Herman Cain Keeps It Simple

The Republican nomination for 2012 is up for grabs, and for at least the 5th time this year, someone new has jumped to the front of the line.  Herman Cain is surging in the polls, and it isn't just because Mitt Romney is most likely a robot sent from the future to bore us all to death so the robots can take over.  Herman gets it.  People like things simple.  Like Herman's 999 tax plan (an idea stolen, quite obviously, from one of my favorite bands http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bimNMiz250). 

That's 9% taxes, sales tax, income tax, whatever.  Sure, it doesn't "make economic sense" and it couldn't "get any votes in Congress", but that's not what Mr. Cain cares about.  He's not one of those political types who wants to "do realistic things" or "govern the country properly".  He just wants to keep it simple.  And he's soooo right you guys.  In America, everything we do to run the country should be so simple a drunk toddler can understand it. 

And that's not all.  Herman Cain is the same guy who once suggested that Congress shouldn't pass any legislation longer than three pages.  That was a while ago now, and I'm hearing that Herman is refining this plan so that, under a Cain Presidency, all laws must be constructed in tweet form.  If it's more than 140 characters, Herman Cain won't sign it!

But why stop there?  Why just fix the tax code and Congress when we have so many other problems?  Well, I have an inside source and I'm here to tell you, Herman isn't stopping there.  Here are some of the other plans you can expect to hear from Mr. Cain in the coming weeks and months.

Law Enforcement: The Super 12 Plan
Anyone who is convicted of a crime, no matter what they did, goes to jail for exactly 12 years.  Jaywalking?  12 years.  Arrested for occupying Wall St.?  12 years.  Beat a mime to death with a pogo stick?  12 years.  Our criminal justice systems spends way to much time and taxpayer money trying to figure out "fair" sentences and when someone should be allowed to get out of jail.  And if 12 years wasn't enough for you, you can just kill another mime and go right back for 12 more years.

Foreign Policy: The Law of Threes
We must always be in three wars at any given time, no more, no less.  And any war we enter must last exactly three years.  See, this way, there's no messy and confusing public debate about whether or not we should go to war with another country.  It's simple!  How many wars are we in right now?  If it's three, than sorry, no new wars today, but we'll put it on the waiting list.  But if it's less than three, everybody in Yemen better run because it's bombin' time! 

Additionally, no more hard decisions about when to leave a country we've reduced to rubble.  Three years and we're done...and you're welcome.  You wouldn't leave a pizza in the oven after the timer went off, right?

Health Care: The NyQuil Plan
We all know trying to get people affordable access to health care is socialism.  And who needs all those fancy-pants doctors anyway?  They're always using big words nobody can understand like "myocardial" and "kidney".  If you're not feeling well in President Cain's America, just go to the store and get yourself some NyQuil.  You don't need to "know" what's wrong, NyQuil will fix it, or put you to sleep until it goes away on it's own. 

They don't all have to be about numbers.  This isn't about numbers, it's about keeping it simple.

Energy: Drill Baby Drill
We all know the two biggest problems with energy.  Number one, we're just not drilling enough.  We all know that god has placed an infinite amount of oil in the Earth for us to use (well, not infinite, but enough so that we'll have some until whenever Jesus comes back).  Unfortunately, godless hippies keep complaining about how we're "running out of oil" and how we need to "plan for the future".  Stupid jerks.  What we need to do is drill more.  And we need to be able to do it without interference from the second problem, regulation.

So here's the two-part plan.  First, everybody gets a drill.  On day one of a Cain Presidency, you'll come downstairs in the morning and, just like Christmas, you'll find your livingroom full of oil drilling equipment.  Drill in your backyard, your front yard, the street in front of your house, under your basement, anywhere you think oil might be.  More drilling=more oil, so if we're all drilling, then we'll have all the oil we'll ever need.  Of course, once you find the oil, you have to give the property you found it under to a big oil company.  Herman won't jeopardize profits, he's not insane. 

As for part two, we have to find a way around these environmentalists and their government regulation, so here's the deal.  Let's say you're visiting the Gulf of Mexico, or ANWR.  As a good American, you've got your drilling supplies with you.  Let's say you come across a little piece of land you think might have some oil under it and you'd like to drill and find out.  No problem.  Just yell OIL! really loud and wait 15 minutes.  If Al Gore doesn't show up to complain, start drilling baby. 

