RUTHFULLY YOURS

The pundits busy divining the reasons Herman Cain won that Florida straw poll so handily can’t be blamed—it was a compelling spectacle and a distinctly satisfying one as straw poll results go. To have listened to the candidate’s prescriptions in his speech to the delegates Saturday was to see why. Everything he told the audience had been said, in one way or another, by most of the leading Republican candidates. The difference here was—is—Mr. Cain’s unfailing capacity to speak as though from a core of fire deep inside him. An irresistible strength—as is the mordant humor he brings to the battle.

So it happens that he can deliver a steely jibe about defense cuts (“You don’t put a bull’s-eye on the backs of our men and women in uniform”) or the way America’s wars must be fought (“The mission is victory. . . . If we are not in it to win it, we will not be in it”) and make audiences feel they’d never heard anything so bracing. . . .

An early response to the Florida poll results came from a friend, historian Alan C. Kors, who observed in mock puzzlement: “So, the ‘Tea Party racists’ in a Republican straw poll chose the self-made black Herman Cain—mathematician and successful businessman—son of a cleaning woman and a janitor, as their choice of nominee for the presidency of the United States. Well! What a bigoted group, what a caste society!”

It’s an observation whose point wouldn’t be lost on Herman Cain.