Bill Hoffman has written at Newsmax.com:
Herman Cain — the maverick American business czar and Republican presidential candidate who campaigned for a sweeping tax reform plan called 9-9-9 — died Thursday morning after a month-long battle with the coronavirus. He was 74.
Cain, who recently joined Newsmax TV and was set to launch a weekly show, died in an Atlanta-area hospital where he had been critically ill for several weeks.
He was admitted on July 1, two days after being diagnosed with COVID-19.
Ten days before, Cain had attended a rally for President Donald Trump in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But it is not known for sure where Cain, chair of Black Voices for Trump, was infected. He had been on a whirlwind travel schedule in June, stopping in multiple cities.
“He was one of the most original thinkers in American politics. He [had] creative strong convictions, an open mind and a deep sense of patriotism,’’ veteran political consultant Dick Morris told Newsmax.
“He was a great friend, a great guy. Suddenly, the plague strikes home.’’
Cain was a self-made man with an extraordinary backstory — one that made him a towering example of hard work paying off.
He was born Dec. 13, 1945, in Memphis, Tennessee and [] grew up poor in Atlanta, Georgia, where his father worked three jobs — as janitor, barber, and chauffeur — while his mother toiled as a domestic.
A stellar student who worked hard, Cain graduated from Morehouse College with a mathematics degree in 1967. A year later, he married Gloria Etchison, who he had met when he was a sophomore at Morehouse and she [was] a freshman at Morris Brown College.
Cain went on to earn a master’s in computer science from Purdue University in 1971, and helped develop fire control ballistics for ships and fighter planes for the U.S. Navy.
Next, he joined the Coca-Cola Co. as a systems analyst, and after considerable success, moved to the Pillsbury Co.
After serving as regional vice president of Pillsbury’s Burger King, Cain then took on the biggest challenge of his career as president and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, a national chain teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
In 14 months, he returned Godfather’s to profitability and led his management team to a buyout of the company.
Later, Cain said he could explain his success at Godfather’s Pizza in one word, “marketing.”
Cain, who long held an interest in public policy, became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in 1995, serving in the position for 20 months.
In 2019, Trump nominated Cain to [the] Federal Reserve Board. But the nomination drew serious flak from Congress and Cain’s detractors.
“Because I ran as a Republican for president and the United States Senate, and because I am an outspoken voice of conservatism, an outspoken voice of the Constitution and the laws, I’m being attacked,” Cain said, shortly before asking the president to withdraw his nomination.
Cain’s first dabbling into politics came in 1996, when he was tapped as senior adviser to the Dole/Kemp campaign for the presidency.
He ran for a Senate seat in Georgia in 2004, but was defeated in the Republican primary by Johnny Isakson.
In 2006, Cain was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, but with aggressive treatment was able to beat the disease.
In his book, “This is Herman Cain!,’’ he discussed his life-threatening illness, writing: “It’s been more than six years since then. And guess what? I’m completely cancer-free! Cured! Why was I spared against those odds? God said, ‘Not yet!’’’
Cain told CNN he began mulling a run for office because, following his triumph over cancer, he felt he had to do “something bigger and bolder.”
From 2008 to 2011, he hosted “The Herman Cain Show’’ on Atlanta radio station WSB. Then, in May 2011, he announced his candidacy for president as a conservative on the GOP ticket, his major campaign issue being the urgent need for top-to-bottom U.S. tax reform.
According to Cain, 9-9-9 would replace the current imbalanced, unfair tax code with three flat taxes: [a] 9-percent business transactions tax, a 9-percent personal income tax, and a 9-percent federal sales tax — a switch that would trigger a great savings to taxpayers.
While his fellow candidates were skeptical of 9-9-9, the plan resonated with Americans and he soon, with the help of a strong Tea Party base, [] rose to the top of Republican polls in the race.
In October of 2011, a Public Policy Polling poll had him leading Mitt Romney by 8 percentage points — 30% to 22%.
“His proposal for 9-9-9 captured the public imagination for months. And it might still pave the way for a fundamental tax reform,’’ Morris said.
During his run, Cain readily spoke his mind on a variety of subjects.
On Bloomberg View, he said: “The only tactic liberals have is to try to intimidate people into thinking that the Tea Party is racist. The Tea Party is not a racist movement, period! If it were, why would the straw polls keep showing that the black guy is winning? That’s a rhetorical question.
“Let me state it: The black guy keeps winning.”
In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Cain said: “Stupid people are ruining America.”
And in a campaign event in South Carolina, Cain said: “If Obamacare had been fully implemented when I caught cancer, I’d be dead.”
He was an unabashed conservative: opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage. He told the Chattanooga Times Free Press: “We have a war on our moral fiber. We will not allow the godless few to destroy our moral foundation.”
