Herman "Surface Man" Cain Does D.C.

Herman Cain visited Washington D.C. today. Among the stops he made was one to the National Press Club. It was the first opportunity for me to see Cain up close.

It's clear he is very charismatic and very comfortable in front of crowds. Before his formal speech began, he was backslapping people, laughing and having a grand old time.

If the race comes down to Barack Obama versus Herman Cain, Michelle Obama should start packing. Cain is a presence, he can speak without a telepromoter and he seems to have a personality that reminds me of another surface man, Ronald Reagan.

Like Reagan, Cain talks a lot about freedom, but I'm not sure he understands what he is saying. At one point, to my amazement, he said that he was in favor of freedom the way the founding fathers were, that as long as a person didn't bother someone elese a person should be free to do whatever he wants. A line stolen from Ron Paul, if there ever was one. I was hoping the moderator/questioner would follow up by asking Cain, if this freedom applied to all drugs as well, like heroin and LSD, to see just how consistent Cain is next to Ron Paul, but I don't think Cain or the moderator understood the depth of Cain's comment.

At another point, Cain was asked a not very technical economic question and Cain yielded and brought up to the podium Richard Lowrie, the Wells Fargo Ohio-based financial planner who was instrumental in Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan. Cain, btw, introduced Lowrie as his "chief economic adviser".

When it came to the housing crisis, Cain blamed it all on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and didn't bring up Fed money printing or the business cycle at all.

Curiously though, a later question was raised about student loans. He took an almost tough luck stance for students on the subject and did not link the ballooning loans to the quasi government agency Sallie Mae, which is a major part of the problem because it is guaranteeing student loans the way Fannie Mae guaranteed housing loans.

Expect him to change his tune on student loans once he is briefed on the topic, but it illustrates how much of a surface guy he is. He is blaming Fannie Mae for the housing crash (after the fact), but has no clue the same thing is going on now in the student loan market via Sallie Mae.
Surface man he is, but that is what appeals to much of the general public?

Even down to Cain's moving the shells around the table tax plan, Cain and Reagan have a lot in common. Rothbard wrote of Reagan: e
ver to raise taxes while raising them all the time.
I fear it will be the same in a Cain presidency. I fear that what Rothbard wrote about Reagan will apply to Cain with just a change of dates and names:

I am convinced that the historic function of Ronald Reagan was to co-opt, eviscerate and ultimately destroy the substantial wave of anti-governmental, and quasi-libertarian, sentiment that erupted in the U.S. during the 1970s. Did he perform this task consciously? Surely too difficult a feat for a man barely compos. Reagan was wheeled into performing this task by his Establishment handlers.

The task of co-optation needed to be done because the 1970s, particularly 1973–75, were marked by an unusual and striking conjunction of crisis – crises that fed on each other to lead to a sudden and cumulative disillusionment with the federal government.

The Reagan candidacy of 1980 was brilliantly designed to weld a coalition providing the public’s instinctive anti-government mood with sweeping, but wholly nonspecific, libertarian rhetoric, as a convenient cover for the diametrically opposite policies designed to satisfy the savvy and politically effective members of that coalition: the neocons, the Buckleyite cons, the Moral Majority, the Rockefellers, the military-industrial complex, and the various Establishment special interests always clustering at the political trough.

(htRyanUnderwood)