It’s Thursday, December 1st, 2011….but before we begin, a few brief thoughts on what we’ll term the Great Cainwreck.

Whether Herman knows it or not, the Cain Train derailed the moment he opened his mouth in response to the first question regarding the initial accusation of sexual harrassment; and the majority of the damage was self-inflicted.  From his inexplicably contradictory responses to the incendiary allegations his campaign KNEW would be forthcoming to an understanding of foreign policy rivaling Hank “Capsize” Johnson’s command of geology, Cain’s campaign to date can rightly be described as either a glorified book tour or the 2012 political season’s version of Amateur Hour.

We’ll even concede, particularly given the paucity of the candidate’s knowledge and depth on a number of issues, the Cain Train was likely headed off the tracks with or without the sexual innuendo heaped upon it.

But the fact remains none of these charges would stand up in a civil action, let alone a court of criminal law.  And it’s this aspect of the Great Cainwreck that disturbs us the most.  As Jon Huntsman suggests in Dan Henninger’s commentary below, given the MSM gauntlet of character assassination Republican (and ONLY Republican) presidential candidates must endure, one must indeed be more than a little nuts to seek the top spot on the GOP ticket.

Had B. Hussein Obama’s character and background been subject to dissection rather than dissimulation, he’d still be living in Chicago.  Remember, John McCain was the darling of the Left….right up until he won the nomination.  It’s not fair, it’s not right and, most importantly, it’s not good for America.

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First up, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger suggests a way to encourage the best and brightest to once more seek the highest office in the land:

Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Rooms?

The campaign-finance laws have made the presidential selection process a self-destructive mess. Eliminate the limits on individual donations.

In what all say is an “historic” election, the GOP is fielding its B team while the A team sits in the locker room. Since when does that win the big games?

Mitt Romney, stuck forever at 25%, has been a front-runner out of a Henny Youngman joke. Take my candidate—please. Gov. Romney has been such a front-runner that virtually any new face in the race momentarily catches him—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry and now even an old face, Newt Gingrich.

The question asked everywhere is, Why is this the field? How did it come to this? Desperate questions bring desperate answers, such that I have been overheard mumbling of late: “Maybe it’s time to bring back the smoke-filled rooms.”

This was the nearly mythical system of selection in which party leaders and party bosses gathered over cigars, bourbon and branch to pick a candidate “who could win.” The most famous smoke-filled room pick was William McKinley, anointed for the 1896 election by Ohio kingmaker Mark Hanna (though in fact Hanna got McKinley nominated over the opposition of GOP party bosses).

While I merely grumbled, my former Wall Street Journal colleague Robert W. Merry explicitly wrote “Bring Back Those Smoke-Filled Rooms” last month on the website of the National Interest magazine, which he edits. Notwithstanding distaste for the politicians picking candidates, he wrote, “consider the dangers inherent in our system now, when candidates emerge based on their own judgment of their overwhelming talents and virtues, rather than those of their political peers, and when the vetting process has been truncated to a point where it relies on happenstance to save the system from people nobody really knows and who may be hiding serious flaws”—he was writing about Herman Cain—”that add up to political liabilities. It was a pretty good system we had in the old days.”

Notwithstanding that smoke-filled rooms are banned everywhere now, a serious problem remains: The refusal today of the best candidates to answer the call. Paul Ryan, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush were all heavily recruited by insiders and donors to get in the race. No dice.

Against this, one might argue that the Republicans merely are having bad luck with the election cycle. The off-year elections produced some of the best GOP politicians in years, but none are ready for 2012. The list includes Gov. Christie obviously but also Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Bob McDonnell of Virginia or GOP Senate freshmen Rob Portman of Ohio, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, and Marco Rubio of Florida.

But what if 2016 arrives, and they still won’t run? Jon Huntsman says you have to be more than a little “nuts” to run for president. A willing Mitch Daniels dropped out at his family’s insistence. And no wonder. Instead of a candidate-vetting process carried out quietly by party leaders, it’s now done randomly by a Hydra-headed national media. Any flaw or past stumble is metastasized into a public nightmare for spouses and children. So they say No. In their place we get mysterious candidates who have wandered in from Nowhere Land or obscure state senate seats.

