Herman Cain Dead from Covid-19
The one-time candidate for the GOP presidential nomination is dead at 74.
CNN reports: Herman Cain has died after being hospitalized with Covid-19
Cain tested positive for Covid-19 on June 29 and was hospitalized on July 1 after developing symptoms serious enough to be hospitalized, according to the statement posted on Twitter.
Cain was a co-chair of Black Voices for Trump, and his last public appearance was as one of the surrogates at President Trump’s June 20 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Trump campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh told CNN at the time that Cain did not meet with Trump at the Tulsa rally.
Loss of life to this disease is a tragedy and it is unfortunate that Cain did not appear to treat his chances of infection as seriously as he should have (his age, 74, and status as a cancer survivor were both risk factors).
Whether he contracted the disease at the Tulsa rally or not cannot be known, but hopefully, some will take this as a cautionary tale. Many will only take risks seriously if someone they know (or, at least, are familiar with) is affected.
My condolences to his family and friends in this difficult time.
(I would ask that we not be ghoulish or triumphalist about this news in the comments).
I’m sorry to hear this. His death will be an occasion of great sadness for many people.
Condolences for the loss to his loved ones. This didn’t have to happen – so many have died that we could have saved, so many that were lost due to poor choices and a disease that should have been contained. Their pain is no different from the 150K families who’ve suffered these past few months and should be respected.
I wonder, will this make a dent in MAGA land? Will this hit home that one of theirs has died from the “hoax”? Will anyone reflect on their choices and change….. or will this fall down the conspiracy hole and people spread lies about his passing? The family’s in for a rough time then should QAnon decide to start their nonsense….
It’s likely he lived a pattern of taking few precautions as well as engaging in other risky behavior. So it’s probable he had many opportunities for contagion.
See how Biden takes care of himself. He does take some risks, as he has to in order to run a presidential campaign, but he also seems to minimize those and to take every precaution. His chances for contagion are lower.
R.I.P to Brother Herman. Didn’t know he survived a serious cancer diagnosis in 2006. Im sure he fought hard. Didn’t like his politics but seemed like a likeable guy.
It was inevitable that a high profile Republican would eventually die from covid. He wouldn’t have been my first choice. Or second.
I hope his passing does cause people to reconsider how seriously they take the virus, and I only wish that it had happened sooner, before we let the virus get so out of control.
I hope he was pretty drugged up and didn’t suffer.
I will simply link to my bad-karma inviting comment from the general forum…
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/thursdays-forum-21/#comment-2532195
It bears mentioning that Bill Montgomery, founder of Turning Point USA, the conservative student organization, has also died of the COVID. His co-founder, Charlie Kirk, is an outspoken anti-masker who denies the science.
@Gustopher:
I wouldn’t call him high profile…we were talking about it in our office and several people said, “who is that?”
Louis Gohmert, on the other hand. His death cannot be ugly enough for me.
On the list of “It couldn’t happen to a more deserving person,” he wouldn’t even make the Top 100. Sympathy to his family.
Imagine giving your life for Donald Trump?
I read somewhere that if Social Media had been around in 1978 a shit-load more people would have died in Jonestown. Perhaps all of Cult45?
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: we were asked not to be ghoulish, so I am refraining from listing all the people I want to see die from covid.
I worry that Herman Cain is not high profile enough, and had too many pre-existing conditions to really be a good warning. And he was not in a position where he was making or implementing policy. But maybe enough people who matter will recognize him. We can hope.
I kind of wish Tom Hanks had died. Not because I don’t love Tom Hanks, but because everyone loves Tom Hanks — it would have made the virus real for a lot of people at an early enough stage that it might have saved a lot of lives.
As for Louie Gohmert, the stupidest man in Washington, I wish him a slow and painful recovery followed by someone telling him, in person, that they have tuberculosis. And then he can die from that. After shaking hands with a leper.
