Is Herman Cain guilty of sexual misconduct? I wouldn’t be surprised

By David McElroy · November 8, 2011

I’ve never met Herman Cain, so I don’t have any specific reason to have an opinion about recent allegations of sexual misconduct on his part. I’ve been around enough politicians over the last 20 years to recognize patterns and personality types, though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the allegations are true.

Cain might be the victim of dirty tricks in these allegations. The one person I know who personally knows the man speaks very highly of him. But there’s something I’ve learned from watching politicians up close for two decades. The vast majority of them have hidden lusts — for sex or money or control or ego gratification — that come along with the desire for political power.

Why do people run for political office? The standard answer — which any of them would be happy to tell you about themselves, of course — is that they’re just wanting to help the country. They love people and care about their communities. That’s what they say.

If you get them to get real with you, you’ll find that most of them have a personal need for the spotlight, for approval, for attention and for control. Most of them have been successful in some way or other. They’ve developed a love for the control that comes with politics and power. Far too often, that lust for power leads to a desire to take risks in order to control women or others they consider weaker around them, at least for a moment. It’s not universally true, but I’ve seen it over and over again.

If Cain is guilty of making sexually inappropriate advances on these women — such as the latest accuser, whose picture is below — my suspicion is that it wasn’t really about sex. It was about power and control. The same kind of personality that’s attracted to power — that lusts for control over others in big ways — gets its short-term “fixes” from controlling other people in small ways. If a man shows a lust for this kind of power over others, I’ve learned not to trust him — simply because of the things I’ve personally seen in the lives of former clients and others in political circles.

If you’re familiar with narcissistic personality disorder, you know that narcissists (the clinical kind) aren’t really in love with themselves. Their self-esteem is tragically low on the inside and they feed like emotional vampires off of approval from others. (I’m certainly not the first to notice the correlation between politics and clinical narcissism.) Even though they appear strong and confident, they have the same kind of deep, hidden hunger that vampires were said to have.

If you’d like to read extensively about the subject of narcissism, you’ll find a lot of valuable information in “Malignant Self Love — Narcissism Revisited,” which can also be read online here. You can also read more about narcissism and political scandals here, here and here.

Getting back to Cain specifically, I have no idea whether he’s guilty of what he’s accused of, but I do know that it takes a tremendous ego need to run for president when you have no political qualifications. (And let’s be honest. Cain has zero qualifications.) Narcissists tend to be smart, charming and at least somewhat successful. Cain certainly qualifies on those points. It doesn’t make him a narcissist. It doesn’t mean he’s guilty of sexual misconduct. But it does suggest to me that it wouldn’t be surprising.

Many people want to talk about who might be behind the allegations. Is it Democrats trying to sabotage a black conservative who they see as a threat? Is it another Republican campaign trying to sabotage someone who’s suddenly seen as a contender? It could be either of those, theoretically, but if it’s one of them, it’s more likely to be another Republican campaign. Contrary to what some people assume, Democrats would be quite happy if Cain were the Republican nominee, because he would be far easier for Obama to beat.

Beyond that, the question is whether some other campaign is working to bring the allegations out or if someone is purely making things up to hurt Cain. Since the allegations occurred many years ago, we know that there’s no campaign creating the charges out of thin air. It could be that a GOP campaign is working behind the scenes to make sure the charges go public. That wouldn’t surprise me at all — and there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that. If you know that your opponent has been accused of a pattern of this kind of behavior, naturally you want that public. You also don’t want to be the one to publicly do it, so it makes sense to feed information to media people if you have it.

Since the allegations took place long before any political motivation was even possible — and because there were multiple allegations — I suspect there’s a good chance the allegations have at least some substance to them. The fact that it’s to someone else’s advantage for the facts to come out doesn’t automatically mean they’re false.

For me, the bigger issue is the simple fact that we live under a system that attracts narcissists to gain power over us. Think about that. The system that we are taught to love and revere is the biggest source of “narcissistic supply” to thousands of narcissistic men who feed their lusts this way. As long as we have a system that hands out power to people such as this, we’re going to get the same kind of people in office again and again and again.

Is Cain guilty of something? I’d say it’s likely, but I don’t have specific evidence. Are other campaigns working to bring the allegations to light? I’d say it’s likely, but I don’t have specific evidence. Is the majoritarian system always going to bring us this kind of scandal? Absolutely. I’m certain of that.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts