Why Politicians Think We’re Stupid and Voters Hunger for Common Sense: An Interview With Herman Cain
Herman Cain, the former pizza magnate and U.S. Senate candidate, recently talked with the Center for Individual Freedom’s Corporate Counsel Renee Giachino about his new book They Think You’re Stupid — Why Democrats Lost Your Vote and What Republicans Must Do to Keep It. The radio interview aired on “Your Turn — Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense” on WEBY 1330AM Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio.
What follows are excerpts from the interview.
GIACHINO: My first guest has not just seen it all, he has done it all. He is a businessman, author and 2004 candidate for U.S. Senate. He currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of The New Voice, Inc., and New Voters Alliance, and he is the host of the nationally syndicated radio talk show “The Bottom Line with Herman Cain.” I am sure that by now you have figured out who it is.
He is past chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and past chairman and chief executive officer of Godfather’s Pizza. Please welcome to the program Mr. Herman Cain.
CAIN: Renee, thank you. I am glad to be on and I love the title of your show because we are missing a lot of common sense these days.
GIACHINO: That’s right. As I read the title of your book, which is the topic of our discussion today, They Think You’re Stupid, I thought you might like the title because throughout the entire book you keep going back to fundamentals of “let’s talk about common sense again.”
CAIN: Absolutely. It is all about common sense and unfortunately with so much political posturing and with so much rhetoric and this and that as it relates to politics, people are overlooking the common sense. I believe that there is a hunger on the part of the general public for more people who get elected or run for office who talk plain common sense to people rather than so much of the political speech.
GIACHINO: I think you are absolutely right. Let me set this up for the listeners. We are talking about a brand new book out by Mr. Herman Cain called They Think You’re Stupid — Why Democrats Lost Your Vote and What Republicans Must Do to Keep It.
Former U.S. Senator and Governor of Georgia Zell Miller wrote the forward for your book and noted that all party leaders would do well to listen to you. He writes that “Herman Cain and his wise and proven leadership are a force to be reckoned with by politicians and a lifeline to the voter who wants common sense leadership but feels like an outsider in both parties.” Do you think that we have become too partisan — that is either too Republican or too Democrat — and we are not issue-oriented anymore?
CAIN: I believe that the Republican leadership and the Democratic leadership have become too partisan. The people who vote — the everyday people who are working and taking care of their kids and providing for their families — people who have voted Republican or Democrat, they are not as partisan as the leaders in Washington. And therein lays the problem.
That is why I titled the book They Think You’re Stupid. The “They” is the leaders in Congress, not those of us who choose to vote Democrat or Republican, because most of us will vote Democrat or Republican mostly based upon where our ideologies lie. And in the last election, more and more people voted for Republicans because more and more people were disgusted with the Democrats. And now we have a lot of people who are disappointed with the Republicans after they got this big majority that we made such a hullabaloo about.
And so I describe people who are not 100 percent satisfied with whatever party they align themselves with as what I call the “politically homeless.” They may have voted Democrat but they are not enthusiastic about waving a Democratic flag. That is what happened last November. But it also happened to some extent to Republicans.
And so in the book I talk about the major things that the Democrats did wrong to lose a lot of votes, but that the Republicans can’t count on those votes if they do not do something to get results.
GIACHINO: I love that term that you gave in the book They Think You’re Stupid — you write about the millions of voters who feel “politically homeless.” I know that some our listeners and frequent callers support parties other than the major two parties. I know in the book you make it very clear that you are not advocating the creation of a third political party for those who feel politically homeless. Do you think if the Democratic Party and Republican Party stay asleep at the wheel — which is the term you use — is it very likely that we will see a surge in voter support for third party candidates in 2006 or 2008?
CAIN: I think that is absolutely a big possibility because people are just sick of the same old stuff. They are sick of the rhetoric as usual. As you know, because both parties have a very loyal base — whether you are talking Republican or Democrat — it is that loyal base that normally allows one of the parties to end up getting someone elected.
The biggest downfall is that too many people who are not part of the base — and when I talk about people being part of the base I am talking about people who, in the middle of the summer, like when I was running for the U.S. Senate, these people in the middle of July are going to come out and vote in a primary where you either vote for the Republican ticket or you vote for the Democratic ticket. Our turnout in
Now, let’s take it one step further. Even in the general election it is unusual in most counties in most states to get too far above 50-52 percent of voters. So part of the problem is that too many people stay home not just in the general election but way too many people stay home in the primary election.
GIACHINO: Let’s talk about your campaign in 2004. You write about how you did not win the nomination, but you did not lose either. Can you tell the listeners what you mean by that?
CAIN: What I meant by that was when you consider the fact that this was my first time ever running for political office, number one. Number two, I ran for the U.S. Senate. I did not go for a lower level office — nothing against lower level offices, but with 35 years of business experience and having worked on the campaign with Jack Kemp and Bob Dole when they ran, having been an adviser to Steve Forbes when he ran for President, and having been involved in politics for over 10 years, I wanted to run for an office where I felt I could have as great an impact as I possibly could.
