December 9, 2011: Herman Cained, Splendid Diversions, Ultimate Uncle Tom.

It was announced over the weekend that presidential wanabee Hermann Cain, he of Godfather’s Pizza, has announced the suspension of his presidential campaign amidst the increasing number of revelations concerning untoward sexual conduct. The latest being a long affair with a woman ending as he was announcing his bid for the White House.

All of this is interesting, if not amusing, but hardly new to presidential politics. From the campaign against Thomas Jefferson in which it was alleged, correctly late twentieth century science would reveal, that Jefferson had fathered several children with his slave Sally Hemmings to the famous campaign against Grover Cleveland, where the opposition slogan ran “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa? He’s gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha”, to Nan Britton’s famous affair with Warren G. Harding in the white house, to Gary Hart and the “Monkey Business” revelations, to the many Clinton peccadilloes, Hermann Cain is only the last in a long list of public figures caught in such scandal.

While certainly entertaining, and sometimes a bit unseemly, these behaviors have served to derail several recent presidential bids and brought disrepute or resignation on several congressional leaders, but at some level have served as only splendid diversions. What’s lost in the ongoing revelations in this case is that most, if not all, of these “affairs” occurred while Mr. Cain was head of the National Restaurant Association. That is while he was functioning in his capacity as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill.

The internal contradiction implicit the spectre of an emerging spokesman for the “tea baggers” and the idiot wrong being nothing more than a lobbyist seeking direct rather than indirect political access has been lost not only on the conservative base of the Rescumlican Party but on the larger nation as a whole.

So now Hermann Cain, perhaps the ultimate “uncle Tom” takes his place as a minor footnote in the dustbin of history. No matter, for he will be well taken care of for waiting in the weeds is “Baby Huey” otherwise known as Newt Gingrich who now emerges as all other alternatives have self-destructed as the chief rival of Mitt Romney for the nomination by the Party of Greed. Cain represents precisely the kind of man to which Baby Huey will sell this country upon his elevation to the presidential chair.

Take heart Hermann, you may still have a future.