Mr. President, Your Facts are Incorrect

By Herman Cain
June 10, 2012

If President Obama believed he had a good economic record, he would be presenting that record to the American people as it really is. It tells you a lot that the president is so willing to distort the facts – especially on the matter of his spending.

A few weeks ago, a writer named Rex Nutting wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch section that made the claim that there really has been no Obama spending spree. According to Nutting, the whole thing is a myth.

This was greeted as exciting news by the Obama White House, which immediately began making the claim that the “conservative Wall Street Journal” had declared he was not a big spender.

How could Nutting make such a claim? Using phony numbers, that’s how. Nutting ignored the fact that much of the spending that occurred in 2009 was requested and approved by Obama after he took office. This allowed Nutting to pretend that all 2009 spending – save for the oddly chosen figure of $140 billion – was the responsibility of George W. Bush.

Because spending increases since 2009 have been relatively small, Nutting’s logic is that Obama has given us tiny increases over a baseline that was Bush’s fault.

It didn’t take long for conservative media to tear Nutting’s deceptive piece to shreds. The piece was so sloppy, it was easy to do. But surprisingly, even mainstream media outlets like the Associated Press and the Washington Post roasted Nutting for his claims, and took Obama to task for citing the discredited column.

And as for Obama’s claim that he was getting support from the “conservative Wall Street Journal,” that was simply not the truth. MarketWatch is an entirely separate section from the WSJ’s conservative editorial page, which weighed in on the controversy after it had festered for several days, ripping Nutting's piece to shreds and castigating the Obama Administration for citing it.

You would think, after all this, that Obama would stop making the claim and stop citing the piece. But he hasn’t. At a fundraiser just the other night, he cited it once again to the roaring approval of a partisan Democratic crowd.

Of course, his claim is ridiculous on its face. The national debt has already risen by $5 trillion in the three years since Obama took office, which is more than it rose the entire eight years of the Bush Administration. To say there has been no Obama spending spree is so absurd, you’d be laughed out of any room full of serious people (apparently Democratic fundraising events don’t apply) if you said it.

I would respect President Obama more if he would stand up and make an honest case for his policies. I’m not saying I would agree with them, but if he thinks spending 25 percent of GDP – which we haven’t done at any other time outside of World War II – is good policy, he should boldly stand up and tell everyone, “Yes, I increased spending this much and this is why I did it.”

Instead, he runs from his spending record because it obviously hasn’t brought the economic benefits he claimed it would, and it’s running up the nation’s credit card at a frightening rate. He is so lost for a justification for all this, that when an obscure columnist writes a sloppy and easily debunked column that attempts to defend him, he references it for weeks on end.

He has nothing else.

That is pathetic. Would it be so hard to admit that your policies haven’t worked and that we need to try something else? Then again, he’s still pushing Congress to give him another $450 billion in stimulus spending, so maybe he really doesn’t understand that his policies don’t work. Maybe he just thinks we need that much more of them.

Congress won’t give him what he wants, of course, nor should they.

Mr. President, with all due respect, your facts are incorrect.

The Obama Likability Trap

By Herman Cain
June 4, 2012

If a pollster calls you at some point during this election season, one of the strangest questions they ask you could be:
“Who would you rather have a beer with?”

And you didn’t know the president would be inviting you to the White House for a beer, or picking you up after work to take you to Joe’s Bar. Because, of course, he won’t. But that doesn’t stop pollsters from exploring the question of “likability,” and it doesn’t stop the media from reporting on it as if it were a relevant factor in determining who should be the next president.

Politicians put a great deal of time and attention these days into trying to be likable, as they’re convinced this will influence a great many voters. This quest for likability can involve everything from looks ($400 haircuts and botox) to jokes on the stump to local sports references at every stop, some of which are guaranteed to backfire – like when John Kerry told a bunch of Wisconsin cheeseheads how much he liked going to football games at “Lambert Field.”

And almost all of this is completely irrelevant to the job of the presidency. In fact, I would argue that the need to be liked can make a leader much less effective – since true leadership is often the opposite of pleasing everyone.

I can’t think of a better example than Barack Obama.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama was regarded as the much more likable candidate than either primary rival Hillary Clinton (whom he infamously and condescendingly told, “You’re likable enough, Hillary”) or general election opponent John McCain. It’s hard to say what the basis was for this belief. I’m sure part of it was that he seemed very natural and comfortable when speaking in public. He seemed to have the ability to relate to ordinary people. And by all appearances he does seem to be genuinely devoted to his family, which is great.

But being president of the United States is arguably the most difficult job in the world. It’s certainly the job that presents the most problems for everyone else when someone does it incompetently. And however likable Obama may have been, there was no reason to think he was qualified for the job. Having served two-thirds of a single U.S. Senate term, with no executive experience of any kind prior to that, simply did not recommend him for the presidency of the United States. Any objective look at the facts should have caused voters to conclude, “This man is going to be in over his head.”

And he has been.

Facing one of the most difficult economic challenges of the last several generations, we elected a man who had never had responsibility for any economy – good or bad, of any size. He had one idea, which was to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowed money. When that didn’t fix the problem, he was stumped. He knows nothing about economics and nothing about business or job creation. And without executive experience, he didn’t know how to surround himself with knowledgeable people who could guide him to better solutions. He had no idea what to do, and still doesn’t.

