The mark of Herman Cain: Uncovering the sex scandal rocking the GOP

A sex scandal threatens to turn a black Republican’s hopes of a 2012 presidential run into a Cain-wreck, finds Dani Garavelli

JUST a few months ago, few people outside the United States would have heard of would-be Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. The self-made businessman has had a stellar career turning round the fortunes of fast-food chains such as Godfather’s Pizza and has cultivated a following as a radio show host in his home state of Georgia, where his deep booming voice and right-wing views have earned him the nickname The Hermanator.

But with no serious political experience he had made little impact beyond the confines of the Tea Party movement which is constantly on the look-out for a credible mouthpiece for its conservative/libertarian philosophy.

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Now, however, all that has changed. Despite never having held elected office and a lacklustre start to his campaign – Cain is now being seen as a very real contender for the Republican nomination for president of the United States of America.

According to the polls, Cain is fast catching up with the supposed shoo-in, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, whom Tea Party supporters dislike as a “moderate”. A Quinnipiac University poll last Thursday showed Cain with 27 per cent support in Florida, one of the key early voting states in the Republican nomination battle, against 21 per cent for Romney. Cain is also ahead of Romney in Ohio and they are tied at 17 per cent in Pennsylvania.

Cain’s chances were given a further boost on last week’s televised debate when main rival Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, couldn’t remember the name of government departments he planned to axe – though it was one of his key policies.

Yet, even as Cain’s stock has risen, storm clouds have been gathering. His many gaffes – his criticism of Muslims, his lack of knowledge of foreign affairs – may not have dented his credibility, but the string of sexual harassment allegations being made against him cannot fail to influence public opinion on the Republican Right.

The onslaught began last month when it emerged two women had received substantial settlements after claiming he sexually harassed them while he was chief executive of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s. Since then two more allegations of sexual harassment have surfaced – and two of the four women – Karen Kraushaar and Sharon Bialek – have gone public.

Kraushaar – one of the two women to have received a financial settlement – said she was forced to leave her job after she was subjected to “multiple incidents of harassment.” Bialek claims Cain put his hand up her skirt and pushed her head to his crotch after she went to him for advice on finding a job.

Cain’s reaction to these allegations has been, at best, evasive; he at first denied all knowledge that any financial settlements had been reached, although later conceded he was aware of an “agreement.”

But the credibility of the women has also been thrown into doubt, with Bialek, in particular, being portrayed as a serial complainer.

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So far, the allegations seem to have made little impact on Cain’s popularity. But it has introduced a highly charged racial element to the campaign, with some suggesting Cain is being subjected to “a hi-tech lynching” a phrase coined when Clarence Thomas was subject to sexual harassment allegations when nominated to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court, only the second African-American to hold such office.

So can Cain – whose campaign is founded on his plans to introduce a simplified tax system – keep trading on his sense of humour, “likeability” and status as a political outsider to sustain his recent momentum? Or will he be just the latest in a long line of men whose political careers have foundered on their inability to keep their wandering hands to themselves?

To understand why Cain should hold such appeal for the Tea Party faction of the Republican party (although not to black voters) you have to go back to his roots. Cain was born into a poor but deeply aspirational family in Atlanta, birthplace of Martin Luther King jnr. His father worked three jobs as a barber, a janitor and a chauffeur for Coca-Cola president Robert Woodruff in order to afford his own house and ensure his two sons graduated.

Armed with a masters in computer science from Purdue University, Indiana, Cain started working first as a computer analyst for Coca-Cola and then as director of business analysis for Pillsbury’s restaurant and foods group. Asked to scrutinise and manage 400 Burger King stores in the Philadelphia area, he presided over a large sales rise in part by establishing the “beamer” programme which encouraged employees to make customers smile by smiling themselves.

Then he rescued ailing chain Godfather’s Pizza by closing branches and slashing jobs. Having returned it to profit, he and a group of other investors bought the chain from Pillsbury.

Along the way, he gained a reputation for forthright opinions and an offbeat sense of humour, his gospel-inspired parody of John Lennon’s Imagine (“Imagine there’s no pizza/ I couldn’t if I tried/ eating only tacos/ or Kentucky Fried”) has become popular during his campaign.

This blend of straight-talking and jocularity is what made him a successful syndicated columnist and radio show host and goes some way to explaining the fascination he holds for Tea Party types.

But the clincher has been Cain’s attitude towards race. Referring to himself as American (as opposed to African-American), he is openly critical of other black people. “Many African Americans have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view,” he has said. Writer and political analyst, Jack E White, says Cain tells white voters what they want to hear about blacks so they can embrace him and say: “See, we’re not racist.”

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“He’s more earthy, down-homey, regular – not uppity,” Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, author of The Persistence Of The Color Line: Racial Politics And The Obama Presidency, has said. “That ‘not-uppity’ part is the contrast with President Obama [perceived as an intellectual].”

Cain’s political potential was first spotted when he effectively sabotaged Bill Clinton’s healthcare plan of 1993. Then president elect of the National Restaurant Association, he challenged Clinton at a meeting in Kansas City, telling him his proposed “employer mandate” would force small businessmen to axe jobs.

The clash so impressed former housing secretary Jack Kemp that he chartered a plane to meet Cain after the debate. Three years later, Cain was a senior economic adviser to Bob Dole’s presidential campaign and in 2000 briefly ran for the Republican presidential nomination. His most serious attempt on elected office, however, came in 2004, when he ran for the US Senate in Georgia, but failed to win the primary.

