Herman Cain told the crowd at the National Press Club Monday something he’s said many times before: His rise in the polls is evidence once and for all that the tea party and conservative Republicanism is, officially, Not Racist.
Cain put a slightly different spin on the story at the Press Club, condemning those on the left who he said say people like him because he’s black — a kind of reverse diversity in which racist whites get behind Cain to show that they’re not racist.
White people, Cain said, just aren’t that conniving.
“Come to some of our rallies. Join us on our bus tour. You have to follow along because there is no room on the bus. You will come to the conclusion that I have come to and that we have come to,” Cain said. “This many white people can’t pretend they like me.”
Of course, Cain is not exactly the poster child for African American political power these days which might explain a bit about why he’s got so much conservative support — black, white or brown.
To begin with, Cain rejects the term African American, preferring to be called “a black American.” He says incendiary things about President Obama’s race, claiming the first African American president of the United States has “never been a part of the black experience in America.”
He’s made a recent career out of standing up for conservatives against allegations that their brand of politics is less than friendly to minority groups. In June, for example, he explained to TPM that tea party rallies are almost exclusively white not because of the message of the movement, but because black people are too poor to attend. In September, he explained that black people generally don’t vote Republican not because of something that party did, but because they have been “brainwashed” by liberals.
All these statements tend to endear Cain to the tea party types, who often express their weariness with racial politics. Whether or not they themselves are racist is often beside the point — the country has moved on, they say, and racial politics are just a means to a liberal end pushed by the Democratic party.
Cain has said that he’d be able to bring his white friends and a substantial portion of the black vote together in a general election contest. But this PPP poll from Oct. 11 showed Obama winning 91% of African Americans surveyed to Cain’s 6%.
Evan McMorris-Santoro
Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.
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