In dealing with political and business scandals, there’s an old dictum: it’s not the charges leveled against you that are important but how you react to them. Confronted with a story claiming he was accused of sexually harassing female co-workers during his time as head of the National Restaurant Association, Herman Cain has made a series of beginner’s errors.

Rather than taking the Politico story seriously and trying to get out ahead of it, Cain first stonewalled, then (through his campaign staff) accused the media of political bias, and, today, tried to portray himself as a victim of false charges from unnamed women. “It is totally baseless and totally false,” Cain told Fox News. “Never have I ever committed any kind of sexual harassment.” Far from putting an end to the story, Cain’s actions have given it more impetus. His statements so far have raised more questions than they have resolved, and he has virtually demanded that his accusers come forward and give their side of the story.

Bad move!

Ask any expert in crisis management (and every big P.R. firm has one or more). The key to handling a scandal is to be calm and systematic. The first essential is to find out the full scope of what you are facing, however bad it is. Then you have to decide how you are going to react to the story in the full knowledge that whatever you do will spark further media inquiries. Finally, you have to choose how you are going to get out your version of events. As far as I can see, Cain hasn’t done any of these things.

If possible, the basic P.R. strategy should be settled on before the story breaks. In Cain’s case, this should have been doable. Politico appears to have been working on its story for several weeks, and it first approached Cain’s staff for comment ten days before it published the story. That gave Cain ample time to remind himself of what happened at the National Restaurant Association, consult with some of his former colleagues there, brief his campaign staff, and decide upon a course of action. But when Jonathan Martin, a reporter for Politico, approached Cain outside the Washington office of CBS News on Sunday morning and asked him whether he had ever been accused of sexual harassment, the candidate seemed blindsided and refused to answer. On Sunday night, after Politico had published its story, Cain’s spokesman, J.D. Gordon, issued a statement suggesting the liberal media was attacking Cain merely because he is a conservative.

On Monday, when Cain finally addressed the substance, he actually confirmed the gist of Politico’s story, which never claimed the allegations against him were true. It merely said, in its lead paragraph: “(A)t least two female employees” of the National Restaurant Association “complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group” and receiving financial settlements. Cain told Fox News: “If the Restaurant Association did a settlement, I wasn’t even aware of it and I hope it wasn’t for much.” Later in the day, at the National Press Club, he said: “Number one, in all of my over forty years of business experience…I have never sexually harassed anyone. Number two, while at the Restaurant Association I was accused of sexual harassment. Falsely accused, I might add. I was falsely accused of sexual harassment, and when the charges were brought, as the leader of the organization, I recused myself and allowed my general counsel and human resource officer to handle it.”

As I said, this raises more questions than it answers. What did Cain do to offend the two women? If their allegations were baseless, why did the National Restaurant Association pay them what Politico described as five-figure sums? Is it conceivable that Cain’s underlings at the association reached financial settlements with his accusers without telling him? Have any other women made similar accusations against Cain? Did he tell his campaign staff about these charges before he launched his bid for the Presidency? And—most importantly of all—will the unnamed women now come forward to defend themselves?

If Cain had been smarter, if he had gotten and taken some better professional advice from somebody with experience in managing P.R. crises, one can at least imagine how things might have turned out differently. At the start of his campaign, he would have sat down his staff, explained that he was sitting on an unexploded landmine, and asked them to prepare a contingency plan. When Politico’s reporters approached them, his staff could have invited them in for a background briefing and laid out what happened at the National Restaurant Association from his perspective, including some of the incidents at the heart of the charges. If, as Cain claims, the association’s internal investigation largely exonerated him, the campaign could have prevailed upon his former colleagues to make this clear to the reporters. Before the story appeared, the campaign could have made sure it contained an on-the-record statement from Cain explicitly denying that he had ever sexually harassed anybody.

Of course, this all assumes that Cain is telling the truth now, and that he wasn’t guilty of anything beyond making some off-color comments and suggestive remarks. If he isn’t telling the truth—if he used his position of power to pressure co-workers to have sex with him and then had his lawyers buy their silence—he had no business running for President to begin with, and not even the most fiendish P.R. spinmeister could have saved him.

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