Herman Cain
Granite Oath PAC House Party
Manchester, NH
April 27, 2011
[DEMOCRACY IN ACTION TRANSCRIPT]
 
Well thank you for being here, and I want to thank Ovide and Betty for opening up their home, inviting you and inviting me.  It is an absolute delight.  This isn't my first time to New Hampshire and it won't be my last time, but I love the hospitality, I love being here, but most importantly I love the people.  There are a lot of familiar faces in the audience, which is a good thing, which means that I didn't bore them enough the last time, so they keep coming back.

Le me make a few opening remarks and then I would rather take some questions.  Did you have people write questions down?  [LaMontagne: We did.]  And they're going to select some of the questions. 

But I'm going to address some of the ones that I usually get asked.  In fact before I came up today I was in Washington, DC — I call it the belly of the beast.  I had about 20 reporters from various publications at a big table asking me questions left and right and up and down and so forth — and what I have found out and I realized this long before today — is that people inside the Beltway first of all they start out with skepticism, secondly they don't believe what's going on out here that we see, they just simply don't believe it.  And they also don't believe that the American people just might have an appetite for a problem solver and not another politician. 

Because the first that I was asked by one of the reporters was well Mr. Cain you know that since you' haven't had any political experience that well people are going to hold that against you.  And my response is you know some people will, but most of them are inside the Beltway.  The real people, they don't care.  And I think the other thing is the  ones that are in Washington, DC, most of them have held public office.  How's that working out for you? 

We have a mess on our hands.  Some of us get it.  But the danger that we face is that half of the American electorate does not have a clue.  This is why we have to work harder in order to get out the vote, get out and vote, and help to educate people.  That's why we've got to work so much harder.  We have become a nation of crises, rather than this land of unlimited opportunity.  We still are a land of opportunity, but it's being diminished and reduced.  Every day we face a different crisis.

We have a moral crisis.  When the President of the United States is trying to get God out of the Declaration of Independence, some of us have a problem with that.  I nearly fell off of my chair when a representative of Minnesota by the name of Betty McCollum led our House of Representatives in the Pledge of Allegiance and left out "under God" on purpose.  We have a moral problem.  Now get this one.  In the state of Illinois an atheist filed an injunction against the schools system where his child went to school because they observed a moment of silence at the beginning of the school day.  He didn't want them to even think about God.  This is how bad it has gotten.  And all you find inside Washington, DC is a lot of political correctness nonsense which is creating the moral crisis we face.

We've got an economic crisis.  Ask the 15 million people who do not have jobs.  They'll tell you.  We're not in a recovery; we're stalled. 

There are five things that I would do. 

Number one and that is lower corporate tax rates from 35 to 25 percent.  We're the only country in the world that has not.  What are we waiting on?  This is why we're losing so many businesses and so many jobs. 

Lower personal income tax rates. 

Lower the capital gains tax rate to zero.  Free up investment in this country.  This is how you create jobs. 

Suspend taxes on repatriated profits.  It's been estimated that nearly a trillion dollars are held by multinational corporations in other countries.  So the liberals' attitude is if we can't get a piece of it, we're going to leave it over there.  I call this low hanging fruit...low hanging fruit.  Take it to zero.  Not 5.25%, which is what it was back in 2003 when George Bush was able to get this done for a limited period of time.  Nearly $350 billion came back into the economy.  It is now estimated that nearly a trillion dollars will come back into the economy. 

And then the next one is give workers a full 6.2% payroll tax holiday for a year and employers. 

These items, folks, are called direct stimulus because we keep the money, we spend it, we save it, we grow our businesses.  That's how you get the economy going.

And the fifth leg of that is make the rates permanent.  We've go to remove this uncertainty that's hanging over this economy, which is bogging us down. 

Now that would be what I would propose to get passed in the first six months.  And then during that time while people are seeing how well this is working — and there are plenty of studies out there that says these measures will work — liberals simply don't want them to work.  Then in the second two years —  During the first two years I would be educating folk on the importance about the Fair Tax, so we would replace the entire tax code with the Fair Tax. 

I got a question today that just absolutely shocked me from one of the reporters.  He says, Mr. Cain, I have been hearing about the Fair Tax for ever and it never seems as if its going to go anywhere.  He says so why would you want to take on something that's going to not happen, that's going to be an impossibility.  I just smiled and said, sir, you don't not do what's right because it's hard to do.  And if the Founding Fathers had had that attitude guess what?  We wouldn't be here today.  Just because it's difficult, it doesn't mean you don't do it.  I know it's going to be difficult, and this is why I'm not going to introduce it  the first two years.  We've got to educate the public because it is, has been demagogued, lied about.  And if the American people know the truth, they will support it, and they will demand it.  This is how you get something like that passed. 

There is another reason we must stimulate this economy.  It's a national security threat.  Because of China.  We're growing at an anemic 2 1/2 percent rate per year in GDP.  On a much bigger base.  But they're growing at 10% compounded on a much smaller base.  Now if you were to compare size of GDP one on one, it's calculated that in 15 to 20 years their GDP in absolute terms would be the same size as our economy. 

The IMF issued a report just two days ago where they calculated what they call purchasing power parity, which basically normalizes their purchasing power...you normalize this, you take out the differences in currency and you basically say what can they buy with their average medium income what can we buy.  And now they've calculated that based upon this purchasing power parity, they will be as big as us in purchasing power parity in five years.  Five years.  Why?  Because we are not growing this economy with the potential that we could.  Somebody also asked today, well what is your China strategy?

Three words.  Out grow them.  That's all we have to do.  And then all of this kumbayah stuff we don't have to worry about [inaud.] and stop them from doing what they want to do, stop them from manipulating their currency.  Just out grow them and it'll take care of itself. 

We've got an entitlement spending problem, entitlement spending crisis.  We're never going to be able to bring down the national debt...until we restructure programs.  I said restructure, I didn't say reform.  How do we restructure these?  We restructure them such that we go from an entitlement society to an empowerment design.  Here's how you empower people.  You give them an incentive to get off the program, not more and more incentive to say on the program.  You restructure where you empower people such that they are in charge. 

Here's an example.  Rep. Ryan's budget — now a lot of people helped him put that budget together, but he has become famous and it's now called the Ryan budget.  He has a provision in there  — it's still in there but it's being demagogued, where he would take Medicare and over a 10-year period — not right away, not cold turkey — give seniors a voucher to choose their doctor, to choose their health care provider, to choose if they want to have a health provider come into their home rather than the government making these choices.  It's already been demagogued that the Republicans are throwing seniors to the wolves, so they would have to fend for themselves.  No.  It empowers people when you give them a choice. 

Block grant Medicaid.  Empower the states.  They have a better idea of how to fix the problem, and how much money they can afford to help take care of those that are less fortunate, not the federal government. 

So this is what I mean by going from an entitlement society to an empowerment society.  We empower businesses with these tax changes, we empower the states with block grants, we empower individuals and put it in their hands.  Just like if you want to improve education, you do the same thing that quick service restaurants did.  Competition.  The reason you can find a Big Mac and a Whopper so inexpensive today is because of competition.  It's not because of government mandates.  That's why I support charter schools, that's why I support private schools, that's why I support [inaudible.].  We've got to unbundle all of these programs in Washington, DC. 

And here's another thing that I talk about doing in order to help bring down the debt, to help empower states.  End all unfunded mandates.  All.   All unfunded mandates.  If you can't end the unfunded mandate, end the program.  End the program.  Let the states decide how they want to spend their resources.  And then maybe we won't have to tax people so much; the money can stay at home.  What a [inaud.] idea.

