Cain vs. Obama, Man vs. Boy

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN “HOPE AND CHANGE” AND HARD WORK?

by Paul R. Hollrah, 2011

(Dec. 14, 2011) — During the 2008 General Election campaign, it was almost surreal to hear liberals and Democrats question whether Sarah Palin had the experience and the qualifications necessary to assume the presidency.  They questioned the qualifications of a woman who had served as a school board member, a mayor, as head of the natural resources division of the largest energy-producing state in the nation, and as a highly successful governor with an approval rating greater than 75%.  Yet, they left unquestioned and unchallenged the candidate at the top of their own ticket… the most unqualified man ever to seek the presidency, a dedicated Marxist with no appreciation for the capitalist system, a man-child who had never managed so much as a sidewalk lemonade stand.

Nevertheless, those on the left who overdosed on the notion of “hope and change,” while having not the foggiest notion of what “hope and change” their candidate would inflict on the greatest, freest, most prosperous nation on Earth, elected him to lead our country.

But while the 2008 comparison pitted a highly competent conservative woman from Alaska against an incompetent and inexperienced black man from Hawaii who has shown absolutely no capacity for leadership during his 33 months in office, the candidacy of Herman Cain, a mature and successful black business executive, would have been the Democrats’ worst nightmare in 2012.  So, while Cain has “suspended” his campaign for the 2012 GOP nomination because of repeated charges of marital infidelity, let’s compare the two: Cain vs. Obama, man vs. boy.

Barack Obama claims to have been born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961.  In June 1963, a year after Obama’s father abandoned him to attend Harvard University, Herman Cain graduated from Archer High School in Atlanta.  He was a member of the school band, the Senior Honor Society, the Student Council, and the Explorer Scouts.  In addition to being Class Salutatorian, he was named “Best All-Around Student” and “Most Likely to Succeed.”

A year later, in 1964, Obama’s mother divorced the senior Obama.  She met and married an Indonesian Muslim named Lolo Soetoro, who adopted Obama and moved his new family to Indonesia in 1967 when Obama was 6 years old.  He was enrolled at the Besuki Public School and the St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic School in Jakarta where school records have him listed as “Barry Soetoro.”  His nationality is listed as “Indonesian,” and his religion as “Muslim.”

Meanwhile, in the same year that 6-year-old Obama was settling into his new home in Indonesia, Herman Cain was graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta with a degree in mathematics.  Shortly after graduating from Morehouse, he was hired by the U.S. Navy where he worked as a civilian mathematician on projects related to missile ballistics (and yes, that would qualify him as a rocket scientist).  During his employment with the Navy he attended Purdue University, graduating in 1971 with a master’s degree in computer science.  After receiving his advanced degree he left the Navy and joined the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta as a business analyst.

While Cain was returning to Atlanta in 1971, ten-year-old Obama was returning to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham.  In Honolulu he attended a private college prep school, Punahou, from the 5^th grade through the 12^th.  He graduated from Punahou in 1979 and enrolled at Occidental College in Los Angeles.  Little is known about his student performance at Punahou or whether he attended Occidental as a U.S. citizen or as an Indonesian foreign exchange student.  All of those records have been sealed from public view under Executive Order 13489.

In 1977, while Obama was preparing to enter his junior year at Punahou, Cain resigned from Coca-Cola to accept a position with the Pillsbury Company.  Then, in 1980, at a time when Obama claims to have been “still drinking and doing drugs, just going through the motions,” Herman Cain was named Vice President of Corporate Systems and Services at Pillsbury, one of the country’s largest conglomerates.

In 1981, a year after Cain became a senior executive at Pillsbury, Obama transferred from Occidental to Columbia University.  In his book, Dreams from My Father, he described his first summer in New York in great detail.  However, speaking at a 2008 fundraiser in San Francisco he inadvertently confessed to having spent a major portion of the summer of 1981 in Indonesia, India, and Pakistan.  The story told in his memoir is untrue.  Obama claims to have graduated from Columbia with a B.A. in political science in June 1983 and spent the following two years working in the private sector in New York.  However, little is known about that period of his life.

