Herman Cain rises
It’s been three weeks since I last wrote a roundup, and those three weeks have been very kind to GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain.
Cain has gained significant ground in almost every poll and has gained “frontrunner” status. A Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll had him four points above Romney and eleven points behind the plummeting Rick Perry.
With Cain’s higher poll numbers comes a lot more attention for the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. For the most part, Cain has used this newfound media attention to push his 9-9-9 plan. The plan, which is not a pizza deal, proposes a 9 percent corporate income tax, 9 percent personal income tax and 9 percent sales tax. The plan has garnered plenty of criticism and is yet to receive support from any notable Republicans, yet Cain’s poll numbers haven’t taken a hit.
The main problem people have with the 9-9-9 plan is that it raises taxes for a majority of Americans while giving a tax cut to the richest among us. Cain recently revised his planning, saying that it would actually be the 9-0-9 plan for Americans under the poverty level, but that has done little to slow critics.
Cain has also used all the attention he is getting to talk about border fences—specifically electrified border fences.
In regards to the U.S.-Mexico border, Cain said, “We’ll have a real fence: 20 feet high, with barbed wire. Electrified. With a sign on the other side saying, ‘It can kill you.’”
Then, Cain went on Meet the Press and declared that this plan was a joke. All was well until a couple days later. Cain said his plan for a border fence may still involve the fence being electrified, but it was still a joke because he didn’t want to offend anyone.
Despite the fact that the attention Cain is getting might not be the best thing for his campaign, his poll numbers are still strong. Polls from the last week and a half have Cain ahead of Romney in key states such as Iowa, Ohio and South Carolina—sometimes by double digits.
Rick Perry plummets
With Cain’s rise comes Rick Perry’s fall. Perry has been plummeting in almost every poll out there, presumably due to his poor debate performances. I could talk about Perry’s poor poll numbers more specifically to show how rough his campaign is going, but an exchange from a recent interview he did with Parade Magazine more aptly elucidates how much he really has hit rock bottom.
The interviewer pressed him on whether or not he thought President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Perry avoided the questions and refused to give a definitive answer as to what he thought of the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate. He even brought up a dinner he recently had with Donald Trump in which Trump expressed that he thought Obama’s birth certificate was fake. You know a GOP candidate is desperate when he is considering the idea that Obama’s birth certificate could be fake.
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