Herman Cain is history. On December 3, he ended his attempt to become president.
Five women brought him down. Four accused him of sexual harassment while he was head of the National Restaurant Association (NRA) in the 1990s. The fifth said she had been having an affair with Cain for the past 13 years.
As the accusations became public, the Left was quick to pronounce him guilty, while the Right just as quickly pronounced him innocent.
How could they reach opposite conclusions? Well, in America, there are certain things you can’t print in the newspaper and you can’t say on television — and those were the things that Cain was accused of. Also, at least two of the women making the accusations — Karen Kraushaar and Sharon Bialek — had received a financial settlement from the NRA years ago under the condition that they not talk about the matter. So what came out were rather vague statements.
When Ginger White proved to reporters that she had Herman Cain’s cell-phone number and bank statements showing he’d sent her money, however, Cain sounded less and less credible as he tried to portray all these women as part of a left-wing plot to destroy him.
A vast conspiracy?
Why would he think this was a reasonable explanation? Possibly because there had been a right-wing plot to destroy a Democratic candidate — namely, Bill Clinton. In his 2002 book Blinded by the Right, David Brock describes the Arkansas Project, a coordinated attempt financed by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to discredit Clinton. Brock was paid to find and embellish stories for a conservative newspaper, The American Spectator.
The most salacious of these claimed that Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, had used state troopers to bring him women for illicit affairs. Brock interviewed the troopers but found out, years after his story was published, that the troopers had been paid to make their statements. The story, however, led Paula Jones to sue Clinton for sexual harassment and Clinton paying her $850,000 out of court to drop the case.
Had Clinton been behaving inappropriately? Jones didn’t need to prove it, because Monica Lewinsky did.
There are, of course, other cases. Both Michael Jackson and Dominique Strauss-Kahn were found innocent, even though the circumstances of their encounters were certainly questionable (and even though Jackson paid one of his accusers to keep quiet).
What about…?
Now attention has turned to Cain’s replacement as front-runner, Newt Gingrich. Some Republicans are willing to overlook all the hypocrisy and corruption in Gingrich’s past. (In some circles, it’s even a badge of honor.) But Gingrich has had his own share of affairs.
Gingrich reportedly visited his first wife while she was in the hospital receiving cancer treatment in order to discuss terms of divorce. He wanted a divorce, apparently, because he was seeing the woman who would become his second wife. In 1993, while married to the second wife, he began an affair with a young staffer in the House of Representatives. The affair went on while Gingrich criticized Clinton very publicly for getting involved with Lewinsky.
Gingrich married the staffer in 2000, and they’re still married. He’s said that he’s spoken to God about this and received forgiveness — implying that we should forgive him, too.
Unlike Gingrich, I’m not going to be “holier than thou” about this. I believe that if you cheat on your wife, then your wife is the person you have to answer to. But I will say that if you’re in politics, you have been chosen to set an example to others. You have also been chosen because people think you will be able to ignore distractions and do your job well.
I am inclined to think that where there’s smoke, there’s fire — and where there’s fire, it’s best to get out of the building.
