It’s hard to forget Herman Cain, the failed Senate candidate turned failed presidential candidate, who made an appearance today at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s event, organized by disgraced former lobbyist Ralph Reed. Cain, once a big attraction for the Tea Party crowd, appears to have lost a rhetorical step.
Cain … exhorted the half-filled ballroom at Washington, DC’s Omni Shoreham hotel to inform themselves and get active in politics. They needed to get involved because, as he put it, “stupid people [who do vote and volunteer] are ruining America.”Those in the room need to outnumber those “stupid people,” he continued. “The solution is real simple folks. Those of us who are informed have got to outvote the stupid people. And you have got to become ambassadors of intelligence, ambassadors of information.”
Voter sophistication appears to be an area of particular interest to Cain. “[W]e have a severe ignorance problem with the people who are so mesmerized by [the president’s] popularity that they are not looking at the facts,” Cain told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly last year. “I still have faith, Bill, in enough people that can wake up and get out of the ignorance zone and we then be able to elect the right kind of people going forward.”Cain might want to rethink this whole approach to “the ignorance zone.”
We are, however, talking about a guy who doesn’t know China has nuclear weapons. He said the U.S. can’t launch a military strike against Iran because it’s “very mountainous.” He thinks “Cuban” is a language. Asked about a military conflict in Libya, he said, “I got all this stuff twirling around in my head.” Asked about foreign heads of state, he said he doesn’t care who “the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” is.
Cain also famously argued the nation needs “a leader, not a reader.”
Maybe he’d be better off references to “stupid people” in his public remarks?
Recommended
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."