Fresh Off Successful Debate Performance, Herman Cain Returns to One of His Favorite Places

The day after an impressive performance in a Republican Presidential debate, Herman Cain left little doubt about his future intentions. He told the assembled local bloggers and print journalists at a briefing in Las Vegas, “Hold the date of May 21^st - write that down, Chuck – in Atlanta, Atlanta’s Centennial Park. Hold the date. Now do you think I’m going to be holding the date and having a rally at Centennial Park on May 21^st to tell you that I am not running? You make the call. Last night exceeded our expectations.”

(Chuck refers to Chuck Muth, President of Citizen Outreach, who organized the briefing and at whose First Friday event later that evening Cain was the featured speaker.)

Before instructing them to “hold the date” Cain had indicated the importance of the debate in his decision-making process. “Needless to say, the debate last night was a pivotal moment, pivotal moment, in the Herman Cain journey to make a decision to run for President,” he said.

His appearance was one of many recent visits to Las Vegas by Cain, who recalled his very first Tea Party speech, in Las Vegas on April 15, 2009. He related, “I just happened to be in town, giving a speech at one of the conventions here, they heard that I was here and invited me out. That was my first, quote, Tea Party event. They were expecting six hundred people and ended up with two thousand six hundred people, which was great.”

He noted another interesting event involving his appearance. The organizers, he said, “were worried that it might rain and impact turnout. It stayed cloudy all day and then, when they introduced me to speak, the clouds opened up and the sun came down.”

Cain is a favorite of Tea Partiers, an honor he readily embraces. He stated, “I define a Tea Party candidate as anyone who believes in fiscal responsibility, the free market system and enforcing the Constitution. That’s the mantra of the Tea Party movement.”

“I have been a believer in that mantra from the beginning,” he said.

He also defended the movement against critics in the media, saying, “The whole attempt on the part of the mainstream media to denigrate the Tea Party movement is because they don’t have another tactic to try to hold it back because they can’t stop it. So name-calling and labeling is all they have – racist group, whatever.”

Cain has made several appearances in Las Vegas since that initial Tea Party speech. Aside from that first Tea Party appearance, he spoke at the RightOnline conference last summer, at a private gathering in Summerlin earlier this year, at a Nevada Republican Men’s Club event a couple months ago and was the featured speaker at Clark County’s Lincoln Day Dinner.

His interest in the area is both strategic and personal. “Nevada’s critical because it’s one of the early primary states.”

He stated, “A lot of people underestimate the significance of Nevada because it’s the first major western state to say Yea or Nay on particular candidates.”

“You’ll never hear President Herman Cain say, ‘don’t go to Las Vegas,’” Cain said. “This is one of my favorite cities, are you kidding me?”

Cain opposes a top-down approach to education policy. With respect to federal funding for education, he stated, “Push it all down to the local level. I believe any education money that we can afford to the states should be block-granted. Secondly, I call it unbundling education. I want to unbundle the education department in Washington, DC. What does that mean? Cut or end all programs that contain unfunded mandates.”

The effect, Cain said, “Most states will probably say, we’ll take a haircut on the dollars we take, if we get to decide how to use it.”

“One of my guiding principles you can put in bold italics is, Washington cannot micromanage anything, which is why programs fail,” he asserted. He proposed to “empower the states to do what they do best, which is to take care of the affairs of the states.”

“Another one of my guiding principles,” Cain declared, “let the people closest to the problems decide on the solutions.”

Cain presented a five-point stimulus plan, consisting of:

1)      Direct stimulus – lower corporate tax rates from 35 to 25%; bring individual tax rates down to a maximum top rate of 25%. “That’s in Ryan’s plan so that’s not new.”

2)      Reduce the capital gains tax rate to zero.

3)      Suspend taxes on repatriated profits.

4)      “A real payroll tax holiday. The piddling 2% the Obama administration and Congress passed at the end of last year has not done anything and most of us knew that it wouldn’t. This administration and the liberals do just enough in cutting taxes for it to fail,” he said. He claimed, “They don’t do enough to make it succeed they do just enough to say, ‘see, it didn’t work.'” Cain declared, “I’m proposing 6.2% for all workers, 6.2% for employers for a year.” Cain claimed this plan would pay for itself as half of the 15 million unemployed would be able to find work as a result.

