Herman Cain, embroiled now in the scandal surrounding an alleged 13-year affair with a woman who decided to tell her story publicly largely because she deplored his handling of previous allegations of sexual misconduct, is very likely not having nearly as enjoyable evening as you or I are.
Even if you’re currently undergoing a spinal tap, I’m pretty sure you’re having more fun than Herman Cain is right now.
It seems that one of the least-qualified men ever to have run for the Presidency, a man whose grasp of foreign policy extends only as far as not liking anything Barack Obama’s done, but not understanding why, has the intellect/libido ratio generally thought unwise for public figures. Gloria Cain probably didn’t marry her man for his scintillating intellect, likely didn’t grasp the fervor of his carnal appetites, and, it turns out, didn’t know anything at all, by Herman’s own admission, about his “friend” and recipient of off-hours phone calls and financial aid.
But now she does; the man running for the highest office in a highly complex world as both its military Commander in Chief and its moral face/nerve center has decided, three days after Ginger White broke her silence and provided cell phone records with a “Herman Cain” number he answered directly after a reporter texted it, that it’s time to tell his wife about others in his circle of acquaintance. Maybe especially the attractive female ones to whom he’s been giving of himself, and I’m guessing Gloria reminded him of it a couple of times.
“In retrospect,” Herman Cain says, he probably should have told her that he had a pretty, younger female friend accepting money from him. And if it turns out that he’s taken trips with her and visited her place at night, he’ll probably expand his moral retrospection to include not just fessing up to that, but to anything else that he and White have done together — which, I’m guessing, will then prove to be just as she says it was.
I can’t imagine the hurt, to put it mildly, that Gloria Cain is enduring. My prayers are with her and her family. But a hedge against infidelity would seem to start with an open agreement between spouses that one spouse knows, sees occasionally, and approves of any friends of the opposite sex the other spouse has. That hedge of marital protection is sealed with a commitment never to do anything in the course of one’s day, alone or with anyone else, that you’d feel the need to hide. If you can’t tell your spouse about it, don’t do it. Period.
Herman Cain clearly is a man sexually attracted to women, as I suspect has been the case with all but maybe one or two previous presidents. But if what these women, including Ginger White, say is true about him, he is not a man who likes women. “Liking women” is not the same thing as having a libidinous and aggressive hunger for them. If these allegations are true, then there’s a tragic irony at play: Gloria Cain, Ginger White, and at least four Herman Cain co-workers have all experienced the latter, which has less to do with appreciation of the female form than it does with contempt for women themselves.