Herman Cain Loved Herman Cain

“I now know that she wasn’t the friend that I thought she was,” Herman Cain said on a call with his senior staff (and the National Review, which has a transcript). “But it was a just a friendship relationship.” The woman in question—“this lady,” as Cain also referred to her in the call—is Ginger White, who says that she and Cain had an affair that lasted thirteen years. “It was pretty simple. It wasn’t complicated. I was aware that he was married,” she said in an interview with Fox News Atlanta on Monday. “It was fun. It took me away from my sort of humdrum life.” And what did she learn? ‘Herman Cain loved Herman Cain.” That seems true.

She told Fox News that she’d been planning not to talk about the whole thing, but that since it looked like it was coming out, she might as well do the talking. “Is it going to hurt a lot of people? Yes. I’m sure I’m going to be one of them.” That, again, seems true. Cain said that she wasn’t telling the truth. He also said that he had given her money over the years, something her lawyer confirmed to Fox News. Cain said “she was out of work and destitute, desperate.“ Her financial records, eviction notices, and lawsuits from business disputes were flashed on the television screen. But so were cell-phone bills with dozens of calls and texts from Herman Cain’s number.

White said that the relationship began at a National Restaurant Association event, the venue for the harassment claims made against Cain, but noted that she had never worked for him, and had never been or felt herself harassed. But what happened to the women who had come forward affected her:

It bothered me that they were being demonized, sort of. That they were being treated as if they were automatically lying, and the burden of proof was on them. So I felt very bad for them.

Does anyone feel bad for Cain? Maybe, in the sense that he, like White, should probably never have arrived at a level in the Presidential race that required this much scrutiny. Not every life merits it, or deserves that kind of exposure; most of us are very flawed. But we are a few weeks away from Iowa, in a race in which Cain has, improbably, remained one of the top contenders. Someone has to take a hard look. The failure of the Republican Party to settle on a halfway serious candidate may end up ruining the lives of people like Ginger White, bystanders whose messy lives might at least have remained private. Is anyone vetting anyone over there?

In the phone call with his staff, Cain noted that ”we made an assessment” after various setbacks, including “the previous two accusations, false accusations,” and had nonetheless gone forward. “Now, with this latest one, we have to do an assessment as to whether or not this is going to create too much of a cloud, in some people’s minds, as to whether or not they would be able to support us going forth…. And so, the public will have to decide whether they believe her or whether they believe me. That’s why we’re going to give it time, to see what type of response we get from our supporters.”

Time, but not too much time: there is speculation that Cain’s campaign will finally end this week. Then maybe someone will begin looking, in a serious way, at Newt Gingrich’s record. Or has the Party moved on to Ron Paul, or maybe even Romney?source