Lastly, there’s Herman “Big Daddy” Cain, the former C.E.O. of Godfather’s Pizza, who recently told Chris Wallace of Fox News that “when” he becomes president, he’s going to remix “Hail to the Chief,” possibly with “some gospel beats.” He won the Florida straw poll and has surged ever since.

He has never been elected to public office and has demonstrated a woeful lack of understanding of international affairs. But what gets my goat is how he plays with the shiv of racism like a circus clown. He complains about people calling him names because he is a black conservative, while simultaneously offering up sweeping racial generalizations about other blacks. He describes the Democratic Party as a “plantation” and says that two-thirds of blacks are “brainwashed” into voting Democratic.

He has also raised the tired trope that Obama isn’t black enough and that the news media is scared that he, “a real black man,” might run against Obama. When Jon Stewart mocked him for saying (“joking”?) that as president all bills would have to be three pages long, Cain accused Stewart of crossing the line by using the “dialect of the old Amos ’n’ Andy.” Yet when shrugging off criticism, Cain quotes his grandfather using poor grammar: “I does not care.” What kind of dialect is that?