cain's handsome glass-walled office overlooks the first fairway of the Eagle's Landing Country Club in this exurb of Atlanta, about 20 miles south of Hartsfield Airport. It is here that the 65-year-old Cain planned to spend what he calls his "cruise control" years -- time spent not exactly in retirement, but at an easier pace than a business career that included stints as CEO of Godfather's Pizza, president of the National Restaurant Association, and chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank.

"Cruise control" it's not.  These days, or at least this moment, Herman Cain, long a favorite of Tea Party activists, is one of the hottest names in the Republican primary race.  For most of the party, Cain wasn't even a blip on the radar until the May 5 GOP debate in Greenville, South Carolina -- or, more accurately, the moments after the debate, when Republican pollster Frank Luntz conducted a focus group on Fox News and found near-unanimous agreement that Cain was the winner. "I've done maybe 35 or 40 of these debates for Fox, and I've never had this kind of reaction," Luntz said.  "Something very special happened this evening."

Many political insiders viewed the debate mostly as an opportunity for former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty to move up into the first tier of GOP candidates.  Instead, people left Greenville's Peace Center talking about Herman Cain -- a result that few participants, including Cain himself, could have predicted.

"I was just stunned, shocked," Cain says of the moment he saw, on a green-room television, that Luntz's group declared him the winner. When his staff hurried to take him to the media room for an interview with Sean Hannity, Cain asked for a few minutes to sit down, catch his breath, and collect his thoughts.  Although he has had some success as a talk-radio host in recent years, he had no idea of the impression he would make on viewers.  "You know how fickle people's perceptions can be," he says.

To call Cain an unlikely candidate is an understatement. He is black, southern, a survivor of a fairly recent and very serious bout with cancer, a failed candidate for U.S. Senate, and a man best known as the chief executive officer of a mid-size national pizza chain.  Yes, Republicans are drawn to captains of industry -- but the pizza industry?

And yet Republican audiences listen to Cain and walk away saying he makes a lot of sense. Last week I attended a Cain fundraiser at a private home north of Atlanta.  (To call it a private home doesn't quite do it justice; it was a 42,000 square-foot Italianate mansion complete with its own lifesize replica of main street in cowboy-era Tombstone, Arizona, with Cain standing in the recreated Oriental saloon to greet big donors.)  I was there on the agreement that I not quote anyone, but what the attendees told me about Cain was very similar to what the Fox focus group members said.  They find him genuine, like his plainspeaking manner, and believe he has commonsense solutions to the nation's problems.

A conversation with Cain doesn't go very far before he gives you his prescription for the current economic mess. "Number one: stimulate the economy with direct stimuli," he says.  "Lower corporate tax rates, lower personal income tax rates -- they work.  Take the capital gains tax rate to zero.  Suspend taxes on foreign repatriated profits.  Provide a real payroll tax holiday -- 6.2 percent for the employee, 6.2 percent for the employer.  That's the Social Security piece.  Do it for a year.  Then put a bow around it and make those rates permanent.  You do that and you remove the veil of uncertainty -- businessmen will go crazy.  They will start investing again."

Cain is also a devotee of the Fair Tax, a proposal popular with some Tea Partiers that would replace the current tax system with a federal retail sales tax.  He doesn't care if a lot of policy experts, including conservative policy experts, say it won't work.  At the debate, when Fox's Chris Wallace brought up those expert opinions, Cain shot back, "Well, Chris, with all due respect, your experts are dead wrong."

In the same debate, Cain also showed what appeared to be a startling lack of engagement in key foreign policy issues when asked why he has not put forth his plan for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.  "I'm not privy to a lot of confidential information," Cain said.  If elected president, Cain continued, he would gather the generals and the experts, talk it over, and then come up with a policy. "The experts and their advice and their input would be the basis for me making that decision," he said.

Some observers and analysts saw that as evidence that Cain hadn't grappled with the issue.  But supporters saw it as a refreshing evidence that Cain is prepared to admit that he doesn't know everything, and that he will take a businessman's approach to solving problems like Afghanistan.