Artur Davis: The Herman Cain Phenomenon

For a medley of reasons, Herman Cain’s ascension in the polls is not going to lead him to the Republican nomination for president.

He has never won an election, has shown no capacity to run any massive public institution, much less America, and his campaign has been operated in a chaotic, haphazard fashion: all of the above are equal opportunity disqualifiers, regardless of race.

But it is no small thing that a steady, dedicated stream of white conservatives are embracing Cain’s candidacy and that he is still standing strong when more accomplished rivals have fallen or are lagging. My guess is that Cain will end up mattering, for the same reason other losers like Howard Dean, Jesse Jackson and Mike Huckabee have made a difference. Just as Dean foretold the emergence of the internet as a campaign tool, and Jackson paved the way for a black/progressive alliance, and Huckabee discovered early traces of the Tea Party, Cain may be onto something too: the eventuality of the next serious minority candidate for national office arising in the party of Lincoln instead of the party of Jefferson and Jackson.

The very thought will rankle some of the liberal hierarchy, which views the right-wing’s loathing of Obama as racial antipathy.

But the facts are inconvenient for Democrats: the 2010 primary cycle was atrocious for black Democratic candidates running statewide in Alabama and Georgia as moderates, and the general was a graveyard for worthy black candidates in Florida and Georgia who campaigned as conventional liberals. Even the exceptions are weighted with qualifiers: Kamala Harris, an incomparably gifted candidate, won as California’s Attorney General only after lagging well behind the rest of the Democratic ticket, and Governor Deval Patrick’s reelection would likely not have happened without a conservative independent siphoning Republican votes.

The breakthrough artists in 2010 were Republican minorities who won large shares of the white vote in a variety of different environments: Tim Scott and Allan West in the House; Marco Rubio in the Senate; Nikki Haley, Susanna Martinez, and Brian Sandoval in statehouses. 2012 promises to continue the trend. No plausible Democratic minority has surfaced in any competitive district or state in this cycle, while Ted Cruz is a first tier Latino Republican Senate contender in Texas.

Congressman Tim Scott

I will offer an even blunter perspective on the racial map in politics: the Democratic establishment is historically quick to question the viability of a minority contender in a majority white political community. If Tim Scott had been a black Democrat, his hopes to run for Congress in a largely white Deep South district would have been dismissed as quixotic. If Nikki Haley, or for that matter, Bobby Jindal, had been running in their states as Democrats, their Indian ancestry would have been enough to brand them as “unelectable”. This is the chatter that has accompanied virtually every Democratic member of a racial minority to climb onto the statewide scene for a couple of decades, most certainly including one State Senator Barack Obama, whom Democratic seers in Washington viewed in 2003 as their party’s weakest prospect to capture an Illinois Senate seat.

My point is not policy-driven: the Republican Party seems less attuned today to the threats from racial inequality than it has been since Richard Nixon. But it should be cruelly ironic to Democrats that the party with less progressive views on race is currently opening more electoral doors for Americans who want to lead but happen to be black or brown.