Having been caught in rolling disclosures and shifting stories regarding the settlement apparently paid to two female employees of the National Restaurant Association during the time he led the organization between 1996 and 1999, Herman Cain has resorted to a familiar defense.
He and his supporters are accusing the “liberal media” of a “high tech lynching” of yet another “uppity black” who dares to be conservative.
If that sounds familiar, you probably lived through the Clarence Thomas hearings.
Back in 1991, Thomas uttered the infamous phrase after Anita Hill, who was supervised by Thomas at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, testified that Thomas repeatedly sexually harassed her and behaved lewdly in the workplace.
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It was a sorry spectacle surrounding the man then President George H.W. Bush selected to fill the vacancy left by the venerable Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme court. Because of the Thomas hearings, the phrase “pubic hair on a Coke can” and an unfortunate pornographic mangling of Long John Silver (pity the once popular seafood chain, and the Treasure Island pirate…) were forever burned in to the public lexicon.
Cain, who called Thomas one of his model Supreme Court Justices< on Meet the Press last month, actually has been laying down the “high tech lynching” framework since at least May, when he warned National Review’s Byron York that his “lynching” by liberals was coming. Makes you wonder if he saw his kinship with Thomas in literal terms.
Conservative talk radio gadflies like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham (who clerked for Thomas) rushed to Cain’s defense, immediately picking up the “high tech lynching” meme.
The spectacle of Limbaugh denouncing the story as a “racially stereotypical attack” on Cain was particularly galling, given his past statements, including saying the NFL, with its preponderance of black players, looks like the Crips vs the Bloods street gangs.
But making the case that Cain is Thomas 2.0 is going to be a much easier sell with Dittoheads and the tea party than with ordinary Americans.
For one thing, back in 1991, Thomas faced a public accuser, who drew the requisite scrutiny, including a vicious vetting of her memory and even her sanity, by Thomas’ defenders in an out of the United States Senate.
theGrio: Why Anita Hill’s story still hits a nerve
In the end, Anita Hill was as much on trial as Clarence Thomas in those hearings, and having an opponent who could be vilified by name helped Thomas win the sympathy not just of the right, but at the time, of the vast majority of African-Americans. (Thomas’ support among African-Americans has since evaporated.)
In Cain’s case, the women are anonymous, and so are the specifics about the charges. Therefore the speculation is much more feverish. Without names or faces to attach to the allegations, the inevitable questions are irresistible. What exactly did the women accuse him of? Were there more than two? And yes, were either of them white? Those questions dog this scandal like a pit bull, and you can bet that every political reporter in Washington and beyond are hunting for those details. As more information inevitably emerges, Cain will face the drip, drip, drip of an increasingly damaging narrative.
Meanwhile, as long as Cain keeps talking, and minimizing the women’s allegations, he keeps the story alive, and he risks drawing one or both of the women into the open. He might want to ask former Congressman Anthony Weiner or ex-New York governor Elliot Spitzer how well that kind of thing works out in the age of the 24 hour news cycle.
Cain also can’t deploy the Thomas defense because unlike in that case, there appears to be that written documentation of the women taking action to address the alleged behavior at the time it occurred (Hill admitted she failed to come forward for years.) That makes this more than a case of “he said, she said.” And Cain’s defense, that he doesn’t remember if he signed off on those settlements, just doesn’t sound credible for a man who claims to be a sharp business mind.
The scandal also highlights something Cain would probably rather not remind voters of: that during the time of the alleged incidents, he was the head of a lobbying organization — since that’s what the National Restaurant Association is. (It was also during this time that Cain first attracted the attention of the conservative movement, when he fired off tough questions about “Hillarycare” at President Bill Clinton at a 1996 town hall.)
MSNBC: Sexual claims common in pressure-cooker restaurant world
As for Cain’s defenders blaming the “liberal media” for a supposed hit job, consider that Politico put four reporters on the initial story — a story that was clearly brought to them, by someone. Sure, they vetted it and checked it out, even tried, over the course of ten days, to get Cain or his campaign to comment (they refused.) The story is backed up by documentation, and the reporters got “multiple sources” to confirm it. Bottom line: the reporters didn’t land on Herman Cain’s sex harassment allegations, Herman Cain’s sex harassment allegations landed on them.
And it will be hard to engender much sympathy for a 65-year-old black man who claims he and his family brushed off segregation, who calls Planned Parenthood genocidal against blacks, and who accuses fellow African-Americans of being brainwashed zombies toiling on the Democratic Party plantation. Cain has no trouble playing hardball against those with whom he disagrees, and he’ll have to deal with it when politics plays hardball with him.
The smart money says this story came not from liberals or Democrats, but from Republicans. It is Cain’s Republican opponents who have the most to gain by knocking him down.
This story didn’t emerge from some liberal island of doom that seeks to destroy all black conservatives. It’s a simple case of opposition research, which is standard fare in a contested primary. And not for nothing, but it’s research about alleged incidents that his former organization saw fit to settle financially, and in writing.
So if Cain is accusing someone of a high tech lynching, it’s fair to assume he is accusing his own side of holding the digital rope.