I ran against one Congressman who had been in Congress for 12 years and another Congressman who had been there for 6 years. The results came out in the primary and I came in with what we describe as an impressive second. I beat the 12-year Congressman and came within 2 percentage points of forcing a run-off with the 6-year Congressman. All because I had an issue-for-issue focused agenda. I forced the debate to focus on the big issues and I was the common sense, plain talk candidate that resonated with not only a lot of people who were part of the debates, but it also resonated with a lot of people who quite frankly said that they were ready to give up on politics.
People are looking for hope. They know it is difficult and it is not going to be easy, but they are looking for a message of hope and they are looking for someone who they can believe in and who believes that we can change Washington, D.C.
After the election, the reason that I say that I did not lose is because I have had thousands and thousands of my supporters say “please don’t go away. Please keep your voice out there.” As a result, I have been inundated with requests to be on television, radio and in print. As a result, that is what gave rise to me starting my own radio show — although I am not going to compete with yours because I do not want you to bury my show. So I am going to stay away from that time slot when I come to your part of the state.
GIACHINO: Well, I hope you do come. That would be wonderful. You can have my spot. That would be just great.
CAIN: No, you have a very good show and I congratulate you on that. My point is I am continuing to keep this conservative message out there that we have to focus on the big issues — the big issues and not just the little ones. The big issues are moving at a much faster pace, and if we don’t have big solutions for things like replacing the tax code, restructuring Social Security with personal option accounts, and if we don’t continue to emphasize the expansion of health savings accounts, these things are going to bring down our economic infrastructure. I am not one to scream “the sky is falling” — this sky has been falling for decades and people have got to stand up and take very strong leadership positions in order to fix the problems that can impact us the most rather than putting another Band-Aid on it.
So this is why I say we did not lose because these issues are still very much on the top of the agenda for many of the American people as well as they have been teed up by the President.
GIACHINO: Well, serving as chief executive officer of The New Voice — an organization that I want to talk more about later in the interview — is another way that you have won.
Let me ask you a little bit more about your running. You ran as a conservative black Republican in the 2004 election for the U.S. Senate in
I love the chapter that you devoted to how you really realized that it was God’s choice for you to run for Senate, and I think it is extremely compelling and I’m glad that you met that call. But, let me ask you, do you think serving our country as a U.S. Senator is one of your purposes or did it take you off purpose? And if running is one of your purposes, will you run again?
CAIN: The answer to the last question – “do I think I will run again” — I don’t know. As you can imagine, running for office is a function of timing, who you will be running against, and when I made the decision to run for U.S. Senate the last time I felt that I was inspired divinely in order to do that. Not necessarily to win, but to help shape the debate as well as help me to prepare and be knowledgeable of the issues for what I am now doing, which is helping people to understand things a whole lot better.
When my first granddaughter was born — this was the story you were referring to — when my first granddaughter was born, I was attending a meeting in Hawaii. At the time I was running the National Restaurant Association and my wife had decided not to go to the meeting with me. We were living in Omaha, Nebraska, at the time. It was about the time for my daughter to deliver so my wife did not go with me so that she would be available to hurry up and go to Atlanta.
Well, I finally got to the hospital but it took me three days to get there. Normally, it does not take three days, unless something is wrong, for the baby to be delivered, but in this case it took over three days for my first granddaughter to be born.
GIACHINO: First babies do that to their mothers.
CAIN: Yes, they do that. So when I got to the hospital about 9:30 p.m. on January 22, 1999, thinking that everything would be over by the time I got there. Do you know that about 20 minutes after I arrived at the hospital the baby was born? Twenty minutes after I got to the hospital.
I went into the delivery room and spoke with my daughter and everything went normal. This is it, nothing was wrong. I went into that room and my daughter asked me if I wanted to hold her. I said, “Yes, I would.” Obviously, I was as proud as a peacock. My first grandchild. And so I said my baby daughter has a baby daughter.
As I held this little 25-minute-old baby in my arms and I looked into that face, the first thought that went through my mind was not “what do I do to give her a better start in life like our parents wanted to give us?” The first thought that went through my mind was “what do I do to make this a better world?”
I did not know what that answer was at that time. And so when things happened later to suggest that I needed to be more active in trying to impact the future policy of this country, it was that inspiration that made me know that I was suppose to try to run for the U.S. Senate, win or lose, because now I am in a position to try to impact policy even though I did not win that election.
GIACHINO: It is a wonderful story and you go on to talk about sitting and listening to a sermon that gave you another sign — but I don’t want to give up all your secrets.
CAIN: You have to leave something for them to read in this book.
GIACHINO: That’s right — the book is They Think You’re Stupid — Why Democrats Lost Your Vote and What Republicans Must Do to Keep It. It is written by Herman Cain. I know the book is available on Amazon.com and it is available at local bookstores. It is published by Stroud and Hall. Can they also get it by visiting your website?
CAIN: Yes, they can. They can get the book by visiting HermanCain.com, or I know that Borders and Barnes and Noble have it nationally and most bookstores have it. You can also get it on Amazon.com or my website, and you can also find out more information about an organization we created, Voters Alliance, for those people who feel “politically homeless,” we have an option for you to become politically vocal.