He’s been even worse on the foreign policy front. Iran and North Korea are playing him like a fiddle on matters of nuclear proliferation. Russia under Vladimir Putin simply disregards him. And for all his talk about how his predecessor supposedly alienated our allies, Obama has managed to upset the British on the question of the Falkland Islands, the Canadians on the question of oil purchases, the Poles on matters of missile defense and “Polish death camps,” and Israel on just about everything.

How much do you like him now?

But as badly as Obama has bungled the presidency – and that is very badly indeed – we have to recognize he is not the only one with culpability here. When the Democratic Party put him on stage at its 2004 national convention to give the keynote address, which he delivered very well, it was absurd that an obscure Illinois state legislator should have been instantly elevated to the level of “rising star” on the national political scene. Given his almost non-existent record of achievement during his tenure as a U.S. senator, it was ridiculous that he was treated as one of the top-tier candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination – while a candidate like New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who had an incredibly impressive resume, was treated as a joke.

Being likable has nothing to do with whether you can lead a nation. It doesn’t mean you can’t, but voters and the media need to look at a person’s qualifications – in the areas of leadership, achievement and ideas – and stop worrying about who they would like to have a beer with. If you want to have a beer, go have one with your friends. Leave the presidency to someone who has actually led something. Likability is not leadership.

In Lieu of a Plan, Our Leaders Make It Up As They Go Along

By Herman Cain
May 28, 2012

Anyone trying to solve a problem, turn around an organization or lead a nation needs something. They need a plan.

Without a plan, you have no roadmap for how you’ll correct things that are wrong. You have no way of measuring whether you’re making progress. You have no method of holding yourself accountable for the results of your actions.

One of the reasons the federal government is functioning so poorly, and causing the nation so many economic problems, is the fact that our leaders have no plan. They are making it up as they go along.

To understand the importance of having a plan, all you have to do is talk to any leader who successfully led an organization, company or movement to the attainment of an objective. They will all tell you it started with a good plan. When I was asked by Pillsbury to turn around a struggling region of Burger King restaurants, the first thing I had to do was develop a plan for how to stop the financial bleeding, how to increase business and how to more successfully manage operations. The same thing was true when I took over Godfather’s Pizza.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make adjustments to your plan. Sometimes as you learn and observe things, it becomes obvious that you must. But the plan still has to be aimed at achieving the goals, and it has to be honest.

America’s leaders today do not have an honest plan. In lieu of a plan, they simply make things up as they go along. Consider the current debate over interest rates on federal student loans. Washington politicians are in an uproar because interest rates are about to automatically double, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. What they don’t tell you is why that’s about to happen. In 2007, Congress passed a bill that cut the interest rate to 3.4 percent, but in order to mask the true long-term cost of this measure, they set the rate cut to expire in 2012. That was supposedly the plan. But now that 2012 is here, there is of course wailing and gnashing of teeth over the increase, so they’re going to extend the lower rate.

Remember last year’s debate over the debt ceiling? Every year or two, Congress establishes a debt limit. If you took it seriously, you’d think they had a plan to make sure the nation incurs only so much debt, and no more. But of course, they have no such plan. Once they hit the limit, they simply increase it again. The debt limit is a joke. It makes it look like they have a plan for fiscal responsibility, but in reality they do not.

The same thing is true with Medicare. When the federal government puts out long-term projections concerning the cost of Medicare, the numbers are always fictional because they are based on a “plan” Congress will never follow. You may have heard during the ObamaCare debate about the Medicare “doc fix.” Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors are scheduled to be slashed dramatically every year or two. When the federal government puts out Medicare cost projections, it pretends these cuts will actually happen and reports the numbers accordingly. But the cuts will never happen. Every time they are scheduled to kick in, Congress enacts the inevitable “doc fix” and the current rates stay in place.

This is what’s sometimes called flying by the seat of your pants. Congress and the Obama Administration make it up as they go along. That’s why Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit in recent congressional testimony that the Obama Administration has no plan for dealing with the federal deficit or debt, informing Congressman Paul Ryan (who actually does have a plan), “But we know we don’t like yours.”

Of course, this is largely a product of politics. Candidates are afraid to put specific plans before the public because their opponents and the media will assail the plans – often inaccurately – and turn what should be a campaign strength into a liability. I experienced that firsthand during my presidential campaign when I put out my 9-9-9 plan for replacing the tax code. The plan was attacked and often misrepresented. But a funny thing happened: Without question, 9-9-9 helped me more than it hurt me, not only because many people like the plan, but also because people had the sense that I knew what I wanted to do.

This is something politicians need to remember: Just because people criticize your plan doesn’t mean they don’t respect you for putting it out there. People understand that leaders need plans. That is more true than ever today. Given the weakened state of our economy and the dire nature of our debt/deficit situation, it is simply stunning that the Obama Administration has no plan whatsoever for what to do about it.

I couldn’t have turned my Burger King region or Godfather’s around without a plan. Mitt Romney couldn’t have turned the Olympics around without a plan. And neither of us would have been successful if we had peddled phony plans we had no intention of following – as Congress does with regularity.

This is why we face such difficult economic circumstances, and such a massive debt problem. You can’t get anything right if you simply make it up as you go along. You need a real, serious plan. We’re not going to get one, though, until we decide to elect leaders who know how to plan, know how to execute and know how to succeed.

There is an old saying. If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Our federal government is failing us.