What about alternative energy?  What about it?  Herman Cain doesn't buy into liberal myths like "wind" or "the sun".  Having more than one energy source is super complicated.  We're sticking with what we know.

The Economy: Lucky Sevens
Cain's 999 plan is a start, but that's not all.  To fix this economy and put America back to work, Cain has a seven point economic plan which is sure to do the trick.

1) Right now, unemployment insurance can last up to 99 weeks.  Republicans know that's way too long, and people need incentive to get back to work.  Under a Cain Presidency, unemployment will last for 7 days, plenty of time to find a new job and get back to work.

2) Drop the minimum wage down to 7 cents an hour.  Listen people, we need to compete with China.  Do you want to move all the way to China for a job?  Or do you just want to live like a Chinese worker right here in America?  I thought so.

3) Get rid of unions until there's only 7 left in the country.  And by 7, I mean 0.

4) Once a week, President Cain will pick the names of seven poor families out of a hat (hat's gonna be pretty full most weeks with the new minimum wage).  He'll send the 7 lucky winners a pizza.  There's no free lunches in America, so they'll have to pay him back once they decide to stop being poor.

5) TBD

7) 9+9+9=7 (right?)

Only 6 points, you say?  Listen, Herman Cain isn't worried about counting to seven, he's worried about America.  He's gonna build a 20-foot electric border fence with an alligator moat, he's gonna keep things simple and he's gonna fix the country...or maybe he's just gonna go on a book tour and endorse Rick Perry.  Who the hell knows?

OK, this was fun, but the truth is, Cain's recent surge in popularity points to a more serious problem.  It's not a surprise that the tea people have suddenly latched onto Herman and his promise to make everything simple enough for them to understand.  This is what happens when one party's message and platform get overrun by the misinformed masses. 

It's easy to dismiss Cain as the new flavor of the week and say he'll be back down at 5% a month from now.  But what if that doesn't happen?  Cain is just crazy enough to go through all of the remaining 349 debates without saying anything rational enough to get him in trouble with the tea people.  And what if Romney stumbles?  What if Cain somehow gets the nomination?  The President is vulnerable, the economy doesn't look to be turning around anytime soon.  There are perfectly realistic scenarios in which any Republican nominee beats the President.  President Cain?  Certainly not likely, but it's hard to say, at this point, that's it's impossible.  This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

The Wrong Argument

I don't know if I can do this.  Since I found out Governor Fatpants from New Jersey isn't running for President, I can barely muster the will to get out of bed in the morning, let alone write anything.  Now who will save us from the scourge of socialism and health care?  Did the Republican party really try hard enough to get him to run?  I hope they at least offered him a lifetime supply of pudding.  But, alas, I push on, with hope that this futile exercise in creative writing will somehow heal my wounded heart.

Speaking of socialism, the President is smack in the middle of his nationwide "Pass this Jobs Bill" tour.  It's like he's a kindergarten teacher..."See these unemployed people right here in front of me?  They can have jobs working on this crappy bridge right there behind me.  Does everyone understand, children?  People (points to people) can have jobs fixing bridges (points to the bridge), and then we get better bridges and more jobs.  See?  It's like if you were sitting there with nothing to do, and there was a pile of Lincoln Logs next to you.  If you started building something with the Lincoln Logs, then you'd have something to do AND you'd get a Lincoln Log cabin.  Does that make sense?" 

But there's a problem (spoiler alert!)...Republicans don't want to do the jobs bill thing.  I'm tired of being mean to Republicans.  They're jerks and most of them don't appear to have working brains, but there doesn't seem to be anything we can do about that.  On the other hand, I think the President could be better at this because I think he's making the wrong argument. 

I felt the same way about health care.  Liberals kept arguing that health care is some kind of inalienable human right.  I'm not sure I even believe in inalienable rights.  We get the rights we earn, there's no space god up there handing out inalienable rights like Halloween candy.  We need universal health care because it's an embarrassment for the wealthiest nation in the world to have millions of citizens who can't afford basic health coverage.  We should be ashamed of ourselves, but our leaders don't really feel shame.

I feel the same way about energy.  Energy innovation isn't about growing a green economy and creating jobs.  Where did we get the idea that everything has to be profitable all the time? It's about being a world leader in figuring out what we're supposed to do when we run out of oil.  Ideally, before we actually run out of oil. 