So we've got an entitlement spending problem.  We've got an economic crisis.  We also have a national security crisis.  It scares me the death and it scares you to death all of the unrest going on in the Middle East.  Do we have a clear mission?  Do we have a clear mission in terms of what victory looks like?  The worst thing that we could do is to send our men and women in harm's way and they not be sure what the mission is.  That is a disservice to our people.  And I happen to believe that we should know clearly what the mission is before we commit any of our resources, but especially our young men and women.  What a big demoralizer for them not be sure why they are there, and some of them in harm's way.

My approach to national security is the same as my approach to every other one of these crises.  It starts with make sure we're working on the right problem.  My job is to ask the question, what's the mission, what's the problem?  What problem are we working on?

In Libya are we working to get rid of Gaddafi, are we working in an humanitarian sense in order to stop the senseless bloodshed of him killing his own —?  What is the mission?  Once we know what that mission is, then we can decide whether or not that is something we want to put resources behind.  People keep asking me, reporters keep asking me, well what would you do about Libya?  I say the first thing is I'd figure out what it is we're trying to achieve.  I'm not really sure what it is we're trying to achieve in Libya.  I'm not really sure what it is we're trying to achieve in Egypt and some of these places.  Afghanistan. We've been there for a while; we've been there too long quite frankly.

One of the things that I would do using this same approach, get the experts together, get the military generals in a room and do what business people do.  You ask the right questions.  Can we win?  Yes or no?  Listen to everybody's input.  And if so, how do we win?  And number three, is it in the best interests of the United States of America.  And if I don't get the right answers to those questions, guess what?  Give me an exit strategy. 

My point is we've got a lot of problems and a lot of crises but there's a right way to go about trying to solve them.  And I don't go off half-cocked when I'm trying to make a business decision.  I would not go off half-cocked without all the information to be able to make a decision about one of these crises.

We have an immig.— we have immigration crisis.  The reason we have an immigration crisis is because the problem is not one problem.  It's four...  [aside... You remember from math.  He was a math major so we keep exchanging mathematical vibes.]  In mathematics, many times, the key to solving a complex problem was to break it down into the combination of problems that are there.  Not trying to sort through, no, what are the components of the problem?  Here's the immigration problems.  Secure the border.  Enforce the laws that are there.  Promote the path to citizenship.  [aside... Where's Denise?]  Promote the path to citizenship that's already there.  We don't need a new one.  Here's how we deal with the illegals that are already here.   Empower the states to do what the federal government isn't doing and won't do.  Let the states handle it.  They best know how to deal with it, how they want to deal with it.  That way you get 50 groups of smart people working on this problem.  Instead of one group of not so smart people.  Use our 50 laboratories where the best ideas in America come from anyway.  The best ideas come from the folk, us, from the states.

When I was on Elliot Spitzer one night— It was an accident...  I told my staff, this doesn't feel right; I think this is a mistake.  I was on Elliot Spitzer and he said—and when I told him about empower the states—he said Mr. Cain, I don't trust the states to do the right thing.  I said see that's where we differ.  I trust the states to do the right thing.  And I said another thing is, what if 45 of them get it right and five of them mess it up.   So what?  They'll figure it out from the other 45.  Doesn't trust the states; that's part of the problem.

Just like part of the problem is too many people in Washington, DC don't trust the people.  Nancy Pelosi says, we've got to pass it before we tell you what's in it.  My latest book is entitled They Think You're Stupid.  I'm working on a brand new book We Ain't Stupid.  We Ain't Stupid.  Now I know that the teachers are going to give me a hard time about that, but as I explain to audiences with children in it, it's called my grandfathers emphatic vernacular.  And I respect my ancestors because they did not always speak correct English, but we knew what they meant when they said I ain't doing this or we ain't stupid. 