“Herman Cain resonated with Americans at every level because they sensed his authenticity,” Chris Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, said of his late friend. “He had a folksy, disarming appeal. You immediately felt his love of country and God.”
This past February Ruddy said he invited Cain to visit Mar-a-Lago and the Trump Golf Course in West Palm Beach.
“The president spotted Herman and yelled out ‘9-9-9’, and everyone roared with laughter,” Ruddy said.
Cain reveled in Trump’s business approach to politics and his independent style – one that mirrored his own.
“I’m not a professional politician. I’m a professional problem solver,” he remarked.
Cain’s meteoric political rise was cut short when he was forced to suspend his campaign in December 2011, after two women accused him of sexual harassment during his stint as CEO of the National Restaurant Association from 1996 to 1999.
Despite his exit, Cain vehemently denied the charges, and his wife solidly stood by her man, insisting “he totally respects women.”
After seeking the presidency, Cain formed Cain Solutions Revolution, which worked with political and business leaders at the national level to promote problem-solving policy ideas.
He also served as an ordained associate minister at Antioch Baptist Church in Atlanta.
Cain[] had hosted a radio talk show and was a familiar face to cable news viewers.
In April, [Cain] joined Newsmax TV, saying he was “very excited” to be joining “one of America’s leading cable news networks.”
After he was hospitalized, Cain seemed to be responding to treatment, with his Twitter feed announcing that his breathing was “getting stronger every day. Make no mistake: He is improving!”
But in the past week, his health took a turn for the worse.
In one of his videos aired June 11 on his hermancain.com blog, Cain said: “We must continue to spread the coronavirus message: social distancing, sanitizing, hair-washing and masks. Don’t take it for granted, take it seriously.’’
Cain is survived by his wife Gloria, and two children, Vincent and Melanie, and four grandchildren.[2]
Herman Cain was and is an authentic American success story, not a pompous politician. He will be missed, as China’s deadly Coronavirus continues to take its toll globally.[3]
Pat Buchanan—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and a former GOP presidential aspirant himself—has written an article entitled “American ‘Stormtroopers’ — A Bright Shining Lie”:
With the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse under nightly siege from violent radicals, and Portland’s police hard-pressed to protect it, President Trump sent in federal agents to secure the building.
The reaction from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi:
“The use of stormtroopers under the guise of law and order is a tactic that is not appropriate to our country in any way.”
Majority Whip James Clyburn endorsed the speaker’s equating of the U.S. law enforcement officers to Ernst Rohm’s SA thugs being deployed to do the dirty work of Adolph Hitler.
“Nobody asked the federal government to come into Portland. Nobody asked them to come to Seattle,” ranted Clyburn. “This is something that’s made up of whole cloth by this administration as an excuse for sending in stormtroopers to incite the people.”
Clyburn had earlier compared the U.S. officers sent to Portland to Heinrich Himmler’s Nazi secret police: “This president and this attorney general seem to be doing everything they possibly can to impose Gestapo activities on local communities, and this is what I’ve been warning about for a long time.”
His Gestapo comparison recalls Sen. Abe Ribicoff’s denunciation of the Chicago police of Mayor Richard J. Daley during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, after police clashed with radicals in Grant Park: “With George McGovern, we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago!”
What do the men and women of the FBI, DEA, ICE, DHS, CBP and the U.S. Marshals Service think of congressional leaders who equate them with Nazi stormtroopers and the Gestapo?
Outraged that Trump sent in federal agents to protect a building they had under siege for weeks, the Portland mob came out in even greater numbers and rioted through the weekend. Saturday night, there were solidarity riots with Portland in Seattle, Oakland, Austin, Richmond, and other cities.
Consider the depth of hatred of Trump that would cause leaders of the Democratic Party to compare U.S. law enforcement to Nazis.
Still, to date, no apologies have been heard.
Yet, as police are again being cursed and showered with debris, it is hard to see how this country reunites, and around what, no matter which party prevails in November.
In addition to the reigniting of protests and riots in urban centers there has come, in tandem with demands to “defund the police,” a surge in violent crime. Last week, Trump offered some staggering statistics:
“In New York City, over 300 people were shot in the last month alone, a 277 . . . percent increase over the same period of a year ago. Murders this year have spiked 27 percent in Philadelphia and 94 percent in Minneapolis compared to the same period in 2019.
“Perhaps no citizens have suffered more from the menace of violent crime than the wonderful people of Chicago. . . . At least 414 people have been murdered in the city this year, a roughly 50 percent increase over last year. More than 1,900 people have been shot. These are numbers that aren’t even to be believed.”
