The false hope of Herman Cain

For an activity that nominally purports to concern itself with leadership, politics is essentially a game of tail-chasing. In a two-party system, or more accurately, a bifactional single-party system of the sort we suffer here in the United States, winning national elections is usually considered to rely upon slicing off a critical two percent from the least-committed, least-principled, most moderate portion of the other faction's supporters. Since the winner of the previous election succeeded in claiming critical center, it is customary for the losing party's next candidate to in some way mimic the previous winner in an attempt to reclaim the crucial minority.

So, it should come as no surprise that after having been ambushed by Barack Obama's unexpected defeat of an uncharacteristically inept campaign by Hillary Clinton, some Republicans have decided that they need a "magic negro" of their own.