by Herman Cain
But media negativity doesn’t intimidate Herman Cain. I decided that the time was right to form a presidential exploratory committee, and I announced my intention to do so on January 12, 2011, during the Fox News Channel’s program Your World with Neil Cavuto.
That declaration provoked even more media negativity. Jonah Goldberg’s observation had been positively benign compared to the brutality and racism of the news website AlterNet, which accused me of pandering to white conservatives. To drive that point home, I and my fellow black conservatives were described as being “garbage pail kids.” That playing of the race card was shameful!
But there was positive feedback, too. Ed Morrissey, writing on the conservative website Hot Air of my appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), in February 2011, reported that I “stole the show” and that my speech had moved some of the attendees to tears.
Among those attendees was a prominent Tennessean who had introduced himself to me following my speech. On May 18 he introduced me at the meeting at the Standard at the Smith House, in Nashville. He reminded me then of his having experienced a “God moment” when I spoke at the CPAC meeting.
This man had gone to Washington because, in his words, “I wanted to hear what the potential presidential candidates had to say, and I wanted to hear it firsthand. I didn’t want it watered down by the press.”
He said that while he had heard some very good speakers, he had also heard some whose underlying aim was to talk about all the accolades they had received and all the things they had accomplished as our representatives. That gave him pause. He was thinking, “Wait a minute. Look at the direction that the country is going. It’s hard for me to recognize the way it was just a few short years ago. We have more problems today than you can imagine and you’re standing up there, telling me how great you are and I’m wondering: Why you don’t take some personal responsibility for the mess that we’re in?”
Then, he said, “I heard Herman Cain. He said some of the same things that I heard from the others, but it came from his heart and his soul and I believed every word he said. He talked about some of the problems that we face, but he also talked about some of the solutions to those problems.” He had never heard such talk before from any other potential candidate—that what I said took him “on such an emotional roller coaster ride.”
When I got through speaking, he said, “I’ve got to go down and tell Herman Cain how I feel.” But to get down to where I was standing, he had to get through the crowd of people I was already talking with, and he thought I would get offstage before he got there.
I don’t like to rush off without talking to the people who have come out to hear what I have to say, so when he approached me, I listened to what he had to say—his “God moment.” He said to me, “You’re the real deal, and if there’s anything I can ever do for you, please don’t hesitate to call me.”
Then he walked away, thinking he would never hear from me. What he didn’t realize at that moment was that if I say to someone, “I’m going to give you a call,” I make that call. So he did hear from me again. On May 18 when this man introduced me to that crowd in Nashville, he said, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, you’re looking at another ‘God moment.’ I want you to meet the next president of the United States.”
“This is a ‘God moment’ for me, too,” I told him.
Getting back to my decision to make a run for my party’s 2012 presidential nomination: In addition to stirring both those who welcomed what I had to say and those who didn’t—actually, most people were thinking, “Herman Cain’s not going to win because he’s never held public office before, and you’ve got to have a certain amount of money”—my declaration of intent also had repercussions within my immediate family. While Melanie and Vincent were fine with it, observing, “That’s just Dad being Dad,” Gloria didn’t immediately jump up and down and cheer.
In fact, she was terrified! Scared to death! That was because of the widely held perception of what it’s like to be in politics—of what it can do to your family and to you, the candidate. While Gloria had, of course, been through my run for the Senate in 2004, that was not as big a deal.
Incidentally, that race was very helpful in terms of lessons learned. I learned that if I were ever to run for public office again, I would have to start early. I was a year late in putting together an effective team. I also learned that I would need to hire good people early on, and that even though there were very few black Republicans in most of Georgia’s 159 counties, when people listened to my message, it was not about the color of my skin. I knew that if I could win that kind of reaction from rural Georgia, I would not need to worry about responses in the rest of the country. I learned that in today’s America, it’s not about color. It’s about the content of your ideas. It’s about your passion.
But when I started talking about running for president? That was a big deal.
I wanted to reassure Gloria about what I had just committed to doing, so I asked her, “What’s your greatest fear about my running?”
“That you might win!” she answered.
“Is that all there is?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’ve seen you do the impossible before, by the grace of God.”
I didn’t give Gloria a speech about all the reasons why I wanted to run, because that wouldn’t have made a difference to her. She came around after I took her to a number of fund-raising events. While I don’t insist that she go to a lot of them, she’s been to about three now, and she sees the enthusiasm of the people, especially when I tell them why I’m running: that it’s for the kids and the grandkids. Gloria loves those grandkids dearly, and that resonates with her more than my trying to sit down at the breakfast table and explain why I’m running. And she knows that I believe in my heart that God is in this journey.
My first step after announcing my candidacy was to assemble my campaign team. I’d known Mark Block, who had been a leader in the Tea Party movement in Wisconsin, for several years. After his appointment six years ago as the Wisconsin state director of Americans for Prosperity, the organization’s president asked me to help them launch some state chapters, so Mark brought me in for an eight-stop, day-and-a-half trip through the state.