Given how Trump’s so-called mind works, I figure on even odds he’ll complain that Mr. Cain won’t get the same funerary honors as Congressman Lewis did.
@Gustopher:
Tom Hanks??? Good god, man. Surely you meant Tom Cruise.
I don’t subscribe to the superstitious belief that we should lie about people once they’re dead. Herman Cain was a two-bit hustler, a fraud, a black man in a racist party whose members despised him for the color of his skin. He died a fool.
Suffice to say that three former presidents will not be eulogizing him.
Adolf Hitler is dead. While I had differences with Herr Hitler, I feel for his family, especially his wife Eva, regrettably also dead, and his close friends the Goebbels family, also dead. Funeral services were performed by Soviet troops pissing on his ashes. Condolences.
People, there is no God, there is no afterlife, and all this ‘speak well of the dead’ bullshit is absurd. Even the pleas of concern for his family are bogus, we have no idea what his family thought of him. They may have popped some Champagne for all we know.
The truth is not altered by death.
@Jim Brown 32: Agreed. I always found him to be an impressive and likable guy, albeit not one I’d want in charge of the nuclear launch codes.
@Gustopher:
Ugh. Please don’t say that.
Would you ever say that about yourself, if you were in his shoes?
@Michael Reynolds: Cain was born a black man in Memphis, Tennessee twenty years before people who looked like him could vote to a cleaning woman and a laborer. He managed to get a degree in mathematics from Morehouse, a masters in computer science from Purdue, and become CEO of a national restaurant chain and head of the national restaurant association. That ain’t too bad.
My guess is that the combination of religiosity and his own success story made the Republican Party appealing. After all, if a man with his origins can make it, any other black child could pull himself up by his bootstraps and do the same.
Of course, the party has been desperate for high-profile black faces for as long as I can remember. So, rather than trying to get him to run for the House of Representatives or the Senate, people were touting him for President. He was way, way over his head in that endeavor. But I don’t think he was particularly hucksterish by politician standards.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: Does anyone not love Tom Hanks?
Covid got real for a lot of people on the day Tom Hanks announced he had it, and basketball basically closed down when Rudy Gobert tested positive. Had they both died, I think our nation would have responded far more aggressively to the virus and a lot of other people would have been saved.
A lot of Americans don’t have empathy unless it hits close to home (as much a defense mechanism right now as a general sociopathy), and celebrities feel close to home.
I would trade Tom Hanks for about a hundred thousand people. There might be other candidates, but I have trouble thinking of anyone else that quite unites the country in feelings of mild general well-being than Tom Hanks.
@Michael Reynolds:
You do know the strength of social taboos, right? Even people who hate the recently deceased will sing their praises.
There was a Mexican politician named Camilo Mouriño. He was lambasted regularly in the press, by opposition parties, for his role in his family’s firm involving government contracts before he entered politics (there was probably no worse ethical violation there than in most government contracts). You know how that is, all innuendo, little evidence, no charges.
Then he died when his government airplane crashed in Mexico City (lots more, and worse, corruption involved in that), and for all the reaction in the press and by opposition parties, you’d think a saint had perished rather than a politician.
Yes, it’s hypocritical, but all too human.
@Kylopod: Yes, if my death could save a hundred thousand or more, absolutely.
At some point I will die from something. I’d rather it not happen soon, but if it could have a very positive impact? Yup, go for it.
(I’ve basically been living in bonus time for the past 10 years since the massive pulmonary embolism anyway…)
@James Joyner:
He went to his death encouraging people to die of the same disease that killed him. He was not only a fraud, but a dangerous one. And he remained in a party that is unmistakably a white supremacist party, and praised our new George Wallace. He was a contemptible man.
@Michael Reynolds:
For the record, I didn’t ask anyone to lie about him. I asked people not to be ghoulish or triumphalist over someone’s death.
Not me. That said, I didn’t hate Herman Cain, and I thought he made a fair carnival barker.
