Would it Derail the Obama Campaign?

Wow. What a storm can start from one poorly sourced, uninformative article, or at least when it's about a conservative.

Picture this; several years ago, like a decade plus, you made a comment that you thought was innocent, but the person you made it to, who was of the opposite sex, took it the wrong way and got offended. She then files a complaint which totally blindsides you, because you know nothing happened and you certainly didn't intend for it to. The matter gets settled and because you're in a position to delegate to others what to do to satisfy this person, you say do it, and you're glad to have it done with and behind you. I know that if I were in this position, I would likely forget it. After all, I know that I meant nothing by the comment, I know I did nothing wrong, and I know that even if there was video of the incident in question, such a video would prove my innocence.

I have been accused of something I was not guilty of. I even had to consult a lawyer, who assured me that the accusing party had no case and I shouldn't worry. Because my accuser didn't work for me, I was in no position to give them money to leave me alone, but if I were, I know the outcome would have been the same, which was, I promptly put it behind me. I was innocent, nothing came of it, and it was only after racking my brain to think of a time when something like this might have happened that I recalled the incident.

Something like this apparently happened to Herman Cain. Now, Cain has had multiple careers, each of which has been successful. He was a ballistics expert for the military, chairman of a state Federal Reserve, eventual CEO of a chain of Burger Kings and then Godfather's Pizza. In a position like that, allegations of sexual misconduct can come out of left field. Most highly-placed men in any field will tell you that even complimenting a woman's new hair-do can open you up to allegations of sexual harassment or some other form of misconduct.

When the story first broke, the following is literally all we knew: Sometime in the late 90's, a woman who worked for or with Cain in the National Restaurant Association accused cain of "unwanted comments of a sexual nature" and "gestures that while not overtly sexual were nonetheless unprofessional and troubling." Also according to the article another woman had made allegations. The article implied that a monetary settlement had been reached.

That's it. That's all Politico said to start with, and that's all they've said at all so far. When pressed to say more, Jonathan Martin, the author of the article, stated that he was not prepared to reveal more out of "sensitivity" to the "victims" involved.

Uh-huh. Tell me another funny, Mr. Jonathan Martin, author of a thousand Palin hit-pieces that go after her family just as much as they go after her. Jonathan Martin is not a sensitive man, so what his sudden reticence says to me is that he doesn't have more than he's already released. An unknown source, two nameless women, vague allegations that could mean anything, and...that's all.

Tell me, would such allegations derail the Obama campaign, if something like that had come up in 2008? I can tell you right now they would not have, because we knew about Obama's William Ayers connections and his 20 years in Rev. Wrong's church, and none of it mattered. If the Left can get Bill Clinton off the hook for his own (many) marital infidelities that he LIED ABOUT UNDER OATH, then they would definitely rally to Obama's defense, had an allegation like that surfaced.

But with Cain, there is much hemming and hawing because this is a serious issue that bears looking into more closely.

Now, Cain, unfortunately, has not responded well to those accusations and quite frankly I can understand why. Like I said, had it been me in his position, even if I'd had to sign off on some sort of settlement, I would have quickly forgotten it because why dwell on something that is settled and that you know had no merit to begin with? Now, one can argue that in his position, he should have been prepared for this, but Cain is not a career politician, always prepared with a statement about anything, no matter how true or untrue, that may come to light from his past. If anything, that may be what hurts his campaign. He is a businessman first, and while that means he brings common sense real world solutions with him it also means he's not thinking in terms of self-promotion or defense, at least not yet. George W. Bush was the same way, and he had some political experience.

Up until now I've seen Cain be able to let any accusations made against him slide off, and I would have hoped that in this case he could come forward right away, say what happened, and let that be that. The way he's handled this is the only thing that I take issue with; not because I think he's lying but because he has made it easy for his attackers to make it LOOK like he's lying, and in the game he's playing, and on the team he's playing for, that's bad.

If he were a Democrat this wouldn't even be a story. Politico wouldn't have touched it and they would have poo-poo'd any attempts from the Right to bring this up. Only if we'd discovered such a non-story as this we probably wouldn't have touched it either.

Cain's first response was to say that he's never harassed anyone nor did he remember paying anyone a settlement. I admit, if I were in his shoes and thinking like I think (and like he was likely thinking), that would have been my gut response. But the fact is, Cain later came back and said "Okay, I guess there was a settlement", while still denying any wrong-doing took place on his part. I'm prepared to believe him, as in America you are still innocent until proven guilty, but if there was a settlement, Cain should not have implied there wasn't, or that he doesn't remember, even if he did forget. He should have released no statement until he had researched or remembered the incident.

This sorta goes back to all I've said about Cain being in this race for America, and not for himself. He was never thinking of this race as a popularity contest or about promoting himself. It likely never occurred to him that an overly sensitive woman deciding something wrong happened when it didn't would ever come back to haunt him. A career politician would have found her and paid her still more money not to talk to reporters.

What Cain finally ended up saying was that the only incident he could think of after spending a day wracking his brain trying to think of what this incident could have been, was a woman that he off-handedly stated was the same height as his wife, while holding his hand under his chin, to indicate the woman's height. If that's truly it, then there is no story and I can confidently say that had this happened to a Democrat, no media outlet would have touched it. Cain stated that he thinks there may have been a settlement, but if it was it would have been part of a severance package and he thinks it amounted to less than three months' salary, possibly less than two months', and that she definitely didn't get all the money she had started off demanding. It's not unreasonable to assume that Cain is telling the truth here. He also says he doesn't recall a second incident, nor was there another settlement. This I can believe right away because it doesn't take much at all for the accusing woman to suddenly have a friend she can get to make up a story in order to seem more credible.

Like I said, if this was me, and I was signing away for the woman to get a slightly larger severance than normal after she asked for a lot more than she got, I probably wouldn't have thought of that as a "settlement", either. In fact, I'll go further; it's entirely possible that this woman was already thinking of resigning but figured there was no reason she shouldn't do so without a substantial pot of money coming with her. So she asked for a huge severance package, and in order to get it, she makes more out of a past incident than is warranted, claiming she's owed the extra money due to psychological duress. The National Restaurant Association conducts its own investigation, realizes what happened amounts to nothing, and let the woman go with a slightly larger package than normal just to get her to go away, and Cain himself, who in a case like that would have been involved peripherally, completely forgets about it. After all the man probably signed off on plenty of severance packages, and this likely wasn't the first time one of them was slightly larger.

So, in summary, it sounds like the allegations against Cain are minimal at best, which apparently even Jonathan Martin and Politico know, since they're not milking the story.

Despite that, Cain's response was less than perfect.

However, despite THAT, if something like this wouldn't hurt Clinton or Obama, why on Earth should it hurt Cain?