I saw this segment on Fox earlier today and it made me shrug. Then it made me sad. Herman Cain is a great communicator, but he is getting tripped up by the stuff of Republicanism 101. Should abortion be legal? Cain says it should not. But then he says families should decided on their own, and even break the law.
Huh? Abortion is no longer even a state issue, but a family by family issue? How is that not functionally a pro-choice position?
Rick Santorum came on after Cain’s appearance and ripped him like Nellie Cruz jumping on an 11th inning inside fastball. Bachmann piled on too, not that either of them matter much in the big picture. Cain has left an opening for the one top-tier consistently pro-life candidate to hammer him hard, and for Romney to hit him too if he wants to. Neither really needs to do a thing, though, apart from encouraging Cain to spend as much time on the air as possible. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.
Later in the segment, Cain also seems to confuse where right to work laws tend to exist. Discussing his 9-9-9 plan’s “empowerment zones,” he said it’s not fair if one city is a right to work city, while another is a union city. That’s really not where right to work laws live, though. There are 23 right to work states, those laws allowing freedom of choice on union membership having been passed at the state level. Not the city level.
And, under federalism, states do have the right to pass their own laws regarding unions and a whole lot of other matters, as do cities, as long as they don’t conflict with federal law or the Constitution. So there’s that.
Cain isn’t known for poor communication skills. What’s going on here?
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