@James Joyner:
Not as bad as some, but he was, in my opinion, borderline nothing more than a conservative entertainment complex guy who tried his hand at running for office, whether we are talking 9-9-9 or Uz-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.
@Gustopher: Tom Hanks might not be a good example for the ones who most need it. For some reason he has become a boogie man to the Qanon folks.
Come now. We know exactly when a majority of the GOP and Trump’s base, will take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously: On January 20th, 2021, when Biden takes office and it becomes his problem to handle.
Then they’ll criticize him for taking time to eat or sleep when he should be dealing with the pandemic he failed to stop years before the virus emerged. They will also blame him personally for each and every death, especially those that took place during Trump’s term.
@Monala: What? Really? I mean, I knew QAnon was crazy, but hating Tom Hanks? What is wrong with those people?
@Gustopher:
For maybe a weekend and then denial would set in. The usual suspects would go back to calling it a hoax or that they died of something else and blaming covid was a libtard plot. Fully 35% of Americans are living in their own reality.
@Monala: @Gustopher:
Hanks is supposed to be one of the ring of pedophiles that Donald Trump is boldly pursuing with an eye to bringing them to justice.
@Steven L. Taylor:
When I die all I ask is that people tell the truth. I have a whole host of fans ready to canonize me in life and I always do my best to knock that down. I don’t want to be remembered as anything other than what I am (well, was). I would have thought the recent iconoclasm of Confederate statues would have taught us the lesson that truth is more important than false praise or unearned respect.
Cain actively sold his people out. He encouraged suicidal behavior. He supported a racist thug. He also sold pizza.
@Gustopher: here you go.
Fact check: Qanon and Tom Hanks
@Kathy:
It’s not a stretch. Arthur Laffer claimed that Obama caused the Great Recession that struck before he even took office, on the grounds that his expected victory crashed the markets. I’m predicting that if/when Biden takes office, a dogma on the right will quickly emerge that the Democrats are what made the pandemic so catastrophic by undermining the GOP’s ability to deal with it–and therefore that they are indeed responsible for all those deaths that occurred while Trump was president.
@Kathy:
Many of the problems of national readiness do date back decades. We had a close call with H1N1 which we basically completely failed at but turned out not to be as deadly as feared.
A friend’s neighbor worked at the CDC at the time, and she described it as “possibly the best dry run for a deadly pandemic that we could have ever hoped for,” and then went on for a bit about how it revealed lots of weaknesses that the exercises they had been using previously failed to.
That was in 2009, and running with an inherited CDC, so I wouldn’t fully blame the Obama administration for the failures to contain H1N1, but learning from those failures was definitely the Obama administration’s responsibility.
There were a lot of lessons that could have and should have been learned from that, and then somehow encased in a protective bureaucracy that would allow them to execute even with the most incompetent leadership at the top.
PPE stockpiles were too low, for instance. Three years into the Trump administration, you want to blame them (and that’s reasonable), but they were also never at the levels needed before then.
The Trump administration then made it so much worse…
@Michael Reynolds: you will be happy to know that when I told my daughter than I regularly interact with one of the authors of the Animorphs series, and she asked what you are like, I told her, “Really, really arrogant. But he’s a good guy with liberal values.”
@Michael Reynolds: I have no expectation or desire to change you, Michael. You keep being the best you you can be, and I’ll be good with that. But you appear to be attacking people like me, who would prefer to notice the passing of a human being as a tragedy, and so I’m going to speak to why I do what I do.
Upthread there’s a comment by @JimBrown32 that says basically “I didn’t like his politics, but he seemed a likable guy” or something like that. I gave it a thumbs-up. The guy pulled off some major accomplishments in his life, and he seemed ok. Yeah, his politics were a problem for me, but that’s not all of a person. I’m sure that pretty much anyone could look at one slice of my own life and declare me a disaster. That’s true of pretty much everyone, I think.