A system that drives out the best over time will drive down the country. There has to be a better way.

There is: Dismantle the presidential campaign-finance laws. For anyone normal, the federal fund-raising limitations are an overwhelming deterrent to running for the presidency. They are smothering good candidates in the crib.

No fiddling at the margins here. The solution is to go radical: Let any individual donor give as much money as he or she wants to any candidate—with full, immediate public disclosure.

Free yourself of the siren song of full public financing. It’s not going to happen. Great cost is now part of the DNA of presidential campaigns, which have entered an era of unstoppably proliferating, for-profit media platforms.

Raising tens of millions of dollars in the small, individual giving limit of $2,400, often with daily phone calls from the candidates themselves, is exhausting and humiliating. Jack Kemp, who made a run in 1988, and Colin Powell reportedly refused to do it. The system is terrifying for anyone of modest means. A serious, informed candidate like Tim Pawlenty quits rather than risk massive personal debt. Why are there so many “debates” now? Because they are little more than a free-media chance to drive more fund raising.

These laws have broken the link between candidates and experienced party leaders who do know the difference between a long-haul competitor and the flavor of the week. Indeed, the parties are now little more than a vehicle to get on the ballot.

The reformers’ great horror is candidacies funded and “controlled” by a George Soros from the left or you-know-who from the right. Nonsense. Available research—and a moment’s thought—suggests this fear is wildly overblown. The reformers should wake up and smell the 21st century’s inescapable transparency. The 1% have nowhere to hide.

The current presidential-selection process is a self-destructive mess, for both parties. Make the fund raising simpler. Eliminate limits on individual donations. Get the parties back in the game. Give better candidates a chance to compete. Save a country in peril. What more could you want?

How ’bout less Obama….say about four years less?!?

And since we mentioned formerly-obscure state senators uniquely unfit for higher office, remember all the patent prevarication promising this President’s Administration to be the most transparent in history?  The Weekly Standard‘s Mark Hemingway does:

Obama Admin Seals Records of Murdered Border Patrol Agent Implicated in Fast and Furious

And to think that Attorney General Eric Holder is getting testyabout congressional calls for his resignation. After all, the Justice Department has nothing to hide, right?

The Obama Administration has abruptly sealed court records containing alarming details of how Mexican drug smugglers murdered a U.S. Border patrol agent with a gun connected to a failed federal experiment that allowed firearms to be smuggled into Mexico.

This means information will now be kept from the public as well as the media. Could this be a cover-up on the part of the “most transparent” administration in history? After all, the rifle used to kill the federal agent (Brian Terry) last December in Arizona’s Peck Canyon was part of the now infamous Operation Fast and Furious. Conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the disastrous scheme allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels.

….The murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent is related to the Justice Department willingly turning over thousands of guns to Mexican criminal gangs, and Obama administration is hiding information about his death from the public. Amazing.

Not amazing….just Obama.

Next up, two commentaries on the race for the GOP nod; first, Thomas Sowell questions whether certain pundits fully grasp the….

Lessons of History?

It used to be common for people to urge us to learn “the lessons of history.” But history gets much less attention these days and, if there are any lessons that we are offered, they are more likely to be the lessons from current polls or the lessons of political correctness. Even among those who still invoke the lessons of history, some read those lessons very differently from others.

Talk show host Michael Medved, for example, apparently thinks the Republicans need a centrist presidential candidate in 2012. He said, “Most political battles are won by seizing the center.” Moreover, he added: “Anyone who believes otherwise ignores the electoral experience of the last 50 years.”

But just when did Ronald Reagan, with his two landslide election victories, “seize the center”? For that matter, when did Franklin D. Roosevelt, with a record four consecutive presidential election victories, “seize the center”?

There have been a long string of Republican presidential candidates who seized the center — and lost elections. Thomas E. Dewey, for example, seized the center against Harry Truman in 1948. Even though Truman was so unpopular at the outset that the “New Republic” magazine urged him not to run, and polls consistently had Dewey ahead, Truman clearly stood for something — and for months he battled for what he stood for.

