Word count of this section, including introduction and conclusion: 245.

All strange things come to an end, and assuming the traditions of American politics over the past half-century hold up, Republicans will pick a nominee who has already run for national office, someone like Mitt Romney (that is to say, Mitt Romney), and Herman Cain’s campaign staff will pack up and head home — or perhaps, in some cases, into courtrooms.

But before that happens, Cain will actually have taught us some of the lessons he claims to be teaching us. This will occur even though no one in politics or journalism takes these lessons seriously — or believes that Cain takes them seriously either.

Cain likes to tell his audience that “the voice of the people is more powerful than the voice of the media.” In fact, he likes to tell them this right after dropping everything for a television interview with Mike Huckabee. But it’s partly true. The words on this page will make little difference to Cain’s electoral chances. His voters have, for the most part, their own media ecosystem. If epistemic closure has hurt Herman Cain, it has also helped him.

Cain also likes to tell his audience that callers to his show went from “concerned” to “frightened” for the nation’s future. This, too, is true. More than any other candidate, Cain has managed to connect to those Americans — yet, unlike Sarah Palin, he has done it by unleashing optimism rather than bitterness. He can articulate a crowd’s worst fears — America is falling apart, weakening in the world, suffering economic carnage — and then reassure everyone that, no worries, we can fix it. If any candidate were able to relate to voters in this way and have a clue what he or she was talking about (there, in Cain’s case, is the rub), that person would be unstoppable.

Desperate people tend to latch onto sudden redeemers, but those sudden redeemers usually fade away pretty fast. (Even Rick Perry, with all his strength on the ground, may suffer that fate.) For all his mistakes, for all the many preposterous flubs, Herman Cain has stuck around for a remarkably long time.

And in the first two national polls that were conducted after the sexual-harassment scandal broke, Cain was still looking strong, running right up at the top with Romney.

Awww shucky ducky now.