Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

For a Republican Party that has spent the better part of its presidential campaign proving that most of its candidates are not smarter than a fifth grader, the real scandal around frontrunner-of-the-moment Herman Cain is not what he knows. It’s what he doesn’t know.

China, for example. Lost in the wave of contradictory statements about his personal behavior was something Cain said a few days ago about the Asian powerhouse.

China, said Cain with his clueless urgency, is “trying to develop nuclear capability.” Anyone who is gobsmacked by this category five level of ignorance concerning a country that has had nuclear weapons for more than 45 years has not been paying attention. Cain makes Sarah Palin, with her eagle-eyed view of Russia from Alaska, sound like a Council of Foreign Relations scholar on a gasbag high.

The clowns have finally taken over the circus, and I mean this with all due respect to those who labor with painted faces and oversized shoes. The party that got itself into a fever over Barack Obama’s imaginary Kenyan birth, and briefly elevated Donald Trump, the main purveyor of that invention, to its front ranks, is now overwhelmed by its own nonsense.



Herman Cain was never — and will never be — a serious candidate. He’s a vanity candidate who got into the race to boost his income as a motivational speaker. And lo, because he can speak, and people like Governor Rick Perry cannot string noun, verb and object together in a coherent fashion, he looks superior by comparison.

As evidenced by his year on the stump, Cain has proved that he knows almost nothing about American life beyond burgers and pizzas, and even less about the larger world.

But Cain is not the problem. It’s his party. Cain gets away with saying that we should have a moat along the Mexican border filled with alligators because there is no reality cop on the Republican beat.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Consider Newt Gingrich, something I suspect many Republicans will now start doing as Cain craters. Gingrich fancies himself as the intellectual among high-office aspirants on the right, albeit a grumpy one. Yet he spent much of his early campaign talking about the nonexistent danger of Shariah law in the United States. In March, when President Obama gave the O.K. for American air support to save lives and oust Muammar el-Qaddafi, Gingrich said it would prove to be one of the worst foreign policy blunders in his lifetime.

Or look for just a moment at Rick Santorum, a man who is obsessed with other people’s sex lives. Last month, this former senator said if he were president he’d wage a campaign against “the dangers of contraception.” He’s serious. “It’s not O.K.,” he said. “It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

The former Iowa frontrunner, Rep. Michele Bachmann, thinks the poor should pay more taxes, and that vaccines against cervical cancer may cause mental retardation. I think she gets her information from a guy living in a van down by the river. On the eve of the last Republican debate, Politifact, the nonpartisan referee, rated 14 of her 36 major policy statements as false. And 9 of those 14 were given the “pants on fire” lie designation.

While the nation begs for solutions to the troubles of a hurting and diminishing middle class, Republicans have been talking about whether Mormonism is a cult, and how many Mexicans they can kill with Cain’s alligators. In the process of trying to delegitimize Obama, they have done the same to themselves.

More than ever, the public feels disconnected from the political process. They feel like it’s an inside game, and money always wins. They despise a Congress that fiddles with votes to keep “In God We Trust” as a national motto and rails against a nonexistent rule to regulate dust, but will do nothing to forward funds to repair a bridge. In the last CBS/New York Times poll, Congressional approval was 9 percent. The only surprise was that it was so high.

It does not matter if the sexual harassment story about Herm Cain the restaurant lobbyist came from a plant by Rick Perry or from Bart Simpson. What Cain did after hours is not a worthy discussion because Cain is not a worthy candidate. He should run for something — anything — and study the globe for 20 minutes before assuming he can be president. In the meantime, Republicans have the frontrunner they deserve.

The public already knows the real scandal: our broken politics. On Sunday, in case we need reminding, the disgraced criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff will be on “60 Minutes” giving a little tutorial about life in the nation’s capital. He had 100 congressmen in his pocket, he explains. “We owned them.”

And as long as the political class focuses on the happy-hour antics of a pizza man, nothing will change but the name of the lobbyist counting congressmen in his corral.