By: Gregory Festley

Many reasons can, and have, been given to why Herman Cain dropped out of the presidential race. The most obvious, of course, is the recent developments made in the past month and a half or so of all of Cain’s sexual improprieties. But I don’t believe that was the reason his campaign failed. No, I think it has a lot more to do with what’s underneath the surface—a surface so superficial and contradictive that it can be brought to its knees by sexual harassment allegations (I say contradictive because many of Cain’s supporters went to Newt Gingrich after Cain dropped out, and, as many of you already know, Gingrich is infamous for divorcing his first wife as she was hospitalized with cancer because he was having an affair, then married the woman he was having an affair with so that he could then begin another affair during his second marriage—which happened during the Lewinsky scandal of Clinton, whom Gingrich was the leader of the commission investigating allegations of Clinton’s perjury, got divorced again to then marry the woman he was having his second affair with, whom he is still, somehow, married to, and to which he replied in a 2011 interview about his past improprieties, “There’s no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”—Yes somehow he was able to justify cheating with patriotism and people bought it.)

In light of who Cain supporters are turning to (Gingrich), it doesn’t seem accurate to say that Cain dropped out simply because he cheated on his wife. The American public, as evidenced countless of times, doesn’t seem to care all that much about if you cheat on your wife, especially considering that divorce rates are still at an all time high. That’s not to say it wasn’t a factor at all, but rather a statement that there were other variables as to why.

The most pertinent would have to be how Cain ran his campaign: with back-water rhetoric appealing to a minority of conservative that love inane, empty sloganeering, i.e. the Tea Party and sympathizers. While it got him pretty high in the polls for a month—which really isn’t that big of an accomplishment—it would have never won a presidential campaign. If we were to suppose that Cain was able by some slim chance to win the Republican nomination, he would’ve made an absolute fool of himself if he used the same techniques against Obama. While you may not like Obama or his policies, he was able to convince enough of Congress (2/3 to be exact) to get behind health care reform, which is no small feat when considering that every—and I mean every—president for the past sixty years attempted the exact same thing without success.

But of course this doesn’t mean Herman Cain is stupid by far. In fact, he very well might have been the third most competent opponent up on stage behind Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. Though, considering his opinions and ideas with regards to Libya, maybe he wasn’t the most diplomatic and convincing character in the race.

Then of course there was the fact that he wasn’t an ostensible politician. I say ostensible because he was, in fact, a politician. He’s run for a presidential bid in the past, but every time lost. So it would be more accurate to call him a failed politician…once again. But he did run under the poorly designed guise of not being a politician but a businessman—as if there was a huge difference. Well, maybe in retrospect there is. What Mr. Cain failed to realize was that a country could not run like a pizza joint. A president’s abilities and responsibilities, while more than most, would not allow him to organize the country like he was running a Fortune 500 company. So his knowledge of business, while somewhat helpful, was not comprehensive enough to organize and reform the country back into shape.

His one piece of pseudo-reform was his 9-9-9 proposition, and anyone who took a modicum of time to work the math out would realize that Herman Cain did not. 9-9-9 worked for many of Republicans precisely because it was really simple to understand. While understandable legislation is not a bad thing, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he would never be able to get enough support from Congress to get it passed and the Constitution does not afford him the right to drastically rewrite the tax code without Congressional approval, and then, if it were to even pass, it would further the gap between classes and polarize the country even more.

So, even before any of the allegations started to come to light, Herman Cain’s surge in the polls was just a spectacle of lights and mirrors that could never constitute as a feasible way to run a government. While the allegations quickened the process by which he failed, it should not be marked as the only reason, but rather as a string of successive populist maneuvers that looked like cheap parlor tricks rather than a presidential campaign.