Media Caining Sends Chilling Message To Blacks
............................................................................................
12/5/2011 Investors Business Daily Editorial......
news.investors.com
Herman Cain's withdrawal concludes a media hit job that sends out two chilling warnings. To conservative businessmen: Don't dare run for high office. To black candidates: Don't stray off the liberal plantation.
There's no denying that Cain, who on Saturday succumbed to weeks of media-driven pressure and suspended his campaign, was an imperfect presidential candidate.
Beyond the series of far-from-proven allegations of sexual improprieties, his performance in answering foreign policy questions disappointed even his staunchest supporters.
Cain's demise illustrates the hazards of placing faith in an unvetted presidential hopeful who has never held public office.
But what if the suffering, thoroughly disgusted American public believes only a nonpolitician and private-sector leader can rein in Washington, D.C.?
The voters have put plenty of imperfect men in the presidency. We might well today pose the same question that one Gov. Bill Clinton asked regarding his own sexual improprieties during a January 1992 interview on "60 Minutes," his wife by his side:
"Are we going to take the ... position now that if people have problems in their marriage, and there are things in their past which they don't want to discuss which are painful to them, that they can't run?"
Our current secretary of state hastily added: "It's real dangerous in this country if we don't have some zone of privacy for everybody."
Why is it that Bill Clinton's "bimbo eruptions" ended up being, to the mainstream media, just marital "problems" whose investigation would invade the Clintons' privacy, while Cain's troubles have been judged mortal wounds to his unconventional and exciting candidacy?
Slick Willie's wandering eye, far from being irrelevant, resulted in a president lying to a grand jury and the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history.
As the Media Research Center points out, "George Stephanopoulos, who as a Democratic operative in the '90s coordinated with ABC to save Bill Clinton from scandal, last Wednesday teased an exclusive with Cain's accuser, openly gloating, 'Will our interview spell the end of the one-time front-runner's presidential bid?'"
At a crucial time in the 1992 Democratic primaries, ABC' "World News Tonight" producers and host Peter Jennings were apparently convinced by Stephanopoulos that revealing a letter to their viewers in which Clinton thanked an ROTC officer "for saving me from the draft" would be "manipulating the process."
Every successful entrepreneur considering entering politics with a vision of economic freedom is now on notice: newspapers, magazines and the TV news will gleefully ruin your "zone of privacy" if you run for president. So if you care for your spouse, your children and your good name, stay out of the national political limelight.
And potential black candidates who recognize free-market reform as the key to improving the lives of their long-suffering people? They can see the media double standard.
If instead of Cain you're Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, or for that matter Barack Obama, you won't have to worry about your life or career being investigated too thoroughly.
The major media dutifully have treated all three as esteemed community leaders unworthy of being subject to heavy-duty dirt-digging.
Add a new verb to the language of politics, alongside Borking for Supreme Court nominees: the media Caining of black capitalists who offer voters their unique wisdom.
|
