The Daily Beast also delves into a bizarre subject that received relatively little attention in the wake of Herman Cain’s pullout — reciting lines from the disco-tinged theme music of the Pokemon movie.
Benetts’ colleague, David A. Graham, points out Cain’s farewell speech to supporters was strangely flippant and lacking substance. Not the way a candidate normally wants their campaign to be remembered.
To establish this contrast, Graham recalls Hillary Clinton’s inspirational words to supporters when she departed from the 2008 campaign: “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.”
Cain chose to borrow the words of former disco queen Donna Summer sung for a kids’ cartoon: “Life can be a challenge. Life can seem impossible. It’s never easy when there’s so much on the line.”
In typical Cain fashion, he had been citing those lyrics throughout his campaign but at some point he attributed them to “a poet.” A few quick Google searches by the public found the true source of those words.
“Throughout the campaign,” Graham writes, “Cain repeatedly reached for snappy, glib, inspirational phrases — often, it seemed, without having thought them through. It was apparently the legacy of his years as a motivational speaker, a sector in which empty but punchy quotes are the coin of the realm and are seldom quarried for their original source.
“For example, Cain’s 9-9-9 plan caught on with conservative voters, but was widely derided by economists on both the right and the left — and it quickly became clear that Cain had no real understanding of how revenues would line up with the status quo, nor of how regressive the tax would be. But that didn’t stop him: he was soon on his heels, offering half-baked notions of exemptions for the poor. The Summer quote was really no different—Cain heard something, liked it, and went with it, only to become a laughingstock once voters and the press took a closer look.”
You can read Graham’s column here.