Meanwhile, as Obama was studying at Columbia, Herman Cain resigned his senior position at Pillsbury to become a burger-flipper in Pillsbury’s Burger King subsidiary, learning the fast-food business from the ground up.  Nine months later he was given responsibility for 400 Burger King restaurants in the Philadelphia region.  Under his stewardship the Philadelphia region went from being Burger King’s least profitable region to its most profitable region in just three years.

Then, in 1985, while Herman Cain was achieving fame and fortune as a specialist in corporate turnarounds, singlehandedly creating and saving tens of thousands of jobs, Obama was deciding to become a “community organizer.”  As he describes his decision in Dreams from My Father, “There wasn’t much detail to the idea; I didn’t know anyone (who made) a living that way.”  When classmates asked what a community organizer did, he couldn’t answer directly.  “Instead,” he wrote, “I’d pronounce on the need for change.  Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds…”  He goes on to explain, nonsensically, that “Organizers didn’t make any money; their poverty was proof of their integrity.”

In 1986, a year after Obama left New York to become a professional rabble-rouser in Chicago, Pillsbury appointed Cain to the presidency of its near-bankrupt subsidiary, Godfather’s Pizza, a chain of 911 restaurants which, in 1984, generated $365 million in sales.  Under his guidance, Godfather’s returned to profitability in just 14 months, and two years later, in 1988, he led a group of investors in a friendly buyout of the company from Pillsbury.  Once the spin-off from

Pillsbury was complete, Cain was named president and CEO of the newly-independent chain.

But as spectacular as Cain’s corporate rescue efforts might have been, Obama was working his own financial miracles, but on a smaller scale.  In Chicago, where he worked as a “community organizer” from June 1985 to May 1988, he earned an annual salary of $10,000, plus $2,000 car allowance.  Then, in mid-1988, just 7 years after completing an around-the-world trip to India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, and after working as a community organizer for 3 years at less than minimum wage, he traveled to Europe for 3 weeks and on to Kenya for a 5-week family reunion.

Upon returning from Kenya in late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School… again, on someone else’s dollar.  After just one year he was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and in his second year, without having published a single scholarly essay on any aspect of the law, he was elected president of the Law Review.  Upon receiving his law degree in 1991, he returned to Chicago where he entered the practice of law.  Among his clients was the Chicago chapter of ACORN, the Democratic Party’s most corrupt election fraud constituency.

In 1996, Obama ran for a seat in the Illinois state senate, launching his political career in the home of former Weather Underground terrorist bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.  And when he attracted several Democrat primary opponents, including then-incumbent Senator Alice Palmer, he had all of his primary opponents stricken from the ballot on technicalities.

While Obama was on the move from Chicago to Springfield to take his seat in the legislature, Herman Cain moved to Washington, DC to become CEO of the National Restaurant Association, the principal trade association of the restaurant industry, which employs some 12.8 million people in more than 950,000 locations, and with revenues of more than $600 billion.  In 1992, Cain became a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, serving as chairman from January 1995 until August 1996 when he resigned to enter the political arena.  Between 1992 and 2008, while Obama was clawing his way through the slimy underbelly of Chicago Democratic Party politics, Cain served on numerous corporate boards, including directorships at AGCO, Inc., Aquila, Inc., Nabisco, Reader’s Digest, and Whirlpool.

In 2002, after just six years in the Illinois State Senate, during which time he gained a reputation for frequently voting “present” on controversial issues that may later prove difficult to explain, Obama began commissioning polls to assess his chances of being elected to the U.S. Senate.  He was elected to the Senate in November 2004, whereupon he launched immediately into a campaign for the presidency.  The rest is history.

Comparing the life accomplishments of the two men there is no doubt that Cain was, and is, far more qualified to serve as President of the United States.  He will be sorely missed.  So why do liberals and Democrats question Cain’s qualifications to lead our nation?  We can only assume that because Cain is who and what he is, because he is the antithesis of everything Democrats demand a black man must be, he puts the lie to everything that liberals and Democrats stand for.  Without relying on social programs such as affirmative action, Cain has claimed his share of the American Dream through hard work and diligence.  As the 2012 election year approaches, it is clear to almost everyone that it’s time to take the matches out of the hands of this dangerous and incompetent fool, Barack Obama, before the entire universe goes up in flames.

 phollrah@yahoo.com