The latest in Herman Cain's tribulations is but the latest in explosive nothings. This clown (and I don't necessarily mean that pejoratively) was never the GOP frontrunner, notwithstanding a fistful of polls that purported otherwise, but were in reality nothing but tea party thumbs poked in the eye of Establishment Romney.
Cain wasn't a close second, either, or even a distant third. He was never a factor in the GOP field -- just a joke, a showman, a vast ego, and above all, a hungry bookseller.
Is that to say his squalid performance art has not genuinely attracted some of the GOP base? Of course not. The same slim electorate that feels chills up its spine when Herm speaks is the selfsame base that would have thrilled to a David Duke. Other than the intense "anti" part, Cain's anti-Mitt message is profoundly void of any significance. This morning Eugene Robinson bothers to assault Cain's positions as "ignorant," "unworkable" and "just plain goofy." No kidding, really? Well, the bother sells papers. Robinson then proceeds to restate the illusion: "yet he is running first or second in most polls for the Republican presidential nomination."
Was Donald Trump ever authentically running first or second? Was Michele Bachmann? Rick Perry? Again, of course not. They were only embodiments of the hardcore base's resentment of Mitt's inevitability (for the nomination, that is; odds are, he'll be crushed in the general).
Cain's butchery of any coherent reaction to yesterday's "explosive" story is unlikely to cause him any immediate harm, since a swaggering admiration of their assorted, interchangeable heroes' incompetence and incoherence lies at the GOP's radical base's core. As long as their guy brays a variation of "Up yours" to the media and their conspiratorial liberals, that base is happy. One of Cain's Florida operatives affirmed the proposition in this way: "Not only did Herman Cain today win the respect of the Ann Coulters, the Brent Bozells and others, but I think he won the respect of those of us in the trenches. Basically he said to the world: Next question."
Intrinsic to that quote is the cognitively insulated speaker's near conflation of "the trenches" with "the world." Doubtless, the trenchers were struck with an awesome respect for their candidate's clueless arrogance and preternatural indifference to really bad press, but the rather more important world is still laughing at Cain and his momentary acolytes -- who, because time still remains to do otherwise, will in time move on to some other, temporarily less-ridiculed anti-Mitt candidate.
So what does it all mean? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Cain's latest perturbation within his own make-believe universe and that of his smiling, stormy-weather followers is merely another empty frenzy -- because the GOP's inexorable nominee, Mitt Romney, is, excepting his stupendous rhetorical gymnastics, so goddamn dull.