Just like health care and energy, infrastructure spending is about doing the things we should be doing if we fancy ourselves the greatest, most awesomest, most amazingest nation in the history of the Universe.  But then there's the question of how we pay for it all.

A corollary to this jobs bill debate is the debate about raising taxes on the rich, and again I think I'm hearing the wrong argument.  The President and liberals keep saying the rich and corporations need to pay their fair share.  That's nonsense.  I don't know what a "fair" tax rate is for a millionaire, and neither does anyone else.  Life's not fair, and even if it was, taxes aren't about fairness.  Taxes are about paying for the society we want, which we currently don't have enough money to support.

Republicans and the tea people say we just need to cut spending to balance the budget, but that's nonsense too.  No serious person has a real proposal to balance the federal budget, and even if we did get a balanced budget for a year or two, it wouldn't last.  We'd have some new big disaster, or start another war (what are you looking at, Iran? You got a problem!?!) and then we'd be right back to deficit spending. 

We need more money.  The truth is, we may all eventually have to pay higher taxes, but the wealthy have to go first, because they have all the money and contrary to what stupid people think, you can't grow the economy by robbing from the poor to give to the rich. 

That's my argument to the tea people, Republicans, the wealthy and anyone else who responds to everything by telling me they "believe in lower taxes" (as if lower taxes are something you believe in like a fucking Nostradamus prophecy).  You can live in a garbage dump and pay no taxes, or you can live in America.  But if you want to live in America, you have to pay the toll and stop bitching about it.

50,000 Airplanes

I couldn't be less impressed with the Presidential address I watched last night. It was a very informative speech if you happen to have just come out of a 57 day coma. Otherwise, it was ten minutes of whining about whose fault the BP oil spill is followed by a brief discussion of the road forward, which basically amounted to "we're going to be energy independent one day, although I have no earthly idea how".

I'm a fan of the President, I think I've been pretty clear about that. And, to be fair, maybe the President is, once again, being the grown-up in the room. Everyone wants him to do something, everyone wants some knee-jerk reaction. Maybe the subtext last night was something like "we can start arguing about the future of energy again once we get the damn leak stopped". If so, that's a fair point and maybe he's right.

Still, this felt like one of those leadership moments. A time when the President got a good pitch to hit and needed to knock it out of the park. Instead, he let it sail right on by. In his own address last night, the President referenced FDR's address to Congress on May 16, 1940. In the spring of 1940 the Nazis were just steamrolling Europe. Roosevelt knew we needed to get ready for war and set a goal for the production of 50,000 combat planes for the air force in the next year. In the same address, he referenced the current production capacity at the time, about 12,000. As the story goes, we didn't produce 50,000 airplanes, we produced 100,000 airplanes.

I'm the first one to say the President can't really do a whole lot about an oil spill. He's not Aquaman. But leadership on the path forward sort of falls under his job description, especially if he wants to be remembered as a great President, as all Presidents do. No leadership here though. The bold rhetoric of the Obama campaign has given way to timidly measured incrementalism. A logical, but often maddening pragmatism aimed at doing what is possible without alienating anyone. We accept that from a lot of politicians, but this President can do better.

Where's our bold energy goal for the next decade? 1 million solar collectors in the deserts of the southwest by 2020. Is that possible? I have no idea. Do you think FDR knew if 50,000 airplanes was really possible? Do you think Kennedy was sure we could really get to the moon? I think some people still believed the moon was made of cheese in 1960.

Don't like solar power? What about nuclear power? Safe, clean nuclear power would be a nice goal. Don't think nuclear power can ever really be totally safe and totally clean? OK, promise me a Dyson sphere by 2020. I don't care, just say something. We need a tangible energy goal, something for which the nation's best minds and most talented scientists and engineers can shoot.

The people who supported this President are waiting for him to do something real, something big that matches the promise of his campaign (and no, that half-assed health care bill doesn't count). The President spends all of his time trying not to bother the people who already don't like him and never will. Meanwhile, the rest of us wait.

There's another one of those election things coming up in 2012. I won't vote for Sarah Palin or Mitt Romnezxygr (sorry, I can't type Mitt's whole name without falling asleep). But if the Republicans nominate someone interesting, my vote's up for grabs. I'm tired of waiting.