The End of Herman Cain?

I'm sure he's joking. Or maybe he was taken out of context. Or maybe he misspoke.

I just can't seem to be bothered to care, or to believe such excuses anymore.

Herman Cain on public employee unions:



The article about the interview:

In the Journal Sentinel meeting, Cain also appeared to be unclear on the issue of collective bargaining as it involves federal employees.

Asked if he thought federal employees should have the ability to bargain collectively, Cain said: "They already have it, don't they?"

Told they didn't, he said, "They have unions."

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 600,000 federal government workers in 65 agencies, says that most federal employees don't have collective bargaining over pay and benefits. They do have collective bargaining power over working conditions.

There are some exemptions to unions in federal government. Air traffic controllers can bargain over wages under a 1996 law that granted full bargaining power to a number of federal workers covered under the Federal Aviation Administration. The U.S. Postal Service, which has hundreds of thousands of employees, has collective bargaining for pay and benefits. But the Postal Service is technically an independent agency of the U.S. government.

Cain's comments came after he was asked about the battles in Ohio and Wisconsin over public employee unions. Cain was asked whether he thinks public employees should be able to collectively bargain.

"Yes," he said, "but not collective hijacking. What I mean by that, if they have gotten so much for so many years and it's going to bankrupt the state, I don't think that's good. It appears that in some instances, they really don't care."

The bottom line, he stressed, was not creating an undue burden on taxpayers.

Asked about last week's vote in Ohio, in which the state's new collective bargaining law was rejected by voters, Cain said that "maybe they tried to get too much and as a result it failed."

Asked if the Ohio Legislature had gone too far in stripping collective bargaining power for public employees, including fire and police personnel, Cain said Ohio legislators "may have tried to get too much in one bill."

Ohio's collective bargaining law differed from Wisconsin in at least one key aspect: Wisconsin exempted police and fire personnel from the law.

In an interview with the Journal Sentinel last month, Cain said he was "right in the corner of Gov. Scott Walker 100%" in Walker's battle with public employee unions.

On Libya:



The silence is horribly painful, let alone the awful answer.

Again, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article:

Cain paused for some time, then wanted to clarify that Obama had supported the uprising. Clearly struggling to articulate a response, Cain paused again, saying, "Got all of this stuff twirling around in my head."

Finally, Cain said: "I would have done a better job of determining who the opposition is. And I'm sure that our intelligence people had some of that information. Based upon who made up that opposition . . . might have caused me to make some different decisions about how we participated. Secondly, no I did not agree with (Moammar) Gadhafi killing his citizens. Absolutely not. . . . I would have supported many of the things that they did to help stop that."

Cain said the question of America's involvement in Libya was not a simple yes or no question. "I would have gone about assessing the situation differently. It might have caused us to end up in the same place."

Told that a number of Republican leaders had praised Obama for his handling of the situation, Cain said he wasn't criticizing the president, "I just don't think enough was done relative to assessing the opposition before everything exploded."