Herman Cain Used the Affirmative Action He Decries to Advance.

Before we heard about Herman Cain’s 4 a.m. call to Ginger White, there was George Clooney’s in Ides of March, the fall film that featured a presidential candidate making a 2:30 a.m. call to the intern, who was in the sack with one of Clooney's top aides.


We all also remember Hillary’s 3 a.m. phone call ad in 2008, so we’re now in the midst of our third presidential election cycle, two of them real, dominated by early morning siren calls that test White House mettle.

But the mystery of Herman Cain is not whether Ginger White’s phone records will finally disconnect him from his 999 area code.

The reason we should all still care about this soon-to-be Invisible Man is the odd GOP phobia that caused his surge in the first place. How he became the biggest Mr. October since Reggie Jackson is a window into the psychosis gripping a party that, in a year, may be ruling all of Washington.

Essentially unemployed since he left the National Restaurant Association in 1999, confounded by Libya, a blogger who insisted there was no 2008 recession as late as that September, Cain nonetheless climbed to the top of the national, Iowa, and South Carolina polls and stayed there until the second week of November. The pizza man even delivered big wins in the Florida and Georgia straw polls. And when four women charged that he took his role as the head of the hospitality industry a bit too seriously, he brushed civil settlements aside as if they weren’t on his tab and still stalked the White House.
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