Herman Cain may have vowed in New Hampshire yesterday that “it ain’t over yet,” but political pundits are already treating the demise of his campaign as a foregone conclusion.
On the cautious side, there’s Steve Peoples of the Post-Tribune, who writes that Cain “also has begun to outline a possible exit strategy,” and suggesting that everything hinges on the candidate’s upcoming face-to-face meeting with wife Gloria, whom he hasn’t seen in person since the Ginger White story broke.
On Washington Post’s The Fix blog, Chris Cilliza and Aaron Blake say Cain’s readying an “escape hatch” and that “the political reality for Cain is that he has become a sideshow in the Republican presidential race.”
Daily Beast blogger Michael Tomasky writes that Cain’s bid was torpedoed by his own vanity:
Let’s quickly allow for the fact that maybe Cain is telling the truth, and that he called and texted White’s cellphone 61 times in four months because he was “trying to help her financially.” OK; allowed. But now let’s contemplate what is probably the case, that White is telling the truth. If she is, then Cain cut off the affair just eight months ago, right before he began running. That’s not ineptitude. That’s just chutzpah.
Meanwhile, over at the Christian Science Monitor, Peter Grier thinks the Cain train is not merely dead, but undead, claiming that Cain is running a “zombie candidacy.”