That turned out to be enough to beat Dewey, who simply stood in the center.

It is very doubtful that most of the people who voted for Harry Truman agreed with him on all the things he stood for. But they knew he stood for something, and they agreed with enough of it to put him back in the White House.

It is equally doubtful that most of the people who voted for Ronald Reagan in his two landslide victories agreed with all his positions. But they agreed with enough of them to put him in the White House to replace Jimmy Carter, who stood in the center, even if it was only a center of confusion.

President Gerald Ford, after narrowly beating off a rare challenge by Ronald Reagan to a sitting president of his own party, seized the center in the general election — and lost to an initially almost totally unknown governor from Georgia.

President George H.W. Bush, after initially winning election by coming across as another Ronald Reagan, with his “Read my lips, no new taxes” speech, turned “kinder and gentler” — to everyone except the taxpayers — once he was in office. In other ways as well, he seized the center. And lost to another unknown governor.

More recently, we have seen two more Republican candidates who seized the center — Senators Bob Dole in 1996 and John McCain in 2008 — go down to defeat, McCain at the hands of a man that most people had never even heard of, just three years earlier.

Michael Medved, however, reads history differently.

To him, Barry Goldwater got clobbered in the 1964 elections because of his strong conservatism. But did his opponent, Lyndon Johnson, seize the center? Johnson was at least as far to the left as Goldwater was to the right. And Goldwater scared the daylights out of people with the way he expressed himself, especially on foreign policy, where he came across as reckless.

On a personal note, I wrote a two-line verse that year, titled “The Goldwater Administration”:

Fifteen minutes of laissez-faire, While the Russian missiles are in the air.

Senator Goldwater was not crazy enough to start a nuclear war. But the way he talked sometimes made it seem as if he were. Ronald Reagan would later be elected and re-elected taking positions essentially the same as those on which Barry Goldwater lost big time. Reagan was simply a lot better at articulating his beliefs.

Michael Medved uses the 2008 defeat of Tea Party candidates for the Senate, in three states where Democrats were vulnerable, as another argument against those who do not court the center. But these were candidates whose political ineptness was the problem, not conservatism.

Candidates should certainly reach out to a broad electorate. But the question is whether they reach out by promoting their own principles to others or by trying to be all things to all people.

Then there’s this gem from Victor Davis Hanson, courtesy of Jewish World Review….

The Castor Oil Candidate

Nominating Mitt Romney is sort of like taking grandma’s castor oil. Republicans are dreading the thought of downing their unpleasant-tasting medicine but worry that sooner or later they will have to.

By any logical political calculus, the former Massachusetts governor is an ideal presidential candidate. Ramrod straight, fit and well-educated, he knows all sorts of facts and figures and comes across like a cinematic chief executive.

At any other time, an informed technocrat like Romney would seem a dream candidate. Yet in the run-up to this election, the people are completely turned off by Washington’s so-called experts, such as Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Attorney General Eric Holder — and increasingly Barack Obama himself.

As a former governor and presidential candidate, Romney has been fully vetted. In these racy times, Mormonism is viewed as more a guarantee of a candidate’s past probity than a political liability. So there is little chance in late October 2012 that a blonde accuser will appear out of Romney’s past, or that the New York Times will uncover a long-ago DUI charge.

The calculating Republican establishment believes Romney has enough crossover appeal to independents to beat a shaky Obama. It still has nightmares of Tea Party senatorial candidates Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, whose 2010 primary victories led to inept campaigns and Republican losses in the general elections in Nevada and Delaware.

Although conservatives dub Romney a flip-flopper for changing positions on abortion, gun control and health care, the base knew all about those old reversals in 2008, when it nonetheless praised Romney as the only conservative alternative to maverick moderate John McCain. Apparently the party has moved to the right since then. Tea Partiers worry that, once in office, a moderate President Romney would prove a reach-out centrist — spending borrowed money like George W. Bush did on No Child Left Behind or the Medicare prescription drug benefit, thereby ruining for good the now-suspect Republican brand of fiscal sobriety.