And so we've got all of these crises.  Then we've got the biggest one, then I'll open it up to questions.  A deficiency of leadership.  Leaders take people to where they would not go by themselves.  That's what this nation is looking for.  Every successful business, every successful law firm, the leaders had a vision as to where they wanted to take people, but then more importantly they shared that vision with the people, with the constituency so they could feel a part of it, so they could know what they needed to do in order to be able to achieve those goals.

The biggest problem we have right now is that 535 members of Congress, I call it the committee of 535, they are not leading.  A committee can't lead; it has to come from the president.  That's why the founders set it up the way that they set it up, and that's one of the reasons folks that I didn't decide to run for the United States Senate again, that I didn't decide to run for the United States Congress; people tried to get me to run for governor of Georgia in this last race.  I said thank you very much for the encouragement.  And people even said you would be a slam dunk because I'm very well known in the state of Georgia; I have run before.  And I said, I'm not looking for a slam dunk; I'm looking for an opportunity to have the biggest impact on this country that we can...

It's not about us.  It's about the grandkids.  I have three of them.  It's about the grandkids.

Member of the audience: We have enough people with egos; we need someone that's really willing to work, to really learn.

Thank you.

Another member of the audience: We do have a leader who's taking us some place we wouldn't go on our own.

Let me just say this.  Ronald Reagan said it best.  You know freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  One generation.  We almost only one election away from [inaud.]  It has to be fought for, protected, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our grandchildren what the United States of America used to be like.  I'm not going to have that conversation with my grandkids.  Not until I do everything that I can do, and not until you can do everything that you can do.  Despite the people stuck inside the Beltway I believe we can take this nation back and become that exceptional nation that we all know that we are.

Thanks very much.


>Ed. Cain spoke for about 21 minutes, and then he took questions:

Q1. How does Mrs. Cain feel about this?

Mrs. Cain is terrified, and she has every right to be.  I will tell you that I have been blessed that in 42 years of marriage—it'll be 43 in June—that I have been blessed with a wife, a companion, who has been supportive of every crazy thing I've wanted to do.  And her words, and I quote, I said darling what's your greatest fear.  She told me one morning, that you might win.  I said I do understand.  But the good news is our two kids are grown, they have their own families, we've got three grandkids and so she spends a lot of time with them.  As I tell people, you're not going to see my wife— First of all she doesn't have the kind of physical stamina to be on the kind of schedule that I have been on, and I'm not going to ask her to do that at the expense of her health.  And so, but you will see her at some events, some critical events.  But she is very, very supportive although she doesn't have the desire to be out here at every stop that I make with respect to this.  So I'm very blessed in that respect.

Q2. Herman, we know that the president is a money-making machine, and he's already started making money for the campaign.  We know how difficult it is to defeat an incumbent.  We know how effective his people are in using the Internet.  We know how they were able to use Facebook and the other social media to get the word out.  What would your strategy be and what would our role be in it, in getting you elected and defeating this guy?  

Thank you.  First of all, our strategy is bottoms up, not top down.  We have built a very, very sizable base of volunteers who have signed up at HermanCain.com in every state in the union.  We're in the process of mobilizing those people that have said that they would like to support this dark horse candidate— that's a joke y'all, laugh.

[LaMontagne: What was that website again?]  HermanCain.com H E R M A N C A I N dot com.  You remember Cain like Cain in the Bible, but I didn't kill anybody, yet.

And so we've got a bottoms up strategy, and it's going fantastic.

Secondly, we have all of the Internet technology tools working for us, and we've put it together.  In fact Scott Toomey, who is one of my senior advisors who is with me—that gentleman there—he is the architect of our Internet equipment and our system and to quote Scott, he said well— I said how did you figure all this stuff out,; I mean it's pretty slick.  He said well R&D.  I said oh I understand R&D; I used to do research and development.  He says no, ripoff and duplicate.