Our foray was so exhausting that at its end, when I got back to the airport for my return trip to Atlanta, I called one of Americans for Prosperity’s directors and asked, “Is this Block guy trying to kill me?”
But I forgave Mark, and during the next six months, when Mark was asked to launch branches in Michigan and Ohio and I was asked to help him, I agreed to do so and we ended up spending a lot of time together, much of it in a car, traveling from meeting to meeting.
On one of those occasions, Mark had scheduled a meeting in rural Michigan and only one person showed up. But to me, it was as if five thousand people were in that room. And later on, when Mark organized what were called “Defending the American Dream Summits,” I was always a speaker.
As I got to know Mark better, I was impressed that not only was he a tireless worker as we traveled the state making appearances on behalf of the movement, but even though he has been in politics for most of his professional life, he is truly blessed with the sine qua non of the professional campaign chief of staff: the talent for thinking out of the box. In my case, thinking way out of that box. And that’s one of the reasons we have a great relationship.
Then, when I talked to him about my running for the presidency, I said, “Mark, we can’t do this top-down. I don’t have that kind of money.”
“I don’t think we have to,” he said.
“Why not?” I wanted to know.
“Because I’ve heard you speak many, many, many times. No one can match you in your ability to move a crowd. You will have an advantage coming out of the gate. You don’t need a top-down. You need a bottom-up!”
And so Mark signed on to run my campaign. We set up our headquarters in a suburb of Atlanta, began to put together an unconventional
campaign, and set about recruiting our unconventional staff. Nobody was more unconventional than Mark Block. One day, when he was taking out the garbage, he was getting off the elevator when another staff person was getting on with a VIP. On Mark’s return to his office a few minutes later, the staff member escorted the VIP in. And when Mark was introduced as my chief of staff, the VIP asked him, “But aren’t you the guy who just took out the garbage?”
“When you work with Mr. Cain, getting the job done has no boundaries,” Mark replied.
As we moved along to increase our visibility, one of our biggest challenges was to find people to work with us who understood what we were trying to do—staff members who were able to fit into our more than a bit out-of-the-box campaign culture. Not only did we succeed in doing so, we created a new paradigm and changed the way politics is done in America.
Among our think-out-of-the-box strategists is Mark’s number two, Linda Hansen, who home-schooled her six children and worked with Mark in Wisconsin. Linda and I actually met at an Americans for Prosperity event there, and I was impressed with the concept of a project she was working on, a book and program entitled Prosperity 101.™
When Linda—Mark and I address her simply as “Hansen”—first told me of her project, which was aimed at educating employers to teach their employees about issues affecting their jobs, and to which I ended up contributing a few pages, I responded that it was “a capitalist response to Acorn.” I added, “I’m on the radio and people don’t need Prosperity 101. They need Prosperity 1.”
With Mark and Hansen on board, we set out to fill in the rest of our presidential campaign staff and to give all employees of Friends of Herman Cain, Inc., corporate titles. Thus, I am the CEO, and among my closest key aides, Mark’s title is COO and chief of Staff; Hansen’s is executive vice president and deputy chief of staff; and Nathan Naidu, an eager, efficient, and well-informed twenty-five-year-old graduate of the University of Alabama who majored in political science, is assistant to the COO.
As of now, Friends of Herman Cain, Inc., has fifty or more staff members—the list is growing every day—as well as an impressive group of field operators and volunteers.
One of the defining moments of my campaign came in late February 2010, when I spoke at one of those summits, held in Wisconsin Dells. I came out on the stage wearing a cowboy hat, took it off, and placed it on the podium. Then I gave my speech, concluding with the words, “I wanted to let President Obama know that in 2012, there will be a new sheriff in town.” Then I put the hat back on and the crowd went wild.
When Hansen escorted me off the stage, she asked me, “Is this an announcement?”
“I just threw it out there,” I told her. “Now let’s see what happens.” Then I went back to Atlanta. A few days later, Mark called and said, “Mr. Cain, I’m getting all these questions. What were you thinking?”
Two and a half weeks later, on March 20, 2010, Mark and Hansen flew to Las Vegas to join me for a strategy session at the Capital Grille Steakhouse, the place where the tables only went up to number 43. Working backward from November 2012, we laid out what would be required if I were really considering running.
At one point, as Mark was speaking, Hansen got up from the table, moved around the corner, and prayed. Then, when she rejoined us, we discussed how to make my candidacy happen, how we thought it could evolve.
Mark had actually discussed the presidency with me back in 2006. But then my cancer was diagnosed and everything went on hold as I underwent treatment. Now, four years later, in March 2010, I was cancer free and the time seemed right to revisit the possibility of seeking the presidential nomination.
Since that time, the Tea Party movement had happened—it really exploded across America on April 15, 2009—and as a result of all of Mark’s activity with it, and with Americans for Prosperity, he was able to establish contacts in most of the fifty states and to put on a Tea Party rally in Madison, Wisconsin. We were expecting two thousand people but eight thousand showed up.
