Herman Cain: le bûcher (Wall street journal)

D'accord avec l'opinion présentée au début de l'article. Si Cain avait imaginé grimpé aussi haut dans les sondages, il se serait entouré d'une équipe plus solide et, surtout, capable de mieux gérer les crises. Une campagne, ça se prépare... Même les scandales!

"Now Herman Cain knows how Icarus felt at the top. We won't go so far as to push the analogy to conclude that the Cain campaign is crashing into the sea. But make no mistake: Herman Cain's got a sea of trouble.

It's clear by now that the voluble former restaurant executive had no expectation that his Presidential candidacy would fly as high as it has. If he did, he'd long ago have had in place the kind of campaign staff able at least to guide a candidate through the inevitable turbulence of modern politics.

The last few days witnessed the spectacle of Mr. Cain's campaign first blaming the liberal media for reporting years-old claims of sexual harassment, then denying the claims as "baseless," then acknowledging that he might have known something about the settlements reached by the National Restaurant Association where he was in charge.

The story reached fiasco status on Wednesday when Mr. Cain's chief of staff, Mark Block, accused the Rick Perry campaign of leaking the early sexual harassment stories. Yesterday Mr. Block half-retracted the accusation. One may reasonably wonder whether Mr. Cain approved this stillborn damage-control strategy. Either answer would be unflattering.

Lesson one of the Cain mess is that running a campaign for the Presidency of the United States is unlike anything else in politics, or anything else in American life for that matter. Mr. Cain's remarkable success so far, riding to the top of the GOP preference polls, is a testament to his skills at communicating and his willingness to offer bold policy proposals.

Mr. Cain has proven there is a hunger in the public for roiling the political status quo. If he has disappointed his supporters, which remains to be seen, it is because he hasn't displayed sufficient self-awareness of the requirements of being a top-tier presidential candidate.

Anyone who makes it to the front of the candidate line is going to come under close—make that withering—scrutiny. If in one's past exist two sexual harassment suits formally settled by one's employer, that is going to become public. It is a certainty. Allowing oneself to drift through a campaign until the day the buried bombs go off is amateur hour. Republicans have a right to ask Mr. Cain what he would have said if he won the nomination and the news had broken after Labor Day next year. The Cain campaign would have been smarter to leak the story pre-emptively."

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