GIACHINO: That is absolutely right.
We were talking earlier in the interview and you write in the book about how politicians are clueless about the average American and what is important to us. We all know — and you know better than most of us — that it takes a lot of money to get elected to political office. Do you think that if Americans get fed-up enough with the elitist attitudes of our elected officials that we might be able to get average Americans voted into office even if they don’t have the biggest wallets?
CAIN: I absolutely believe that that is going to happen. I call it a new model of an individual who is going to get elected. This is why I believe that I did so well in my Senate campaign. When my opponents tried to make a big deal of the fact that I did not have any political experience — and they brought this up at a couple of the debates that we did — my retort to that was, “Well, look at what the political experience has gotten us in Washington, D.C., right now — a mess.” It caused these people to stop and think.
I basically brought common sense business principles to how I would approach solving these problems and it resonated with people. So I believe that the answer to your question most directly is that, yes, people are getting fed up.
Look at some of the other recent examples. Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected out in California. He did not have a political career but he was very well known because he went in and talked about what the problems were and how to solve them. Too many of the professional politicians don’t want to face the real issue or put a solution on the table. They want to put another Band-Aid on it to pander to the people because they know that most people are not going to pay attention to what is going on in between the elections, but then they are going to go back and make some more promises on the next election day.
Unfortunately, some of us are stupid because we don’t pay attention and we don’t stay engaged. A lot of politicians take advantage of that. But I believe that the time is here, not coming, when voters are going to elect a different kind of candidate.
Look up in Pennsylvania, Lynn Swann, the former football player and sports announcer, who is going to run for governor. I would call that a little bit out of the ordinary. And he has a very good chance of winning.
I have a 35 year business career and I came very close to forcing a run-off here in Georgia, and I think we have instances all over the country where you are going to find more and more people who don’t have the tradition “I came up through the political background” because by the time you come through the political ranks and you jump through the hoops and you have to return all of the favors, you are just as messed up as the ones we have there.
I think people are seeing that and more and more people who don’t have deep, deep, deep pockets or deep, deep, deep political roots are going to be elected more and more in the future.
GIACHINO: You just touched on this and I think that you probably find this as well in hosting a radio show. Very often I find myself talking with guests about political parties and elections. Some people think I’m crazy — I hear that “we are over a year away from an election and it’s too early to talk politics.”
But I think in your book They Think You’re Stupid you make a great case that part of the problem we are facing in modern politics — and you just mentioned this — derives simply from the fact that we don’t talk often enough about politics and the political process in between elections. We talk about partisan politics, but we don’t talk about the issues. Can you share your thoughts with us about that philosophy?
CAIN: Let me just look at the Social Security issue as a more recent perfect example. The President, to his credit, keyed this issue up and tried to educate the people about the option of personal retirement accounts. The evidence is overwhelming — you have the Galveston, Texas, example where the employees of Galveston were able to opt out because of a little window of opportunity in the law back in 1981. You have the situation in the small country of Chile because their payroll taxes have gotten up to 27 percent compared to where we are at 12 percent, and it is going to go higher if we don’t change things, and just taken with the evidence that our own elected representatives and senators have an optional personal retirement account that they call the thrift savings plan.
This is why I say they think that we are stupid. They have the same plan that the President is proposing, yet you have the Democratic leadership in Congress who are vehemently falling on the sword to say that they do not want to consider that option. And so what you have is a double standard. The media, the mainstream media — and here again I am with you, Renee — not all media, but many of the mainstream media outlets do a terrible job of presenting both sides of the issue and they are openly biased toward the more liberal view of some of these solutions.
So the Democratic leadership has a system of scaring people and telling them that their benefits will be cut when the President said over and over that they will not be cut. They scare people by telling them that it was going to take money out of Social Security when in fact it was going to divert money that they have not even collected yet. So as a result of this liberal media and out-and-out deception on the part of the Democratic leaders, this is why people get confused and then they get misled by certain polls and you see poll results that say that the public is losing confidence about whether or not they like that idea.
That’s the road that they lead them down. And because we don’t pay enough attention in between elections — the Democratic leaders on counting on this — that is how they deceived the public in between this election and 2006 when they get ready to run for office again.
GIACHINO: We only have about 30 seconds left and I do want people to know where they can go on the Internet to learn more about the New Voters Alliance. Is there a website they can visit?
CAIN: Yes, go to my website at HermanCain.com and I have several pages.
I want to leave your listeners with this one thought — don’t give up. Believe that we can change things in Washington, D.C., because if we give up on the greatest country in the world, if we give up on our system, even though it is not perfect, we have given up on the greatest country in the world, and we cannot do that after all of the sacrifices that so many people have made to keep this country where it is today.
GIACHINO: That’s right. I want to encourage the listeners to go out and buy the book They Think You’re Stupid by Herman Cain. Actually, buy two copies and send one to your Congressman. I think they need a copy of it.
Thank you very much Mr. Cain it has been a pleasure and I hope to have you on the program again soon.
CAIN: Thank you. I look forward to it.
July 28, 2005