Herman Cain’s Epic Jeb Bush Smackdown – “At Least I Was Once Winning”
Desperate to remain relevant after polling at only 5% in the latest national survey, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush has repeated remarked about the 2012 Republican primary, noting that Herman Cain was the front-runner in the fall of 2011 but dropped out before the year’s end.
However, as CNN explains, “Bush predicts his campaign will be more like that of John McCain in 2008, who started out slow but won the nomination in the end.”
It seems that Cain has taken notice of those remarks and posted a strongly worded response on his website in a piece entitled: “Hey Jeb: Before you talk about my ‘fall,’ try getting as far as I got.”
Referring to Jeb’s latest polling figures, Cain begins by writing: “Big talk from Mr. 5.5 percent,” adding that “Someone should tell Jeb Bush that I’ve accepted an invitation to speak at Donald Trump’s rally this coming Monday in Georgia. I accepted for a simple reason: He asked. But Gov. Bush seems weirdly interested these days in the connection – if only in his own mind – between what he thinks happened to me and what he thinks is going to happen to Trump.”
Continuing, Cain writes that: “I’ve heard this one before, of course. Herman Cain was leading the 2012 primary race only to ‘flame out,’ and the same thing is going to happen to Trump. This is how Bush tried to reassure disappointed supporters this past Monday, invoking ‘the fall of Herman Cain.'”
Taking a jab at Jeb, Cain adds: “I’m sure his supporters were really reassured by this. Hey, don’t worry that I’m way behind and gaining no ground whatsoever, but there was once this one guy who led and didn’t win.”
Cain went on to defend his long-shot bid for the Republican nomination, pointing out that he went farther in the polls than Jeb has despite lacking the advantages of the “Bush” name and massive amounts of campaign funds:
At the height of my campaign I was in first place at 24 percent. Even when I left the race I was in third place at 14 percent. Who am I? A guy who ran a pizza company and had a successful corporate career before hosting a talk show in Atlanta. I was not anonymous but I was hardly famous.
Who is Jeb Bush? He is the former governor of Florida, and he has one of the most famous political last names in America. He has more political money behind him than any candidate in this race with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton. And how is he doing in the polls? The current Real Clear Politics average shows him in fifth place at 5.5 percent.
“If you want to say I had a ‘fall,’ go ahead, I guess. You can’t fall when you’ve never gotten any higher than the floor in the first place, and that’s the state of the Jeb Bush campaign,” Cain continued, adding that he was “proud” of what his campaign accomplished and that “most of the people who run me down have never gotten anywhere near as far as we did.”
Continuing to hammer Jeb’s campaign, Cain writes:
But if I were to give Jeb Bush a piece of advice – not that he probably thinks he needs any from me – it would be to focus on coming up with a rationale for a Jeb Bush presidency. To date, I haven’t heard one that’s got many people very excited. And to judge from the polls, 94.5 percent of Republican primary voters agree with me.
Even if Trump does come back to the pack at some point, there are other candidates much better positioned to pick up support because they’re much more appealing than Mr. Famous Political Name. And really, when you haven’t come anywhere close to what some pizza guy once did, you sound pretty desperate trying to use the pizza guy as your defense.
Cain concludes by dropping the hammer on Jeb, writing: “At least I was once winning. Jeb Bush has been doing nothing but losing throughout this entire campaign. His problem is him.”
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