Who first tipped off Politico to the sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain that have become such a big story?
I will say at the outset that I haven’t a clue. And neither, I suspect, does anyone else, except Politico and the source[s] him/herself.
That doesn’t mean we can’t speculate, with the caveat that all of this is a mere flight of fancy. So here’s my shot at it.
It may have been the folks at Politico themselves, sleuthing around in LexisNexis for any dirt they could find on Cain. Highly unlikely, however; it’s hard to see why they’d focus on Cain, plus Politico’s pieces on the subject have repeatedly referred to “multiple sources.”
Most of the speculation on the sources’ identities has so far centered on Cain’s Republican opponents. That makes a great deal of sense because they’re the ones who are seemingly most threatened by Cain. Cain himself appears to think one of them bears the blame; he’s been shooting from the hip and accusing Perry consultant Kurt Anderson of being the culprit, although he’s walked back a bit from that charge in recent days.
Or Cain may have other antagonists, perhaps even personal rather than political ones, who possessed the lawsuit information and would like to see him brought him down. As in a detective novel, there’s probably a plethora of possibilities there; a powerful and successful man is likely to make quite a few enemies.
Of course, Politico itself is well aware of its sources, and probably its sources’ motivations, too. But so far Politico isn’t spilling the beans, which puts it in an interesting position. As Andrew McCarthy writes:
[In subsequent articles,] Politico has reported [on allegations] that Perry may be the source and that Romney may be the source. Yet, Politico knows precisely whether the Perry campaign or the Romney campaign (or both . . . or neither) is the source…
In sum, Politico is publishing at least some things it knows to be misleading or untrue, and framing as a great mystery something to which it knows the answer. That can only be because Politico finds the specter of the Republican circular firing squad more appealing than the prospect of informing readers of the accurate version of events.
One possible source that’s hardly been pointed to is Obama or someone in his camp. But why would Obama bother at this point? In fact, Cain might be a weaker opponent than some of the others, and Obama might even welcome a Cain candidacy.
Then again, perhaps Obama fears it for special reasons of his own. If so, it could be the result of what I’d call the Bobby Rush phenomenon. You may recall that Rush was Obama’s opponent in the 2000 Democratic Congressional primary, and the only person in political life who has (so far) ever gotten the better of Obama.
Rush is a black man of roughly the same age as Cain, although the former is an extreme liberal and the latter a conservative. This is what Rush did to Obama back then:
Running in 1996 from the South Side, Obama won a seat in the Illinois State Senate, but three years later, when he tried to take on Bobby Rush, a four-term Democratic incumbent in the House of Representatives, Obama got a lesson in Chicago politics…
Rush did not hesitate to mock Obama as inauthentic””and, by inference, insufficiently black. “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool,” Rush told the Chicago Reader during the campaign. “Barack is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it.” State Senator Donne Trotter, who was also vying for Rush’s seat, told the same reporter that “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community. You have only to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It’s these individuals in Hyde Park, who don’t always have the best interest of the community in mind.” Rush’s tactics were brutal, and they were effective: Obama lost the primary by thirty points.
The experience unquestionably made a deep impression on Obama. That’s not just my guess, either; take his word for it:
“I was completely mortified and humiliated,” Obama told [David Remnick] while he was still only considering a Presidential run. “The biggest problem in politics is the fear of loss. It’s a very public thing, which most people don’t have to go through.
Not the sort of thing a person would forget, or want to repeat.
Although Obama also had an older black opponent in Alan Keyes in his Senate race of 2004, Keyes did not occupy the same “authentically black” position as either Rush or Cain could be said to. Keyes is an intellectual like Obama, hardly a man of the people, and without much political following at all. In fact, Keyes was drafted into the race as a last-minute replacement (with less than three months to go until the election) for the disgraced Jack Ryan, who was forced to quit after salacious allegations by his wife during their divorce and child custody hearings were released to the public when those records were unsealed against the will of both parties.
Obama has also been the beneficiary of other scandals felling opponents at opportune times, based on leaks to the press about legal proceedings that made them look bad. Just ask Blair Hull. And of course there’s the Alice Palmer incident, which I never tire of mentioning, in which Obama used every legal trick in the book to eliminate his mentor Alice Palmer, an older and popular black politician who probably would have defeated him in the primaries for his very first office (state senator) had he not gotten her knocked off the ballot due to irregularities in her candidacy petition.
It wasn’t just Palmer, either [emphasis mine]:
There [Obama’s people] began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city’s South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama’s four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.
Fresh from his work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens.
But in that initial bid for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckle arts of Chicago electoral politics. His overwhelming legal onslaught signaled his impatience to gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder stateswoman like Palmer.
A close examination of Obama’s first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career: The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it.
Right from the start, Obama seemed especially wary of competition, particularly from older black candidates who probably would be seen as more “authentically black” than he. Cain fits that description, too despite the efforts of the left to discredit him as a buffoon and/or an Uncle Tom.
Cain may indeeed be a weak candidate in many ways (lack of political experience, changing his mind on abortion), and he’s not doing so well against Obama in the polls. But nevertheless he just may be the potential opponent who frightens Obama the most.
A Cain candidacy would open Obama up to the sort of criticism no white candidate could ever mount without the fear of at least being accused of racism. Obama’s blackness, and opponents’ fear of the racist charge, has had most of his rivals treating Obama with kid gloves. With Cain—as with Bobby Rush before him—the gloves would be off, and Obama knows it.
Running against a black candidate also has the potential to split the the black vote, the group that has remained most steadfastly and valiantly behind Obama. If he can’t count on them he loses a great deal, and no other Republican candidate but Cain presents this threat.
[NOTE: Obama’s campaign manager in the fight against Bobby Rush had this interesting obvervation on the repercussions of that defeat [emphasis mine]:
…[U]ltimately, if it hadn’t been for that race, there would be no Barack Obama. That was boot camp. That’s what got him ready to do what he had to do.”.
We don’t know exactly what that thing he had to do was. But we do know the Rush experience was exceedingly formative.]