We realized then and there that this Tea Party thing is much deeper than anyone had imagined. And I was one of the few potential candidates—maybe the only one—who realized what was happening in America because I was living it, so I could feel it.
By March 20, 2010, we all knew that the moment had come for our campaign to move forward. The first step would be for Mark and Hansen to create a buzz around me. They secured an invitation for me to speak in April at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans.
At the end of the speech, I headed offstage, with the crowd on their feet and cheering. I walked back to the podium and said, “I just want you to know that there may be a dark-horse candidate running for president.” The three thousand delegates went wild, and I felt like I was a rock star.
After New Orleans, we asked ourselves: What do we do in the June-to-November time-frame? We decided that I would travel the country, campaigning for Republican congressional candidates and speaking at Tea Party rallies and other large events so as to determine whether I would be acceptable as a candidate to grassroots Americans.
We soon found out: We did an event in Dayton, Ohio, and four thousand people came out to hear what I had to say—we called it our “watering the desert” effort. Then the results of the November 2010 elections vindicated what we felt was happening. We had planned for certain business and public relations reasons to launch our exploratory committee in April or May of 2011, but we now realized that support for my candidacy was growing, so we went ahead and pulled the trigger in January.
We were supposed to make the exploratory committee announcement in Atlanta, but while we were at a meeting in Phoenix, we found out that a snowstorm had closed the airport in Atlanta. So I ended up doing what turned out to be an almost nonstop series of interviews from Phoenix, garnering considerable nationwide attention.
Another major tipping point in my campaign came when I spoke to four thousand people at the 2010 Right Nation conference in Chicago. It happened that Glenn Beck was also a participant, and he asked me to meet him in his suite overlooking the conference.
I did, and Glenn said, “Mr. Cain, people have been asking me if I know who the next president is going to be. Now I can tell them I’ve met him.”
I can tell you that that was a pretty big moment. It was nothing short of inspirational.
We were going along like gangbusters. Then in April 2011, a series of events occurred within mere days of one another—a period we would come to refer to as “Hell Week”—that nearly derailed my campaign.
I was scheduled to speak at a conference in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the opening event of a week that would take me to several cities around the country. We had been promised the use of a private aircraft. But on the afternoon before I was to head for Harrisburg, we were told that the private jet was no longer available.
At about five o’clock that afternoon, Mark Block and my advance man came into my office, each man looking as if he had just lost his pet puppy dog. It turned out that they were depressed because there was no Plan B. Mark then explained that the person who had promised us the plane shared it with his business partner, and that the partner had pulled the plug on our use of it.
I sat and thought for a few minutes. And then I said to Mark, “You’re a good public speaker, so you’re going to substitute for me in Harrisburg.” Then I asked my executive assistant to put him on a flight and to book me on a commercial flight to San Jose, California, where I had a speaking date the next day.
Then I flew to San Jose via Dallas, where I had a brief stopover. As I sat on the plane, I didn’t talk; I didn’t read; I just prayed the whole time. When I arrived in Dallas, while I was sitting near the gate, a UPS pilot who was also traveling to California recognized me and came over to talk. When we got on the plane to San Jose, I was in seat 3B, while he was seated in row five, on the aisle, and I noticed that he was reading a campaign booklet I had given him in Dallas.
The man next to the UPS pilot as
ked him, “Do you know Herman Cain?”
“Yes,” the pilot said. “He’s sitting in row three.”
The man came over, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Mr. Cain, I’m sorry to bother you, but how much money can I give and where do I send it?”
“You can give $2,500,” I replied.
“You are going to get a check from me and my wife, and I’m going to help you raise more money in California, where I have a business,” he said.
When I landed in San Jose, the driver who was supposed to meet me in the baggage claim area was late, and I just made it on time to address eight hundred people at a home-school convention.
My next stop was Jefferson City, Missouri, for a Tea Party rally on the steps of the State Capitol Building. Mark, who had engaged in a dialogue about me with my good friend Colin Hanna, who had been asked to introduce me in Harrisburg, joined me in Jefferson City. Mark’s presentation in Harrisburg had apparently been quite effective because at dialogue’s end, I won a delegate straw poll—and I wasn’t even there!
It was after Mark joined me in Jefferson City that our next problem surfaced: how to get to Fargo, North Dakota, where I was to address a dinner event. Mark called the dinner’s organizer and when he said that he would send a private plane, Mark and I both said, “Thank you, Lord.”
That was the good news. The private plane arrived all right, but it was no bigger than a crop duster and we had assumed that they’d be sending a jet to pick us up. I guess we were naïve. As there was only one pilot on board, I took the copilot’s seat and Mark spent the flight hunched down in the tiny seat directly behind the pilot’s.
On boarding that aircraft at two o’clock in the afternoon, we were told that we’d have a four-hour flight. That would give me just enough to time check into the hotel, freshen up, and change clothes. There was a problem, however. I had to do two radio interviews, starting at five o’clock. As the time for my interviews approached, Mark asked the pilot to land at the nearest airport. He set the plane down in northern Minnesota and I did the interviews from the flight-operations office.