As Black Lives Matter protests revive, ostensibly for greater justice for black folks, a vastly disproportionate number of victims of these urban shootings and killings are black, as are a disproportionate number of the criminals doing the shooting and killing.
The New York Times suggests that a new “Silent Majority” of 2020, unlike Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority of 1969, backs the protesters and their causes.
A dissent: While the country was disgusted and outraged at George Floyd’s death from that cop kneeling on his neck, and supported the protests and the calls for police reform, two months of leftist rampages have taken their toll.
When the protests turned into riots, when the looting and arson began, when the statues began to be pulled down, when the rampages went on and on for weeks and months after Floyd’s death, support began to wane. And it is dissipating quickly.
The country is not going to sit still for three more months of this. At some point soon, America is going to say: Enough is enough.
Moreover, Trump has turned a permanent presidential spotlight on a real outrage: The shootings and killings that go on year in and year out, and are now escalating, especially in poor black neighborhoods of major cities, and are accepted as normal by the same liberal Democrats who have misruled those cities for decades.
Trump has put this issue on the table for the indefinite future. And the ferocity of the liberal reaction testifies to the validity of the issue and the terror of the left that a consistent stand for law and order — and with the cops who guarantee it against the mobs that threaten it — might turn the tide in Middle America back to where it naturally resides.
The majority of Americans believe, and rightly so, that this is a good country. And they will eventually tune out radicals who visibly hate its heroes and history and have on offer nothing but their own inchoate rage.[4]
The thugs, slugs, hoods and mongrels of the super-racist “Black Lives Matter” and Antifa groups—and others like them—must be put down like packs of rabid animals.
Indeed, similar to his vicious congressional colleagues Elijah Cummings and Maxine Waters, the idea that any Americans would lionize and celebrate the life of John Lewis is repulsive, and underscores the depth of depravity and sickness in the United States today.[5] Obviously, it is not surprising that the ultimate un-American, racist and anti-Semite Barack Obama—who should be in prison today for treason, at the very least—has honored him.[6]
© 2020, Timothy D. Naegele
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (see www.naegele.com and Timothy D. Naegele Resume-20-6-30). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/articles/), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
[2] See https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/herman-cain-obituary/2020/07/30/id/979733/ (“Herman Cain Dies From Coronavirus at 74”); see also https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/herman-cain-covid-19-obituary-tweet/2020/07/30/id/979836/ (“Trump Hails Herman Cain in Tweet”—”My friend Herman Cain, a Powerful Voice of Freedom and all that is good, passed away this morning. Herman had an incredible career and was adored by everyone that ever met him, especially me. He was a very special man, an American Patriot, and great friend. I just got off the phone with his amazing wife Gloria, daughter, Melanie, and son Vincent to express my deepest condolences to the entire family. @FLOTUS Melania and I loved Herman Cain, a great man. Herman, Rest In Peace!”)
[3] See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/07/16/china-must-be-crushed/ (“China Must Be Crushed”) and Timothy D. Naegele, The Coronavirus and Similar Global Issues: How to Address Them, 137 BANKING L. J. 285 (June 2020) (Naegele June 2020) (Timothy D. Naegele) [NOTE: To download The Banking Law Journal article, please click on the link to the left of this note];
[4] See https://buchanan.org/blog/american-stormtroopers-a-bright-shining-lie-138977 (“American ‘Stormtroopers’ — A Bright Shining Lie”)
[5] See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/john-lewis-civil-rights-america.html (John Lewis: “Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation”)
Lewis’ failure to recognize and condemn black-on-black crime—which is directed at elderly blacks, and especially elderly black women who have lived in fear for decades—perpetrated by the thugs, slugs, hoods and mongrels of the “Black Lives Matter” and Antifa groups (or others like them), is tantamount to racism itself.
And what about the rights of white Americans, and Hispanics, and Asian-Americans, and so many others?
See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2020/06/26/american-blacks-constitute-less-than-14-percent/ (“American Blacks Constitute Less Than 14 Percent”)
[6] See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/is-barack-obama-a-racist/ (“Is Barack Obama A Racist?”) (see also the comments beneath the article) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/15/when-will-barack-obamas-trial-for-sedition-begin/ (“When Will Barack Obama’s Trial For Sedition Begin?”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2019/07/29/barack-obama-is-responsible-for-americas-tragic-racial-divide/ (“Barack Obama Is Responsible For America’s Tragic Racial Divide”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2018/05/24/should-barack-obama-be-executed-for-treason/ (“Should Barack Obama Be Executed For Treason?”) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_(civil_rights_leader) (“John Lewis (civil rights leader)”) and https://apnews.com/76a63a9d89f53018f9347206b98ae9a9 (“3 former presidents mourn John Lewis at funeral in Atlanta”)
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