Quotes of the day

“Herman Cain is getting pretty close to being something more than the flavor of the month. PPP’s newest polls find him with a double digit lead in Wisconsin, and running only a point behind Mitt Romney in Nevada. This now makes 4 weeks in a row where Cain’s been on the top of our polls- in 9 surveys we’ve conducted over that period of time he’s held the lead in 8 with this Nevada poll serving as the only exception…

“Cain’s numbers continue to represent a huge amount of momentum. He’s gained 21 points from late July in Nevada, when he was at 7%. And he’s gained 23 points from mid-August in Wisconsin where he was also at 7%. It’s the Tea Party that continues to drive Cain’s support. He’s up 37-19 on Romney with those voters in Nevada with Gingrich in second at 20%. And in Wisconsin he gets 37% with them as well with Gingrich at 17%, Perry at 12%, and Romney all the way back in a tie for 4th with Ron Paul at 8%.”

“If Herman Cain feels his management skills are up to any challenge, some of his former staff members think he should have started with the disorder in his own campaign.

“Mr. Cain has hardly shown up in New Hampshire and Iowa, they said, spending the bulk of his time on a book tour through the South. He occasionally mishandled potential big donors or ignored real voters. His campaign churned through the small staff; last week, his campaign announced the appointment of the veteran campaigner Steve Grubbs, his third Iowa leader in four months…

“And then there was that e-mail to the staff about traveling in a car with Mr. Cain: ‘Do not speak to him unless you are spoken to,’ the memo said…

“Some former aides said they had longed to see the problem-solving side of Mr. Cain, or to see Mr. Cain at all. Over the spring and summer, he did not spend much time with workers. He did not plan conference calls or staff meetings and was given to changing his mind about appearances, sometimes with little notice, a tendency that angered his field workers…

“‘Everything we tried to do was like pulling teeth to get accomplished,’ said a former staff member in Iowa, who asked for anonymity. ‘I’ve never been involved in a job that was as frustrating as this one. We couldn’t get an answer on anything. Everything was fly by the seat of your pants.'”

“Check the polls: Gingrich has recovered some of his old intra-Republican popularity. Cain is now the front-runner in Iowa and in a bunch of later primary states where voters know the candidates mostly through debates and Fox News hits—forums where these two shine. Both candidates are doing even better than they were before they converted their campaigns into full-service book tours…

“There’s a popular going theory in the punditocracy now: Cain’s just proving that every outsider candidate will get a bubble. Today, Cain, tomorrow Santorum. I don’t buy it. The Cain/Gingrich un-campaigns are succeeding because they understand how the media works. Just look at how they’ve spent the last decade. Gingrich, ousted from House leadership 13 years ago, spent the Bush era writing identical-looking policy books and building a honeycomb of nonprofits: American Solutions, the Center for Health Transformation, on and on. Cain ran for U.S. Senate in 2004 and lost, but before and after that he was a pundit and radio host who could walk onto Fox News almost as easily as Gingrich could. Starting in 2009, he spoke to every Tea Party that would have him. That, not some sort of meticulous Washington meeting schedule, was how he found his campaign chief and built his network.

“In the last 10 years, Cain and Gingrich have learned to make bold pronouncements and endorse wild gimmicks, like Gingrich’s plan to break up courts if they annoy conservatives, or Cain’s 9-9-9 implosion of the tax code. They run their policy shops the way a contrarian editor might run his magazine. It works. Bill O’Sullivan, the treasurer of Texas Tea Party Patriots, explains that Cain and Gingrich have won over the party’s base because they barrel through the normal constraints of campaigns and the ‘glorified spelling bees’ that are media-sponsored debates.

“‘What we’re trying to do is find leaders,’ he says, ‘and these guys have decided to go outside the paradigm. They’re showing enormous courage.'”

“The conventional analysis ignores a giant fact: A new force swept into American politics in 2009 and its influence continues to climb. Last year, it used nomination fights to eliminate two incumbent Republican senators (in Utah and Alaska, although Sen. Murkowski ultimately survived through a write-in campaign that attracted waves of Democratic votes), and defeated then-sitting Florida Gov. Charlie Crist in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat, thus sending Marco Rubio to Washington instead…

“This is the power of the new force. It can grab a third-tier candidate by his lapels and put him on top. And the new force is seeking the most electable radical it can find, not the pol patiently waiting in the wings. They want a 21st century reformer who will take on the mid-20th century entitlement state, not a tinkerer trying to keep alive a consensus formed before many of them could vote.

“That new force is the Tea Party. It is challenging and changing the rules of how the GOP establishment picks it presidential nominee.”

“You can certainly argue that Iraq and the financial crisis posed unique and unprecedented challenges. It was probably impossible to get everything right. But the fact is that people we had every reason to regard as the greatest experts failed to get anything close to optimal results…

“Now Republicans are zooming from one low-expertise candidate to another. Michele Bachmann has never run anything but a small business. Herman Cain ran a pizza company and lost an election for senator. Rick Perry showed little interest in national issues in his first 10 years as governor of Texas.

“Mitt Romney’s years in private equity and one term as governor of Massachusetts give him an edge in expertise over the present field. But his experience is thin next to contenders in the past.

“It’s offputting to watch what a low value voters put on expertise. But that’s what happens when experts blow it one time after another.”