The Cain Conundrum

This has been one of the weirdest campaign seasons that I've ever seen in my life.  With Obama's spectacular failure to come through on his promise to prevent the unemployment rate from exceeding 8%, you'd think it would be easy for the GOP to cough up a worthy opponent to run against him... but they just can't seem to settle on a frontrunner for some reason.

For a while there, it was looking like they finally settled on Herman Cain, but his poll numbers have fallen a bit in the wake of whatever the hell these past couple of weeks have been.  I'm not sure that "scandal" is the right word to describe it, because I don't even know what I'm supposed to be outraged about.  I've seen a lot of allegations being thrown at Herman Cain, but no credible person has stepped forward yet to make a specific allegation that can be backed up with any kind of evidence.

The way that the media has covered this story has been utterly atrocious, which may earn Cain some sympathy points from conservatives who are sick to death of having our candidates chosen for us by a blatantly corrupt media over and over again... but as unfair as the media may have been to Cain, his campaign's handling of all this hasn't been so great either.  When it's all said and done, I worry that the idea that Cain did something wrong will be cemented in the heads of too many people, even if those people aren't really sure what that something is.

But all the nebulous accusations of impropriety aside, there is another problem for Cain here: he seems to be "winging it" way too much.  I want to support him, but I'm not entirely sure where his head is at on some issues... and lately, I'm not even sure if he knows where his own head is at.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he'd make a terrible president... just about anyone would be a thousand times better than Obama.  The question is, how would Cain be as a candidate in the general election?  Obama has been campaigning for years now, it's just about the only thing he knows how to do... any time there is a problem, he just reverts back to campaign mode.  He is a lousy president, but he is very comfortable with pretending to be a great president, and he can afford to "wing it" now and then because the media will be covering for him every step of the way... whoever the GOP nominates won't have that luxury.

So then, where does that leave us?  One of Ace's commenters makes this dire prediction:

Too late. Newt Gingrich is now the Wave of the Future.

We are accelarating towards the point of anti-Mitt singularity where the last anti-Mitt ends up being Mitt Romney himself, so we have 2 Mitt Romneys running against each other.

In other words, Mitt Romney's existing political platform which goes Schrodinger's cat on every issue.