Good enough?

“The video is being taken out of context,” said spokesman JD Gordon. “He was taking questions for about 30 to 40 minutes on four hours of sleep. He didn’t say anything wrong or in accurate; it just took him a while to recall the specifics of Libya.”

Gordon added, “It just took him a while to gain his bearings.”

The clip was posted unedited by the Journal-Sentinel so I don’t know what context he thinks was missing. Is there some context that would explain why he needed the editorial board to remind him whether Obama is pro- or anti-Qaddafi? Because I’m thinking pretty much every one of our readers could nail that detail even on three hours’ sleep.

According to Andrew Rafferty of NBC News, “When I asked Cain if today’s Libya gaffe builds on idea he doesn’t have in depth knowledge of foreign policy, he simply said, ‘999’”. Not a joke.

I guess we’ll be okay as long as President Cain never gets a phone call at 3 a.m. The irony of today’s supergaffe is that I think it’ll do him much less harm among primary voters generally than the harassment charges have, even though his hair-raising vagueness on key foreign-policy details is much more certain than whether he did anything to his accusers. Only political junkies will see the Libya clip; thanks to Gloria Allred, everyone’s seen the Bialek presser. ABC’s out with a new poll tonight, in fact, showing Cain’s favorable rating now stands at 29/44, a steep drop from last month’s rating of 31/27. That’s a poll of adults, not of voters, but don’t forget that Rasmussen also found his favorables underwater at 37/51 in a poll of likely voters last week. Barring some revelation that Bialek and Allred set him up somehow, I don’t know how he turns that around. His biggest political asset has always been his charm; once that’s been neutralized to the point where people are about as favorable to him as they are to Gingrich, what reason is left to vote for him over Newt?

Actually, the most damning poll against him is our own, I think. As a commenter in the last thread said, if he’s lost the Cain fans at HA, there can’t be much room left for him among the base. And maybe he’s starting to realize it: According to his spokesman, the reason Cain was in Wisconsin today instead of on the trail in Iowa was because he wanted to go to the Packers game. Exit quotation: “We’re here to tailgate.”