The result of those worries is that Romney has become the process-of-elimination candidate. The Hamlet-like governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, hemmed and hawed and bowed out, as most knew he would. The charismatic and controversial Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin decided they were making too much money to go through another nasty political race.

If finger-pointing magnate Donald Trump was going to bet a campaign on Obama’s reluctance to disclose official documents, he would have done better to demand the release of the president’s mysteriously secret college transcripts and medical records rather than his birth certificate. In the debates, the audiences liked what former Sen. Rick Santorum had to say, regretting only that it came out of the mouth of Rick Santorum.

Rep. Michele Bachmann once soared as the anti-Romney and then crashed when 90 percent of her statements seemed courageous and inspired — but 10 percent sounded kind of weird.

Then came the most promising anti-Romney alternative, job-creating Texas Gov. Rick Perry. He looked as presidential as Romney but immediately proved even more wooden in the debates. His “brain-freeze” moments were made worse by occasional goofy explanations that seemed most un-Texan.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio were always crowd favorites, and they’re certainly hard-charging conservatives. Yet at some point, both realized that their scant years in office were comparable, in theory, to the thin resume of Obama when he entered the presidency clueless.

Rep. Ron Paul’s shrill talk on fiscal sobriety is as refreshing as his 1930s isolationist foreign policy is creepy. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is a sort of weak Romney doppelganger, raising the same paradox that money, looks, polish and moderation this year are cause for suspicion, not reassurance.

Many like businessman Herman Cain’s straight-talking pragmatism. Yet more are worried that he might not know that China is a nuclear power, or that we recently joined the British and French in bombing Libya. By now, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich knows almost everything about everything. But lots of Newt’s original — and now abandoned — positions were as liberal as Romney’s. And not all that long ago, he seemed as brilliant and glib — and recklessly self-destructive — as his contemporary and antagonist, Bill Clinton.

To beat an ever-more-vulnerable Obama, Republicans keep coming back to someone who resembles a Romney, with strengths in just those areas where Obama is so demonstrably weak: prior executive experience as a governor, success in and intimacy with the private sector, a past fully vetted, and an unambiguous belief in the exceptional history and future of the United States.

In short, if Republicans are happy in theory that Mitt Romney could probably beat Obama, they seem just as unhappy in fact that first they have to nominate him.

A pre-sale case of buyer’s remorse which won’t be assuaged by Mitt’s rather testy non-answers and repeated “It’s all in my book….only $29.95!” references in this interview with Bret Baier:

Turning to the Delta House Memorial “Don’t Know Much About History” segment….

Does Obama Know the Difference between Great Britain and England?

It is gratifying to see President Barack Obama condemn the disgraceful storming of the British Embassy in Tehran by thugs acting at the behest of the Iranian regime. After all, Obama has been notoriously slow in the past to criticise the brutal actions of the Iranian government after initially extending the hand of friendship to it. But did he really need to make another embarrassing foreign policy gaffe while doing so?

In a press conference this evening, the president referred in stumbling fashion to the “English Embassy” in Iran instead of the British Embassy. One can only imagine the kind of howls of derision that would greet any presidential contender if that kind of basic error were made before, say, the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. You can watch the video above.

In case the president is unaware, England forms part of Great Britain, which also includes Scotland and Wales, though not Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. There is no such thing as an “English” embassy anywhere in the world, and there hasn’t been one for several centuries.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this latest slip-up by President Obama. After all he recently described France as America’s closest ally, and famously declared that he has traveled to no less than 57 states. But it would be nice if the leader of the free world bothered to look at a map once in a while, or even paid a visit to the British Embassy in Washington, currently housing the Churchill bust that Mr. Obama unceremoniously threw out of the Oval Office soon after his inauguration.

Imagine the MSM firestorm George W. would have ignited had he made a similar misstatement.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a day with two items confirming the Apocalypse is upon us….

Kidnapper Sues Former Hostages, Says They Broke Promise

And Chafee wonders why his approval rating is lower than The Obamao’s.

Magoo