Herman Cain, the New Star of the Tea Party

The ultraconservative black businessman is henceforth one of the favorites of the Republican primary for the United States presidential election. What follows is a portrait of this self-made man who is climbing upwards in the polls.

“Don’t blame Wall Street; don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job, and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”

This is the type of statement that has earned 65-year-old Herman Cain his recent breakthrough in American polls of voting intentions for the presidential elections in 2012. The ultraconservative black businessman who made his fortune from pizza is, in effect, one of the new favorites for the Republican primary.

Cain, who was perceived until now as an unlikely and minor candidate, has in the space of a month surged to the forefront of the scene and is now hot on the heels of the former governor and favorite, Mitt Romney, in the polls (according to a Gallup Poll published Monday). The former head of the Godfather’s Pizza chain had already generated surprise by winning the straw poll in Florida for the Republican primary, outstripping the two party favorites, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry.

A Modern “Moses”

Like Rick Perry, Herman Cain has enjoyed the politics of the ultraconservative movement, the tea party, which wishes to reduce the public deficit by cutting down on expenditures. He also seduces voters with his very conservative moral and religious values. Cain, who doesn’t hesitate to compare himself with Moses guiding his people out of Egypt, is firmly opposed as much to gay marriage as to abortion. On certain points he even places himself to the right of the ultraconservative Perry, whom he accuses of being too soft. The latter continues to fall in the polls, since he proposed scholarships, financed by the United States, for the children of immigrants.

The slogan of Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” campaign defines his plan for fiscal reform, which aims to bring tax rates on consumption back up to 9 percent, benefiting from firms and individual incomes. Economists are not in agreement about the capability of such a system to reduce public deficit, but all agree that the final result would be less taxes for the rich and more for the poor.

But Herman Cain has above all marked for himself a different course and an atypical style. Born in Georgia to a chauffeur father and a housewife mother, this self-made man who has never held an elective office embodies the American dream. This is perhaps why he has little scruples for taking it out on anti-Wall Street demonstrators, which he has caricatured as jealous Americans who wish to “take someone else’s Cadillac.”

Far from being ashamed of his modest origins, he proclaims that, on the contrary, being compared to “Mr. Everyone” made him a proud “outsider” during the journey to the White House. In an interview with a religious channel, he even played up his lack of culture: “And when they ask me, ‘Who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan?’ I’m going to say you know, ‘I don’t know. Do you know?’ And then I’m going to say, ‘How’s that going to create one job?’”

A Black Electorate to Win Over

One of the issues of his campaign will be to win over black voters, who vote 90 percent Democrat. He claims that he is convinced that he will be able to rally a third of black voters. His remark on how blacks have been “brainwashed” into voting Democrat have been very badly received by the community.

It remains to be seen whether he will succeed in keeping the advantage in the long term or whether he is only the transitory darling of a very volatile Republican electorate, which doesn’t cease to get enthusiastic about and then reject diverse candidates. Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have, in effect, had bitter experience with these fleeting periods of glory. Now that he is in the spotlight, Cain will be more rigorously scrutinized during the next debates. He could be obliged to justify some of his controversial stances — for example, his refusal to appoint a Muslim in his administration or his proposal to place alligators at the Mexican border.