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Herman Cain

A few days ago, after coming under criticism for my answer to a question about Libya in an interview, I made a lighthearted comment that reflected all this – that I’m not supposed to know everything (most of the media quoted me as saying “anything”) about foreign policy.

Bizarre things happen when you run for president, one of which is that statements like this go viral, with people claiming I had somehow made the case that no knowledge of world affairs is required for the job.

I obviously don’t think that, but I’m also quite willing be honest about my strengths. My background is in the business world, and my greatest strength concerns the economy. My motivation in running for president is to apply my leadership skills to all issues – foreign and domestic. But clearly, as I have met with foreign policy luminaries like John Bolton and Henry Kissinger, I have done a lot more listening than talking – because they know a lot more about it than I do, and it would be absurd for me to claim otherwise.

That said, a man taking the oath of office for the presidency must have a sense of America’s place in the world, and must have a clear idea of the challenges, threats and opportunities that present themselves. Otherwise, success on the economic front likely goes for naught, as mistakes in the international arena tend to be costly both in the short term and in the long term.

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Herman Cain

Perhaps you have heard that the so-called congressional “supercommittee” is charged with finding $1.2 trillion in deficit-reduction savings (over a decade, mind you) by the Friday after Thanksgiving. If they fail to do so, according to the recent debt-ceiling compromise, automatic across-the-board cuts will kick in.

It’s very unlikely the “supercommittee” will achieve anything meaningful with respect to budget discipline. While there are many reasons for this, the biggest is the lack of presidential leadership.

President Obama has never demonstrated even a morsel of understanding about how far beyond its means the federal government is living. Consider: A president who touts $1.2 trillion in budget cuts over 10 years as some sort of major achievement thought nothing of perpetrating an $862 billion “stimulus” package just months after taking office. And when it didn’t stimulate a thing in terms of economic growth, this same president came back and asked Congress for another spending extravaganza worth more than $400 billion.

There’s your $1.2 trillion in savings, wiped out not in a single bound, but in two of them. Super, indeed.

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Herman Cain

I am a serious person, seeking the opportunity to do a serious and very important job. Our nation has very serious problems, particularly of an economic nature, and Barack Obama does not have the skill, knowledge or will to solve them.

I do.

Unfortunately, the media-driven process by which one must seek this opportunity is fundamentally unserious. I have touched on this before – the emphasis on “gaffes,” gotcha questions and time devoted to trivial nonsense – and everyone knows the process only became further detached from relevance this week as the media published anonymous, ancient, vague personal allegations against me.

Once this kind of nonsense starts, the media’s rules say you have to act in a certain way. I am well aware of these rules. And I refuse to play by them.

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Herman Cain

My continued strong performance in the presidential polls has the media, pundits and political strategists confounded, because I am not running my campaign in the way they say I am supposed to.

Newsflash: I’m not going to start now.

Having said that, I think it’s worth considering how the media and the talking heads assess candidates for the highest office in the land, and the criteria they use for deciding who is a serious candidate and who is supposed to be perceived as some sort of fringe figure.

Although I am leading in the national polls and have practically run the table on the recent straw polls, the pundits and the political consultants say I don’t have a chance because I’m not doing it their way. They don’t like the fact that I’m spending time in states like Tennessee, Arkansas and Alabama instead of living in Iowa and New Hampshire. It’s just not done! They are beside themselves because I supposedly don’t have a large enough staff. (They actually have no idea what the size of my staff is, but that doesn’t stop them from talking about it.)

And the way they flyspeck my campaign ads, you’d think they were advertising consultants critiquing a bunch of Super Bowl commercials. Just about every professional political consultant in America had a conniption fit over my recent ad featuring my chief of staff, Mark Block. (You know . . . the “smoking man” ad.) That ad has now had more than one million views on YouTube, and that doesn’t even include those who saw it on The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity. And since it began circulating, I’ve risen in the polls. My name ID has risen from 21 percent in August to 79 percent now.

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Herman Cain

One of my favorite criticisms of my 9-9-9 tax reform plan is the one where people indicate they would support the plan if only we could find a way to guarantee Congress could never change the rates in the future.

