Herman Cain Still Exists

And I continue to have inadequately informed opinions about what that means.

I keep hearing that nobody really knows who his advisors are, but I'm not really sure what that means. What exactly is "the Cain campaign." If you try to call them...does anybody answer the phone? Who's doing the fundraising? Are any of these people professionals? I find the idea that they might not be intriguing. Obviously, there's an entire industry built up around taking dim-but-likable Republican governors and grooming them for national campaigns. Has Herman Cain been denied this resource by the powers that be? Or has he rejected it? If he has rejected it, is it because he's crazy or is it because he has no actual interest in winning the nomination? And then it makes me wonder about how the process works for other candidates. I mean, what would George W. Bush's tax plan looked like if he had been forced to come up with one on his own with the help of a guy he knew who had a degree in accounting? Very possibly much more rational than the 9-9-9 plan, but mostly it's just a ludicrous scenario. So much of the way modern politics works is based on the idea of the candidate as a product, manufactured and sold to us by a larger organization.

Or maybe Herman Cain has exactly the same set of organizational resources that any candidate would be expected to have at this point, but you just can't control a guy who's determined to give his opinions on "Ubeki-beki-beki-stan," any more than you can make Sarah Palin anything but Sarah Palin. Except I secretly kind of admire the Ubeki-beki-beki-stan line...since it's the only thing I know about Herman Cain's foreign policy views, I choose to believe it's his way of expressing his belief in a profound refocusing of the agenda on purely domestic matters.