Irrelevantly Important or Importantly Irrelevant?

I can safely say that none of the sexual harassment allegations against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain have changed the likelihood of his receiving my vote.

For one, I am not a registered Republican, so should Mr. Cain still be actively campaigning for president by the time our primary rolls around, I could not vote for him. For another, should he be the GOP nominee, I will without qualm forgo my opportunity to cast a ballot for the office of President of the United States on the basis that both of the candidates listed on that ballot are insufficient for the job. In other words, I already had a bunch of reasons I'd never vote for Herman Cain, so the truth of the allegations doesn't matter to me as a voter.

Mr. Cain is simply not a credible candidate for president. He has a compelling personal story as a cancer survivor and a self-made millionaire. He has some engaging ways of communicating with an audience. He has executive experience and has demonstrated some ability as a leader. But the latter is the only advantage he holds over President Obama and Mr. Cain's many shortcomings negate nearly all of that advantage. His "9-9-9" tax plan sounds simple but has drawn quite a bit of fire from conservative economists as well as liberal ones. Even if it had not, the creation of a national sales tax is a bad idea, for yet to dawn is the day when the federal government can look upon an existing tax without thinking about how to raise it. What would be a nine percent national sales tax today under a President Cain could with great ease become a ten, 15 or even 20 percent national sales tax under a potential President Clinton (Chelsea, to be specific).

Closer scrutiny of Mr. Cain's campaign shows a candidate who hasn't thought much about foreign policy or other important areas of the presidency, and who has little experience in the politically necessary art of dining with the devil -- er -- opposition, in order to get things done that the country needs done. The flaws in the "9-9-9" concept betray a lack of follow-through thinking about other important manners in which Mr. Cain may actually have some expertise useful to the office. He knows something about how to energize a business and that experience could translate into helping energize the national economy. If some reflection helps reposition that experience from the context of a single business to the national economy, that is. Evidence of that reflection is still sketchy.

What looks to me to be his greatest flaw is Mr. Cain's apparent embrace of his insufficiency. In contrast with President Obama, who is more passively insufficient for the office, Mr. Cain is almost aggressively insufficient. His pleasure at running an outsider's nontraditional campaign seems too easily to slide into pleasure at the fact that he doesn't have too many ideas about things that presidents should know about. Just because a good chunk of the reporters covering you are indeed members of the D.C. Echo Chamber that's part of the problem doesn't mean that every idea they have about what makes a good president can be dismissed so casually. Maybe it takes a hundred of them to reach the stopped-clock success rate of twice a day, but that means sometimes they are onto something. For example, a president need not name every obscure capital in the world, but he or she should have some picture of what kind of world beyond its borders the United States wants to live in and what it should and shouldn't do to bring that world about. Advisers serve to bring reality to that vision and shape it in light of what's feasible -- not to educate a president about what's going on so that the vision can be crafted sometime before the term is up.

Barring complete insanity from the Republicans -- a Paul nomination, for example -- I could not in good conscience vote for a man who has not convinced me he is right for the job and has gone a long way in convincing me otherwise, no matter how good a person he might be. So there is next to no chance I could vote for President Obama. But I could not in good conscience vote for a man who possesses so many of the same flaws as well as some new ones of his own, even though more of his opinions may match mine, so Mr. Cain would be out should he win the GOP nod.

All of this, of course, is said with the caveat that our state has not given its electoral votes to a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson and so my presidential ballot selection is not likely to matter either way.