RUTHFULLY YOURS

The word on the street among the right’s intelligentsia and punditocracy is that Herman Cain cannot, should not, and will not be the Republican nominee for president in 2012.

Hmmm.

Now, dear readers, those “never-will-happen,” 100%-certain predictions made by mere mortals — and there seem to be more and more of them these days — just remind me of weatherman goofs.

You know what I’m talking about. “There’s a 0% chance of rain here today”; it’s raining cats and dogs right out your window. “There’s a 100% ‘probability’ that this hurricane will hit the east coast of Florida by evening tomorrow”; hurricane fill-in-the-blank hits west coast of Florida where all the east coast residents have been moved during evacuations.

Weather is a far more exact science, however, than predicting human behavior.

And one would really need to be a ninny living under a rock in the San Fran Bay not to know by now that we have entered a new era in American politics, where the unpredictable, unlikely, unforeseen anomaly is becoming a new rule of sorts.

The triumph of Barack Obama against one of the most far-reaching, most powerful political machines in American history — the Clintons — ought to have awoken political insiders to the new reality. But if they were sound sleepers, then the rise of the middle-class, grassroots tea party movement ought to have been like a million roosters crowing at dawn, enough to awaken all but the dead-as-doornails beltway folks. Nothing — absolutely nothing — in American politics is predictable using the old rule book. Not anymore.

So when a proven American businessman like Herman Cain arises and runs for president, dissing his chances is downright dimwitted. If the politicos are right and 2012 will be all “It’s the economy stupid,” then the voice of  exemplary free-enterprise success might be the  most appealing one in a room full of nothing else but polished, professional, mealy-mouthed politicians.

In the first Republican presidential debate last week, Cain  blasted out the response that should have been headline news from coast to coast. When asked about his nonexistent public-office resume — and how he might win the presidency having never won an election — Cain quickly and authoritatively parried: “Everyone in Washington has held public office before. How’s that working out for you?” A slam dunk, if there ever was one.

I would not ever want to be caught in a woodshed facing off against Herman Cain.

Herman Cain speaks, and people who’ve never even heard of him stand up spontaneously and applaud. Many actually cry in gratitude for the authoritative voice of experience Herman brings to every audience. There was good reason for Ed Morrissey to report on Cain’s CPAC speech as the one that “stole the show.”

So why not Herman Cain for president?

Before I go further down this road, some full disclosure. No, I don’t work for Herman Cain. I don’t know him personally either. However, I have loved Herman Cain since the first time I heard him on radio, many years ago now. I have heard Cain verbally eviscerate “African-American” poor-mouth callers in a way that surely made them hope no one they knew was listening.

Herman Cain is an Atlanta guy; I’m an Atlanta gal. Herman Cain has been married to the same woman his entire adult life and is a family man if there ever was one. I’m Cain’s lifelong-married female societal counterpart. I relate to Herman Cain as though he were my next door neighbor in the other America — where monogamy still thrives and kids still mind their manners and the adults still stick together and raise future citizens who don’t end up costing their neighbors a wad in legal and welfare expenses.

Herman Cain is — through and through — the kind of guy you would trust with your last dollar. He’s so honest and so courageous that he has referred to himself as “the dark-horse candidate” — with a smile that could charm the hide off an ornery gator.
Cain’s outspoken love for America is so scary to the left that they’ve already hurled vicious racist epithets at him. There’s nothing for which the Marxists have less tolerance than a black man not willing to remain on the Democrats’ plantation. I daresay that a black man, courageously standing publicly for American free enterprise and individual meritocracy, is even scarier to the left than a rising Mama Grizzly.

But the Marxist, racialist-solidarity card played against Herman Cain is like putty in this man’s hands. I’ve seen him fight back against this leftist canard with a vengeance. Calling Herman Cain a “garbage pail kid” or a “monkey in the window” disgraces the writers, not Cain. And Cain does not — thank God! — take this sitting down or by returning to the back of the bus. (Please do yourself a favor and follow that link to Herman Cain’s pitch-perfect response.)

Eric “justice for my people only” Holder won’t find a “coward” on race in Herman Cain. Cain has not only more melanin in his skin than either Holder or Obama. He has the genuine black American experience in spades, no racist pun intended. While Obama and Holder were attending posh schools and being fawned over by white liberals, taking advantage of affirmative action programs every step of the way, Herman Cain was moving up and out the hard way, the all-American way.

Herman Cain was born in Atlanta in 1945. Think about that for a minute, dear readers. 1945. I was born in Atlanta in 1951. I know a whole lot about what life was like down South under Jim Crow. I’m six years younger than Herman Cain and I still remember vividly the “White” and “Colored” signs that adorned water fountains in the parks and restrooms in every town south of the Mason-Dixon line. I still remember segregated movie theaters, where black audiences were consigned to balcony seating with a back-door entrance, and where “Whites Only” everything, from lunch counters to hotels to Laundromats, reigned supreme.

If a white woman like me remembers these things with shame, how do you suppose Herman Cain remembers them? With justified pride — that’s how. Cain took injustice lemons and turned them into more sweet-tasting, entrepreneurial lemonade — for himself, his family, his community, and more American workers — than you could shake a stick at. And, all the while, he was smiling and singing God Bless America! Fundamentally change America? Not while Herman Cain is standing watch. He knows hard work still pays in America. And he will fight to preserve that opportunity for our posterity.

Herman Cain came from a solid, middle-class black family of the kind that once made up the vast majority of black American families. Even under Jim Crow, families like Cain’s (and Condoleezza Rice’s) flowered in segregated enclaves identical to their white counterparts. Black moms, dads and kids living under the same roof, all working hard under an unfair, completely lopsided system that was in place long before they were born. But unlike their modern set of racialist peers, these exemplary black Americans did not become resentful, angry, or vengeful. Instead, they used their newly attained civil rights to rise to the top — like the cream they always were.

Cain has literally wowed every single audience in every single venue where he has appeared. Cain has personally spoken at more than 40 tea party rallies. He comes across as the embodiment of American spirit. Perhaps, this love-America attitude in a modern black man is so rare that when it emanates from Herman Cain, it literally knocks people off their feet.

Or perhaps Herman Cain has the kind of fire in his belly which can only come from God? Who knows. What mortal among us can accurately define a person’s resonance with masses of other human beings, at a split moment in history’s march?

One thing I do know for sure. I would pay huge bucks for the privilege of seeing Herman Cain face off — mano a mano — with the adolescent “first black president.” Cain vs. Obama? Whoa. Now, that would be something. My intuition tells me that this historical face-off would be Obama’s first woodshed experience.

Obama could continue to call himself the “first black president” — and Herman Cain could take the title of “first genuine American black president.”

Sounds pretty good to this old Atlanta white gal.

Go Herman!!  Knock their everlivin’ socks off, honey!