Herman Cain: The accusations mount

“It’s just getting worse for Herman Cain,” said Rod Dreher in TheAmericanConservative.com. The number of women accusing the surprise front-runner in the Republican presidential race of sexual harassment keeps growing, and now those charges have “a name and a face.” This week, Sharon Bialek, 50, accused Cain of assaulting her during his tenure as head of the National Restaurant Association. Bialek claims that when she met with Cain about possible employment, he bought her drinks and dinner, then put his hand up her skirt and said, “You want a job, right?” Cain has heatedly denied Bialek’s story, said Jonathan Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com, insisting he doesn’t “remember knowing” her, and calling her story “totally fabricated.” His campaign said Bialek had declared bankruptcy twice, had a shaky employment history, and was now seeking financial gain. That might satisfy his die-hard Tea Party supporters for now, but Cain’s “already slim chances of winning the nomination have been lowered considerably.”

Maybe so, said Chris Cillizza in WashingtonPost.com, but it’s worth noting that Cain’s poll numbers have actually improved among GOP voters since harassment charges first began to surface. Cain supporters are clinging to the idea that there’s a conspiracy between “establishment Republicans and the national news media to bring him down.” Bialek herself is a conservative Republican, said Steve Kornacki in Salon.com. But the Cain campaign has sneeringly noted that her attorney is “activist celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred”—a much-despised figure on the Right. Now that he’s spinning Bialek’s charges as the work of “the Democrat machine,” Cain “just might continue defying gravity.”

We conservatives need to be consistent, said William Bennett in CNN.com. Those of us who insisted back in the 1990s that Bill Clinton’s womanizing and lying were relevant to his job as president can’t now give Cain a pass because he’s a Republican. With at least four women making allegations, Cain can’t argue anymore that this is “a witch hunt or a lynching.” I fully understand the revulsion at the media frenzy over these charges, said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com. Still, I must admit being dismayed that some fellow conservatives are now saying that if Cain—a married man and minister—made a few passes at women, it’s no big deal. It’s liberals who excuse “repugnant sexual behavior” in Democratic politicians. We conservatives are supposed to be “the folks who talk about how character matters.”

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