Don't Count Cain Out

I didn't see the presser last night that the twitter machine dubbed the #CainWreck. The consensus was this spelled the ultimate fail for the Cain campaign. But I'm still not ready to write him off so quickly.

The man is brazen. He lies with aplomb. I watched Cain's interview with Jon Karl earlier in the day and he didn't look like a guy ready to quit. And he made one point that convinced me he's still in it to win it. His name recognition has gone to 11. Or as he put it, "99.9, like Ivory Soap okay?" As the old saw goes, no such thing as bad publicity as long as they spell your name right.

He clearly thinks he can ride this scandal out. I'm not sure he's wrong. Certainly, Cain has a savvy digital team.

Instead of the most recent news report popping up at the top of search results on Wednesday, the campaign for the Republican presidential candidate paid for search results to produce an ad with links to a new website, www.CainTruth.com, devoted to defending Mr. Cain and telling his side of the story.

Promising to help “bypass the media filter,” the new website’s banner headline reads: “Get The Truth About Herman Cain.” One of the posts, published on Wednesday, is titled: “Media obsessed with nonsense; the voters and I are not.” In the post, Mr. Cain explains that he is a “serious person” and that he is not going to abide by the rules that the media sets on how you have to play.

He's winning the social media. He "added 15,000 new Facebook fans last week, six times as fast as Mr. Romney." Even if half of those are lefties looking for snark fodder, it's still impressive. And he's blitzing Google Ads and twitter today with his "999K on Nov. 9 for Iowa" internet fundraiser.

In these jaded times, not sure what number of victims it takes before Cain hits the critical limit of cognitive dissonance in his base, but I don't think he's hit it yet. By all appearances, he doesn't think so either.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]