This is a problem for me as much in life as in death. I think you can consider any person and note that there are some aspects of them that you like, and others that you don’t like. A friend once said, “To his dog, Hitler was probably a pretty great guy”.
I’d rather focus, especially once someone passes, on the things I liked about them. I fear for the consequences for my own psyche were I to dwell on everything I didn’t like about every person I ran across. I’ve spent a little bit of time in Bitterhatingland, and I didn’t like my stay. I don’t want to go back.
Somehow though, if I focus on the positive aspects of a person, you want to call it a lie. I object to that. It’s not a lie.
@Jay L Gischer:
He helped Trump kill people. I don’t find that likable.
Everything. SATSQ.
The Q/45 cult has decided that Tom Hanks did not actually have COVID, he was actually on house arrest for being a part of the worldwide child sex cabal, along with Epstein, Bill Clinton, Oprah, Ellen, Lady Gaga, and any other celebrity who has ever criticized Trump.
According to Q, it is known.
😐
@Gustopher: President Obama also oversaw our response to Ebola, which resulted in 12 American cases and 2 deaths. I’d say they learned some things from H1N1. And you can’t forget the budget sequester that the Republicans forced during Obama’s administration, which limited his ability to do things like replenish government stockpiles. Even so, they put together a pandemic playbook and held practice exercises for the incoming administration in order to help them prepare, and were ignored.
@Steven L. Taylor: Fair point. There was a minstrel quality to some of that. I don’t know whether that was a Conservative Entertainment Complex schtick or how he ingratiated himself during his business career.
@James Joyner: @Steven L. Taylor: My take on Cain is that he monetized an earning opportunity with a wink-wink nod nod. There is a market within Conservatism for a black face to parrot their talking points. Malcolm X has a famous interview where he describes it.
Cain did so in a way where I feel he signaled to black people not to take him seriously –‘Im just taking these white folks money…’ Diamond and Silk are kinda in that same category–as opposed to, say, Candace Owens who absolutely tries to take on an air of seriousness. My only real beef with Herman Cain was that he trashed Government Employees (a conservative virtual signal) knowing full well he used government service as a launching platform for his own carrier. Outside of that–by all accounts he was a really nice guy that didn’t take himself or position overly serious.
Just as a point of fact…
Tom Hanks is, literally, one of the nicest guys on the planet. In real life. Not “Hollywood nice”. He’s truly what you see in interviews. Yes, he’s a great actor. But he’s also kind, caring, generous, has a lovely wife and marriage. His kids are a range from awesome to complete screw up, but he’s a damn good father, as well.
No. I wouldn’t trade Tom Hanks for 100,000 people. Tom Cruise? Definitely.
I’m not shooting off fireworks, but I have no more sympathy for Cain than I did for Ted Bundy. He voluntarily, eagerly participated in disseminating misinformation that has led to the deaths of over 150,000 people in the U.S. — and counting. He wasn’t a child. He knew exactly what he was doing. He allied with DT because he wanted MONEY and POWER.
I’m also 100% certain that, like the rest of the GOP, Cain didn’t shed a single tear for any of the other ~150K victims.
I know that hell likely doesn’t exist, but if it does, I hope Cain is greeted by all of the victims, each one of them holding a match.
The victims are the ones who have my sympathy.
@Gustopher:
Fair enough.
But lots of other countries were caught literally unprepared, and among the developed nations the US alone responded in such a terrible, counterproductive way. Ok, the UK did as well, but Boris caught COVID-19 early enough to change tracks.
Note also many countries whose leaders like to imitate Trump, like Mexico and Brazil, also rolled out horrid responses to the pandemic, largely in imitation of Trump.
@Jim Brown 32:
I think you’re right about some of that. I mean the departed quoted Pokemon movie songs in suspending his presidential campaign:
https://kotaku.com/herman-cain-quotes-pokemon-as-he-suspends-his-campaign-5864783
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
Exactly. The people waxing poetic about what a “nice guy” Cain was remind me of the families and friends of serial killers, mass shooters, etc. who, understandably, struggle mightily to reconcile the friend or family member they knew with the person who did something so terrible.