5)      Make the rates permanent. Extending rates for a limited time merely extends uncertainty.

Cain derided recent attempts aimed at reviving the economy. The stimulus “didn’t work. It made a few union people happy. Made a few folk who were on the government dole happy but it didn’t stimulate the economy.”

When asked about a recent report that, despite poor employment numbers, CEO compensation was increasing, Cain spoke about his own experience on corporate boards and declared, “It is not the government’s responsibility, job or purview to decide what a CEO ought to make.”

Later, he added, “CEO compensation responds to the same laws of supply and demand as buying a loaf of bread or buying a car.”

To those critical of corporate profits, Cain responded, “Why should Exxon make $60 billion last year? Because they took the risk to make that $60 billion.”

He used a recent example to make his point about the risk assumed by corporations, “Shell oil spent years and $2 billion plus developing exploration techniques off the coast of Alaska preparing to drill. $2 billion, several years, preparing to drill. Then the EPA says, ‘we’re not going to give you the permit because you are 70 miles from a small Alaskan town that has a population of less than 200 people and they might smell the fumes from your drilling.’”

Regarding the deficit, Cain declared, “We don’t have a revenue problem in America, we have a spending problem in America.”

He advocated replacing the current income tax with a Fair Tax. He said his plan for deficit reduction would entail an across-the-board 10% cut in every agency except defense. “We need to eliminate whole programs in every agency to get spending under control,” he asserted.

Cain would spare defense from the cuts for security reasons. “We’ve got all these nutcases out there, pipsqueak potentates, rattling their sabers,” he said.

He didn’t seem hesitant about attacking the Third Rail of politics. Cain declared, “I would restructure Social Security. I would restructure Medicare and I would restructure Medicaid. Trimming around the edges is not going to work.”

Cain criticized the current and past administrations for addressing Social Security merely by raising the retirement age, lowering benefits and raising taxes. Cain’s idea of restructuring of Social Security would include the introduction of voluntary private accounts for younger workers. These workers would still be required to contribute to the current system to provide benefits for existing retirees but a portion of their withholding would go into private accounts. Cain compared this to the model Chile adopted three decades ago.

The age at which workers would be able to opt for private accounts would be set to provide enough funds so those in the traditional Social Security system would not lose any benefits.

He discussed the difficulty of changing programs such as Social Security due to the tendency of opponents to demagogue the issue. “Every time you want to change something and make it better, watch out for the rhetoric of what it’s going to do to hurt old people, children and puppy dogs,” he joked.

 Cain, who described himself as “proud to be an American, black conservative,” dismissed race as an issue. “Color is off the table whether I run or not,” he said, adding, “Did Barack Obama open the door for me because I’m black? No. The door was already open. He just happened to get through it first.”

Though he would not have released pictures of Osama bin Laden’s body, Cain would not have disposed of bin Laden’s body as quickly as the Obama administration. As far as adhering to Islamic tradition in handling the body, “He killed three thousand people. Why do we care?”

A decade-and-a-half ago the Republican National Committee declared that Las Vegas was not a suitable site for its national convention. Cain expressed disagreement with that decision, “I would absolutely not be opposed to holding a Republican National Convention here in Las Vegas. In case you haven’t figured out, Chuck knows this, this is one of my favorite places.”

Cain praised the area, “Vegas has mastered the art of entertainment and gaming is only one part of that that they have mastered. That’s why I come here. My wife and I come here a lot.”

Later that evening one of the largest crowds ever attended the First Friday event, primarily to see featured speaker Cain. Many came to see him despite not knowing who he was a mere 24 hours earlier. After delivering his speech he was deluged with requests for photographs and autographs by an adoring crowd.

Las Vegas is a favorite of Cain’s. Since his debate performance, it appears as though, at least among conservatives in the area, the feeling is mutual.

Thanks for the link, Stacy.