They must really like the plan to ask for that. Has any other presidential candidate ever been asked to guarantee that the tax rates he proposed could never be changed?

I realize, of course, that much of this owes to the introduction of a new federal tax – the consumption tax – as part of the equation. It makes people nervous because they figure politicians can’t raise a tax that doesn’t exist. So once the consumption tax is in place, they say, 9 percent will only be the starting point for politicians to raise it and the other taxes, and 9-9-9 quickly becomes 10-10-10, 11-11-11 and who knows what else?

That’s why it’s nice to have respected economist Arthur Laffer bring a little reality to the discussion in a piece he wrote last week for the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Laffer, you might remember, was the originator of the Laffer Curve, a notion in economics that demonstrates you get diminishing returns from higher marginal tax rates because they discourage investment and economic growth. Specifically, his Laffer Curve showed that you can collect the same amount of revenue from a lower marginal rate as you can from a higher marginal rate because of the impact the rates have on the economy.

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Herman Cain

Do you know why candidates for office tend to be reluctant to propose detailed plans? Because they know the plans will be flyspecked and picked apart by just about everyone. Inviting criticism doesn’t help you to get votes.

But fear of criticism prevents you from conceiving solutions to problems. So even if avoidance of criticism helps in propelling you to an election victory, how are you supposed to effectively govern? How are you supposed to fix the problems you told everyone you were going to fix?

That’s why I’m happy to see so much criticism of the 9-9-9 plan I’ve proposed. It shows that people are thinking seriously about a substantive idea. When people stop obsessing over “gaffes” and campaign strategy, and start honing in on fixing the country’s economic problems, we are getting somewhere.

This is not to say, of course, I’m going to leave poorly founded criticisms of the plan unanswered. Certain objections to the plan are circulating in the usual places, driven by the same kind of thinking that has left us with a stagnant economy, $14 trillion in debt and mounting entitlement obligations. These criticisms deserve responses, and here they are:

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Herman Cain

I’m not surprised I got a question like this from Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC. Given the mindset of Mr. O’Donnell and most of his colleagues, it’s to be expected that he would cite my statement – that Occupy Wall Street protesters have only themselves to blame if they are unemployed or lacking wealth – and ask if I wanted to apologize for saying so.

Not a chance.

In fact, I would add this: Anyone who abandons these protests and tries taking my advice is almost certain to end up better off. That’s because it’s empowering to you when you stop blaming other people for your situation, and start taking responsibility for yourself.

Another name the OWS protesters use for themselves is the 99 percent. This is in contrast to the 1 percent of the population whose greater wealth they resent. Their premise is that the 1 percent has been exploiting them, and now the 99 percent is fighting back.

Well.

No one has to tell me about the challenges involved with pursuing success when you are born without a lot of advantages, or to a family without a lot of money. That is the story of my life. I achieved success in business because I worked hard, studied hard, set goals, honed my strategy, weathered setbacks and kept at it no matter what. Sometimes those setbacks occurred because, at least it seemed to me, someone didn’t treat me fairly. But I quickly learned that this, too, is part of life. Complaining about it won’t help you. Devising strategies to overcome it will.

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Herman Cain

As I launch a two-week book tour around the USA promoting “This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House,” it’s a perfect time to reflect upon my campaign for president, and how we got to this point.

Entering the race to make the world a better place for my grandchildren – I made a commitment to do what I could to bring this country back to what Ronald Reagan so famously referred to as the “shining city on a hill.”

With 14 million Americans out of work, an unemployment rate of over 9 percent, a weakened military and a weakened dollar – we’re facing the worst economic times since the Great Depression.

My message for Barack Obama is this: Your Hope and Change just ain’t working!

We need leadership in the White House – not a community organizer. And as a successful business leader and CEO, my executive experience in turning around struggling companies is just what this country needs.

Growing up in the segregated South with little money, my family was rich in faith, love and a belief in the American dream. I learned from my parents, Lenora and Luther Cain, Jr., that empowerment – not entitlement – was the key to achieving success in life. You have to work hard, and given the right national policies for less government and lower taxes, the sky is the limit.

It’s true that I’m not a politician.  Some say that means I can’t understand the government. Washington is full of politicians – how’s that working out for us?

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