Thing is, terrible people aren’t necessarily terrible to everyone.
@EddieInCA: I think that’s why Qanon has him on their radar screen. Such an obviously good guy, but he’s a liberal… so he must be hiding something.
@Jim Brown 32:
Both D&S and Candace Owens were liberals who made an overnight conversion to Trumpie conservatism. Serious or not, they’re all basically fictional personas they adopted for money.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to black conservatives, as the recent revelation about Norma McCorvey (of Roe v. Wade fame) revealed. Vox once did an interview with a former reality-TV star who revealed that in the late-1990s she was approached by several agents encouraging her to become a conservative pundit, even though she was a liberal. They told her there was a market for young, pretty women spouting right-wing talking points.
I believe this is a lot more widespread than most people realize. Many right-wing celebrities are basically just people cashing in. The minstrel-esque black conservative is just one incarnation.
The problem with your analysis is that however much of a performance this sort of thing may be, and however nice the people may be in the real world (I’m not getting into the sexual harassment allegations against Cain, of course), it isn’t benign–these people are peddling misinformation and bigotry, and therefore contributing to evil in the world. Cain’s 2012 presidential run was on the path that led us to Trump. I cannot look on him kindly no matter how pleasant he may have been off camera. Indeed, in some ways I’d have an easier time sympathizing with him if he had been a true believer. The fact that he was a con artist who knew he was spewing bullshit that actually hurt people makes him harder to mourn.
@Kathy, @Monala: Oh, the Obama administration absolutely was dramatically better, but if someone wanted to play what-about-ism for campaign ads, or to shift blame, there’s stuff there.
But it’s comparing mistakes and missed opportunities to gross negligence.
The CDC used to be the world’s experts at containing and dealing with outbreaks, and that is no longer the case. Part of Trump’s “America First, what happens over there will never affect us” strategy. We need to fix that.
And if the President can order meat packers into plants, he can order the production of PPE…
@Monala:
And that would be accurate. Thank you.
@EddieInCA:
Hanks did a history podcast with Dan Carlin and he was absolutely every genuine, normal, history-loving Dad.
@James Joyner:
My feelings exactly.
I didn’t seem to agree much with him much in the dirty business that is politics. His accomplishments in his personal life has me impressed though. I remember his sense humor and ability to not take himself to seriously, it made him a stand out among his peers. RIP , and condolences to his family
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m sure we can be help with that if you want to send them around 😉
(Side note and old guy complaint: I hate the fact that most browsers and text message apps will change good old emoticons into emoji or worse yet, animated emoji. Semicolon-dash-close parentheses summed up perfectly how tongue in cheek I meant that comment to be. Grinning yellow head has a completely different connotation.)
@James Joyner:
And he threw all that–and his life–away, to suck up to the stupidest racist in America.
What a shame. My sympathies to his family.
@Michael Reynolds:
I want a Viking funeral.
(Without the murder of my house thralls which is not an issue since I possess none)
I do not give a crap about what people will say – cannot, actually, since I’ll be dead.
I could be convinced of a sky burial too. Recycle the nutrient load.
Being buried in a box specifically designed to retard degeneration is really spooky and unnatural. I would much prefer to eaten by birds and small mammals than by creepy underground fauna.
But best would be in a burning longboat. Let the the fishies eat what didn’t burn.
@de stijl:
No kidding. How am I supposed to return to nature? Box burial is not for me. If I go before my wife, I’ll be cremated so she can keep my ashes until she goes. Then she’ll be cremated, and our children will mix our ashes together and scatter them…somewhere. Haven’t quite gotten that part decided yet.
But the key is no box burial, and we must be returned to nature, together.
