Herman Cain on Fox News: Obama Voters Were 'Misled'

Fox may have gotten rid of Dick Morris but with the hire of Herman Cain, it looks like we’ll still have plenty of wacky punditry to laugh at for the foreseeable future. In fact, Cain's first appearance on The O’Reilly Factor tonight elicited the kind of O'Reilly response that I previously thought only attached to Morris: Oh, Come On. But that’s what Bill O’Reilly said when Cain argued that the reason President Obama is so popular is because “51% of the voters were misled enough to vote for him.”

The Cain segment was one of several O’Reilly devoted to his current fixation: how the country is going to hell in a  handout-basket. Apparently, Cain didn’t get that memo. But, it’s more than a little ridiculous (not to mention disrespectful) to argue that Americans have been bamboozled into electing and liking a president.

So I had to agree with and even applaud O’Reilly’s candor when, after saying, “Oh, come on,” citing the “long, long campaign” plus the “billion dollars” spent by Mitt Romney on advertising, he asked, “I mean, how dumb are we?”

“We are that dumb,” Cain said. Well, not everybody, he granted. Presumably, he meant the 49% who didn’t vote for Obama were not “that dumb.” But, Cain said, there’s a “severe ignorance problems with the people who are so mesmerized by his popularity that they are not looking at the facts.”

What facts are we missing? I’m not sure. Maybe that we don’t have a real leader. Cain opened the discussion by saying that he thinks the biggest problem facing the country is “a deficiency of leadership.” We have a “politician” and not a leader in the White House, Cain opined. Any doubt about whom Cain had in mind as the right kind of leader?

Paraphrasing Martin Luther King, Cain said, “’There is nothing more dangerous than serious ignorance.’ And that’s what we have. And he (Obama) gets away with it.” Apparently, ignorance about foreign countries while you're running for president doesn't count.

But fear not, Foxies. Cain is “cautiously optimistic.” Why? Because we’re going to have four years of economic suffering and that will cause people to “wake up.” Assuming of course, they’re not further bamboozled.

But that brought O’Reilly back to handout hell (although he had temporarily diverged to the woes of public education and “machines taking over peoples’ lives”). “Maybe that’s the wake up call,” O’Reilly said. But he insisted there’s a mentality of it’s “not what we earn, but what we’re gonna get” that O’Reilly feels certain has infused the country.

Cain reiterated that after four years of suffering, people will wake up.

O’Reilly was not so sure. He noted that even after the payroll tax cut expired and people’s taxes went up, Obama’s approval rating did not go down.

I doubt that Cain will do anything to change that.

With all this talk of what ails the country and the suggestions of “makers and takers,” O’Reilly, along with most of his Fox News hosts, steadfastly ignore the plight of the working poor.  As the Working Poor Families Project reported in a recent brief:

While the U.S. economy has shown some signs of recovery—the U.S. unemployment rate has dipped below
8 percent from 10 percent three years ago—the economic outlook for many working families is bleak. New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the number of low- income working families in the United States increased to 10.4 million in 2011, up from 10.2 million a year earlier.2 This means that nearly one third of all working families— 32 percent—may not have enough money to meet basic needs. At the same time, inequality among working families is increasing, as higher-income families receive a larger share of income relative to families at the bottom of the income distribution.

If O’Reilly, Cain and their "leaders" really think that the solution is to cut taxes, cut benefits and tell these folks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps – then I think they may be whining about how dumb and lazy we are right through another Democratic administration.