So we have developed that piece of it and this is what's so encouraging about this.  Scott and his team have developed metrics to measure my presence on the Internet.  And it's worked so well.  They've developed a metric where we on average are getting six times the number of Internet mentions for every TV mention, beating everybody, and that is because of what we have done to cultivate that audience, to cultivate the people on Facebook, to cultivate the people on Twitter.  Because everybody likes to get their information a little differently.  So we have developed ways to appeal to all of those ways.  So we will definitely be doing that.

Now what you can do, since you asked, go to HermanCain.com.  You can either contribute online, you can volunteer, because we're going to mobilize people, and then we've got a comment column where you can say well I want to spend an hour a week working on the campaign or I want to put out door signs or I want to write letters. Tell us what you want to do and we're in the process of mobilizing.  And for those people that you know don't want to contribute online for whatever reason we have some little handy cheat cards with the information that tell you where you can— I'm not soliciting, but you can write a check.  You can write a check, got the address right here, okay.  [Audience member: Suggesting].  I'm just suggesting.  So we've got some of these that we can pass out, so that's how you can help.

We set four criteria. 

One was how quick were volunteers going to step forward?  It has exceeded our expectations. 

Number two.  How much, they call it earned media; you know like when I'm on Fox and when other stations want me on.  That has taken off ever since we announced that I was going to, I did the exploratory back in January.  I mean we get more radio requests and TV requests than I can physically do.

And then the third one is the Internet presence.  We are blowing away everybody else in terms of our ability to be on the Internet because we've cultivated that audience. 

And then the fourth is fundraising.  And what we have found is the fundraising has not taken off because a lot of people are still sitting back and waiting to see whether or not—well is he for real?  Well let me put it to you this way.  See because of McCain Feingold and the rules, we have to be careful of certain things.  In January I put my toe in the water.  Today it's up to my chinny chin chin.  No more toe in the water.  And we will be making a final decision within weeks, not months.

 Q3. Hi.  I'm just a little concerned with the Federal Reserve.  I mean they are printing money hand over fist.  They are bankrupting this country, and I'm just curious what your position is as far as the Federal Reserve?

I believe we need to fix the Fed, not end the Fed, because this Fed is doing things that were never done when I served on the Board of the Fed back in the '90s under Alan Greenspan.  One of the reasons that they have gotten off track is their mission was expanded to try and control not only inflation, but unemployment.  You can't do that with monetary policy.  Secondly, the national debt reaching such astronomical levels is what caused them to start printing all that money and buying our own Treasury notes.  You can fix the Fed by first of all eliminating their mission to try to control unemployment, and start to pay down the debt, and Congress has the authority to set their policy in terms of the things that they are doing.  This administration has politicized this Fed to the point that they print money on a dime.  So I happen to believe that we can fix the Fed by changing their policies, and Congress providing the oversight that it should provide.



>Ed. Cain answered three more questions from the audience (another on the Fed, one on the Ryan and Obama budgets, and one on the national sales tax versus the value added tax).  Ovide LaMontagne made a pitch for Granite Oath PAC, and wrapped up asking a three questions that had been submitted.

Q.  How would you go about repealing Obamacare and how would you reduce the deficit and the debt of the federal government?  I suspect the two are somewhat related.

First I would ask Congress to repeal and replace and go from a government-centric proposal or bill like Obamacare and replace it with a patient centered bill, which means that we would include tort reform, we would put more choices in the hands of the consumers, we would have high-risk pools by each state—back to empowering the states.  Not a high risk pool for the federal government.  And you can do this with measures that would in fact help to increase accessibility and bring down costs.  In other words, lets let doctors be doctors and let make patients make more choices.  So I would repeal Obamacare to begin with, which won't be easy, but we need to.  It can't be fixed in my opinion.