This time round, his attempt to win the Republican nomination is being backed by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who fund Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing political advocacy group for which Cain has worked since 2005.

At the beginning, critics claimed he wasn’t taking it seriously enough. Earlier in the year, two aides resigned from his campaign complaining that he was more interested in promoting his latest book than pounding the streets in New Hampshire and Iowa.

And even since the campaign has taken off, it has been marked by a series of blunders; from insisting he’d be unlikely ever to have a Muslim in his administration, to calling Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the house and most senior woman in congress, “Princess Pelosi”, Cain has courted controversy. The first point on his four-point immigration plan was an electric fence to kill those who tried to enter the country illegally (he later claimed that was a joke). But a reputation for political incorrectness is a badge of honour to the Right; and his electric fence suggestion was met with raucous applause at a Tea Party gathering.

Cain’s 9.9.9 tax plan – which would replace the current tax system with a 9 per cent business transactions tax, a 9 per cent personal income tax and a 9 per cent federal sales tax – has been criticised as placing too high a burden on the poor.

But far more serious has been the way Cain’s team has dealt with the sex allegations; the early vacillation was damaging enough but then, last week, his campaign manager Mark Block issued a statement saying Karen Kraushaar’s “son” Josh Kraushaar worked for Politico, the organisation which leaked details of the National Restaurant Association settlements. Josh Kraushaar does indeed work for Politico, but he is not related to Karen Kraushaar and Block was forced to apologise.

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The sex allegations have put race back on the agenda; not least because, even today, details of interracial sex can cause a stir in some quarters. Earlier in his campaign, Cain raised eyebrows when he said: “People sometimes hold themselves back because they want to use racism as an excuse for them not being able to achieve what they want to achieve.” He told supporters he believed racism was largely irrelevant in the 21st century. Yet Cain and his supporters are now raising it as a possible motive for a smear campaign.

“Of course, as soon as he gets into trouble, it’s race, race, race, race,” Harvard professor Randall Kennedy has said.

Cain’s refusal to take the allegations seriously has also compounded their potential to damage him. Asked – live on the Jimmy Kimmel TV show – whether he would hire lawyer Gloria Allred, who is representing Bialek as his attorney he replied: “I can’t think of anything I’d hire Gloria Allred to do,” which some saw as evidence that his attitude towards women was indeed highly disrespectful.

So far, the allegations do not seem to have hurt Cain’s chances. If US radio talk show host and right-wing opinion former Rush Limbaugh, who last week pronounced Bialek’s name as “Buy A Lick” and asked if Kraushaar’s plan for a joint press conference of accusers meant they wanted to “synchronise their menstrual cycles”, is anything to go by, attitudes towards women among Cain’s support base are hardly progressive.

Some of his supporters see him as the victim of a smear campaign while others say that – even if they’re true – the allegations pale in comparison to the sexual misdemeanours of other US politicians such as founding father Thomas Jefferson and Bill Clinton.

Although critics have been having a field day – coming up with “Cain-wreck” to describe his campaign’s trajectory – his approval ratings have remained more or less stable and his campaign managers say $2.5 million (£1.6m) in donations have come in over the past ten days. Cain has become increasingly irascible as the scandal has dragged on, but he continues to deny all the allegations. Whether he survives depends largely on what happens next; if more women go public with detailed accounts of alleged harassment, then he might be seen as a liability. But if Bialek is as bad as it gets, then it seems quite possible he will ride out the storm.

Not that any of this means Cain will ever be president. It’s early days, as commentators have been quick to point out. In December 2007, Gallup showed Rudy Giuliani leading the field, followed by Mike Huckabee. The eventual winner, John McCain, was tied third with Fred Thompson. Cain lacks access to the kinds of funds Romney and Perry have piled up. In the end most right-wing Republicans will pick whichever candidate they believe has the best chance of taking out Barack Obama – and, however “likeable”, that’s unlikely to be Cain.

Wandering hands

Jacques Chirac

Known as Jacques “three minutes, shower included” Chirac, the former French president had a reputation for having indiscreet encounters with beautiful women wherever he went. The extent of his philandering was revealed in a book written by his chauffeur.

Bill Clinton

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There can be few people alive today who don’t know what Monica Lewinsky did to Bill Clinton in the Oval Office and how Clinton tried to wriggle out of owning up to it. The president was impeached as a result of the scandal which changed the way the world looked at cigars forever.

Silvio Berlusconi

Even by political standards, Silvio Berlusconi is shameless. His tenure as Italian prime minister has been characterised by sex scandals with young women. Responding to criticism this year, he said: “When asked if they would like to have sex with me, 30 per cent of women said ‘Yes’, while the other 70 per cent replied, ‘What, again?’”

Boris Yeltsin

Known more for his prodigious vodka consumption than his predatory behaviour Yeltsin nevertheless had a reputation for goosing women and was once caught on camera pinging a secretary’s bra strap as he approached the stage to deliver an important speech.

Anthony Weiner

Newlywed congressman Anthony Weiner’s wandering hands extended only as far as his keyboard. After weeks of denying inappropriate behaviour, he admitted sending explicit messages and pictures of himself in his underwear to six women over a three-year period. He resigned this year after one of the photos was leaked to a TV show.

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