Video: "9-9-9 The Movie"

The Herman Cain campaign today released “9-9-9 The Movie,” an attempt to reassure conservative critics and convert independent skeptics to Cain’s much-mentioned economic plan. Among others, Politico and ABC reporters are already busy deriding it, wryly comparing and contrasting it with earlier admittedly weird and arguably insubstantial Cain campaign spots.

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First accounts of the video from these news outlets feature subtle, tempting and remarkably similar sentences like these:

“It’s the kind of thing that Cain fans may enjoy, that Cain detractors will laugh at, and that shows, in any case, how little Cain’s message has evolved since the summer.”

-and-

“It’s the kind of thing that Cain backers can e-mail out to friends and family as an easy-to-follow primer on how they believe 9-9-9 would work.”

In other words: Close, but no cigar, Mr. Cain. This doesn’t do the defensive trick and fails to fool anyone into thinking 9-9-9 is anything more than amateur policy-making.

MSM disapprobation makes me want to like the video. But as Ann Coulter once said: Just because liberals accuse you of being stupid, it doesn’t mean you’re smart. I’m inclined to agree with the consensus here: The video doesn’t really answer the concerns about 9-9-9, most especially the criticism that the plan just adds a national sales tax on top of local and state sales taxes. It does, however, have a very nice Schoolhouse-Rock-like aesthetic and, at the very least, effectively makes the case that we need tax reform. For that, though, I’d look to Paul Ryan before I’d look to Herman Cain.

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