The thing is that with most of these black “conservatives” you never really hear much about them from other black people, either positive or negative, it’s like they really are part of a minstrel show (let’s call it “The Token Follies”), just there to make certain white people feel good about their politics…”See? They’re with us! We aren’t racists”…
@Mikey:
And no public viewing!
I do not want to be dressed up in clothes I rarely wore painted up like a cheap whore.
I really dislike looking at the bodies of dead friends. It is obviously an empty vessel with no light of life in it. Mal has left the building; nothing of her remains in that husk.
I go the service but never do the actual walk-by viewing. I find it abhorrent. That thing was not Mal.
—
Funerary practices are really interesting and revealing anthropology.
Trump claims Cain died of “age related lung failure”.
I want my ashes to be compressed into diamonds when I die, and made into rings for my girls. And then I’m going to haunt every boy who’s ever bad to them. If there aren’t any boys to haunt, I’ll find bad politicians to Beetlejuice. 😉
I should insist on a traditional Tibetan funeral (body dissected into pieces and left on a mountain top for the carrion eaters) but there’s probably some law against that. Phooey!
@grumpy realist: Well, there’s always this…
@grumpy realist:
I like the concept of sky burial. It is very adaptive.
Nature provides the means of body disposal. It recycles precious nutrients back into the ecosystem. Carrion eaters provide an essential system to the whole. Meat that is too foul for most animals they can process quite easily.
Some view the practice as unseemly or brutal. It is clean and honest. We are flesh.
I do cotton to underground burial at all. That what eats the body should have eyes and ears. Next trip thru the bardo maybe they recall some aspect of what they ate. Incorporate it.
I have instructed my family to simply not claim the body. The capstone of my life of irresponsibly failing to take care of things will be irresponsibly leaving my body wherever it ends up.
I do question whether they will go through with it though.
It’s a second choice after “just shove my body into the compost bin or something”.
@Mikey: That’s not bad.
@Mikey:
Some guy writes crime fiction about the Body Farm. Not half bad.
@Jax: I was spared the curse of daughters. Unfortunately, all I have so far is granddaughters.
@grumpy realist: There is. But if you are amenable you can give your body to the cadaver farm in Tennessee.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Same place @Mikey brought up. University of Tennessee.
I read a year or so back they are trying to set up satellite programs in various biomes and climates.
The Body Farm novel series was by Jefferson Bass.
@OzarkHillbilly: Even better! You can imbue your diamonds for your granddaughters’ with the Curse of the Grandfather!
as the man says, Wear The Damn Mask.
@Gustopher: “There were a lot of lessons that could have and should have been learned from that, and then somehow encased in a protective bureaucracy that would allow them to execute even with the most incompetent leadership at the top.”
If you can come up with such a ‘protective bureaucracy ‘, your Nobel Prize in political science awaits you.
@Gustopher:
A man after my own heart. When I shuffle off this mortal coil, they can stuff my corpse into a Hefty trashbag and toss me into the nearest landfill. What do I care? I’ll be dead.
@Kylopod: I’m mostly an OTB lurker. I rarely comment because sooner or later someone will say what I wanted to say better than I would have, as you did. Especially this:
“I cannot look on him kindly no matter how pleasant he may have been off camera. Indeed, in some ways I’d have an easier time sympathizing with him if he had been a true believer. The fact that he was a con artist who knew he was spewing bullshit that actually hurt people makes him harder to mourn.”
Cain was one of many pre Trumps, a junior Trump.
@Scott O:
Feel free to speak up if you want.
@de stijl:
They can throw my body in a dumpster for all I care. But I think it’d be creepy to have my wife and kids picturing my slowly-moldering body in a box. Burn me up, flush my ashes down the toilet.
@Mikey: My wife and I have talked about green burial. There is a nature preserve near our house that would be the perfect resting place, but it’s off limits, so our friends would have to do a sneak burial. That’s a little too much to ask.