Posts Tagged ‘Democrats’
The Hermanator
Oct4
By John Feehery
The Hermanator - Herman Cain
The Hermanator is now tied with Rick Perry for second place in a new Washington Post poll in the Republican race for the White House.
That doesn’t surprise me much. A very good friend of mine who describes himself as a moderate independent Republican kind of guy pinged me on Facebook about Cain. He said he would vote for him if Mr. Cain survives the primary process down in Texas.
And for many folks out there, Herman Cain is more than just a successful pizza guy. He is the embodiment of the American dream.
Unlike Barack Obama, Cain believes deeply in the concept of American exceptionalism. He worked hard his whole life, and he has been successful at just about everything he has done.
Where Obama preaches collectivism and class envy, Cain preaches self-reliance and individual liberty. Where Obama has nothing but contempt for free-market capitalism, Cain believes strongly in the power of the marketplace.
He turned around Burger King, made Godfather’s Pizza a huge success, and helped to stop Hillarycare in the mid-nineties.
Cain, born in Georgia in 1945, encountered his fair share of racism growing up in the old South. He is no naïf about bigotry. But he learned the value of hard work from his parents (his mother was a domestic and his father was a chauffeur). A graduate of Morehouse College, one of the great historically black colleges, Cain served in the Navy before starting his business career at Coca-Cola.
In many ways, a Cain-Obama match-up would be intriguing. One believes in the American dream, while the other believes that America must be fundamentally changed. One confronted racism in the heart of the Confederacy during the most difficult days of civil rights battles, while the other became a community organizer in Chicago twenty years later. One was born of two black parents whose grandparents were likely slaves, while the others parents were a white Kansan and an African who had no experience with American slavery whatsoever. One has been accused of selling out his people by being a Republican, while the other was accused of not being black enough in his first political primary.
I like Herman Cain. He is hard not to like. He has stared down cancer, corporate America, racists, and the American media, and he seems to be getting stronger as the campaign goes along.
But that doesn’t mean that I would vote for him for President.
Herman Cain would make a great Secretary of Commerce. He is the consummate salesman. He knows how to move product. He knows how to talk about business because he knows business as well as anybody.
But the Hermanator is not ready to be President of the United States.
He doesn’t have the diplomatic or political skills to run the country. He has never won an election. He doesn’t have a sophisticated strategic world-view. He hates Muslims too much. He is prone to saying crazy things about sharia law. He doesn’t have a basic understanding of key international issues, like the Palestinian right of return or the strategic ambiguity of our relationship with Taiwan.
His 9-9-9 plan sound like a good idea, but it really isn’t. It is actually a back-way to impose a 9 percent sales tax on all products while keeping around an individual and corporate income tax. You start with 9-9-9, and pretty soon, you are at 20-20-20 and you wonder why everything is so damn expensive.
If he were elected President, it would horrify our allies and bring a smile to the face of our chief competitors. We would be an international laughing-stock.
I like Herman Cain. But he shouldn’t be our next President.
Waiver Nation
Sep29
By John Feehery
It used to be that waivers were a bad thing.
It was bad to be put on waivers if you were in the NFL or played Major League Baseball. That meant you were out of a job.
Now, waivers are a good thing.
The Obama Administration announced that it was going to give waivers to the states of No Child Left Behind.
Too many states can’t meet the requirements of NCLB, so they are begging the Feds to give them a break.
If there is one thing that Mr. Obama and all the Republicans running for President agree on, it is that they don’t really love that landmark law legislated by John Boehner and Ted Kennedy and signed into law by W.
It’s too hard. Let’s give the states a waiver.
That, of course, begs the question: If the law is so bad, why don’t you just repeal it. Good question.
Mitt Romney promised that the first thing he would do if elected President would be to give waivers to all 50 states to the health care law signed by Mr. Obama.
Obamacare is a sure loser. All Republicans agree with that. When Romney announced his idea to gut the law, Michele Bachmann chimed in snidely, “well I am going to repeal the law.”
That would seem to make sense in an alternative universe, but we live in the real world, and there ain’t no way the Democrats are going to join with us in repealing Obamacare, so in the meantime, give me a waiver baby.
It seems that every time the Congress passes a dumb law, states want waivers from it. As Rick Perry rightly pointed out, sometimes that even means getting waivers from the Social Security program.
Because of the wonders of our tax code, close to half of the American people get a waiver from paying any Federal taxes. No wonder the country is going broke.
Pretty soon, every body is going to want their own personal waiver from dumb Congressional laws. The problem is that there are so many stupid Congressional laws, that it is hard to know where to start.
We are becoming a waiver nation. I can think of several politicians I would like to see put on waivers.