Secondly, bringing down the debt.  Any businessman will tell you that if you take over a troubled business or a troubled country, you've got to cut multiple ways.  I call it horizontal cutting and vertical cutting.  Horizontally, you go in and say a 10-percent cut in every federal agency across the board for next year's budget, that's the starting point.  Then you do what I call a vertical cut, where the president along with the new agency heads, you do a deep dive and evaluate whole programs.  There was a report several weeks ago that talked about all of the overlap and duplication in Washington, DC.  Why?  Because no one ever sat done and said well how does this overlap with this, why do we have multiple programs?  There was one of them that I can recall where there were 15 different agencies working on the same food safety issue.  I think we can eliminate 14 of them right [inaud. now?there].  That's a no-brainer. 

And so what I'm saying is rather than just taking over as president and doing all of the presidential balls—first of all I'm not going to do 20 presidential inaugural balls; we got to much work to do—once you appoint your agency heads and you get them confirmed then you sit down with the agency heads and all of the senior staff in that agency.  Because sometimes the senior staff will work against that agency head and work against the president if their trying to protect their favorite program.  This is part of the hard work of turning a country or turning a business around. 

When I went to Godfather's, Godfather's was going bankrupt just like America is going bankrupt.  We are broke, but nobody wants to tell you that we're broke.  We just don't have a court that we can file the bankruptcy papers in.

I went to Godfather's and I used the same approach; I've used it multiple times in taking over troubled businesses.  All of my vice presidents, I called them in, I said folks we've got problems.  We're not going to be here in a year if we don't take some drastic measures.  And if you explain to the American people what these drastic measures are, what we need to do, how it's going to impact them, the American people will support it.  They're not going to just do something because some political elites say this is what we need to do; we'll go ahead and pass the bill, and then we'll tell you what's in it.  That's not how you respect the American people.  And so all my vice presidents came in, and I gave them all their marching orders and in two days they came back with revised budgets with this first 10-percent cut.  Well my marketing director, he came back and said Herman, I can't cut it 10 percent.  I said why.  He said I can't run the marketing department off of a 10 to 15 percent cut from last year.  I said Charlie I guess I'm going to have to redirect your career and find someone who can.  I redirected his career; I found another marketing vice president and she did an even better job than he did.  If you have to make tough choices that's leadership.  So it can be done; we've got to cut out whole programs to begin to bring it down.   

Q.  Okay, quick question, of all of the threats facing our country, what do you see as the greatest and what would you do fix it?

Terrorism.  Terrorism is our greatest threat, because to quote former President George Bush, we have to be right every time; the terrorists only have to be right once.  That's our greatest threat, because many of you all probably read stories about homegrown terrorists right here in this country.  And how I would fix it is allow the intelligence agencies to do their job.  That's the problem.  We've got great intelligence people but their hands are tied in a lot of ways.  Untie their hands and let them do their job.  This is how we protect this country, you know from the terrorist threats from around the world.

Q. And then the last question.  This is an interesting one.  If you have not held elective office what makes you ready to hold national office?  And the questioner goes on to say Herbert Hoover was a businessman; he never held elective office before the presidency. 

My problem-solving approach is what distinguishes me from some of the other candidates, and that is first make sure that you're working on the right problem.  Did we need Obamacare when we have problems with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid..?  No.  We weren't working on the right problem. 

Secondly, set the right priorities.   ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, I heard the head of ICE make the statement, quote, I don't have enough resources to do my job.  They get about 5 1/2 billion dollars a year.  That same year Congress approved $16 billion in earmarks.  I would have rather had $16 billion going to ICE with somebody who knew what they were doing, because they probably need some technology upgrades and things of this nature.  I don't know all of the problems.  Put the priority where you want stuff fixed.  And it starts with rearranging the budget. 

Thirdly, surround yourself with good people.  I know a lot of great people that can help us solve these problems.  Some of them come from the business sector, a lot of them come from the business sector, big business, small business, etcetera, you name it.  President Obama's administration has only seven percent of the people who actually have worked in the private sector—the lowest in modern presidential history.  Seven.  And we wonder why the policies are not working...  And so surround yourself with the right people.  And then you put together the appropriate common sense plans.  Do we have booklets?  Common sense plans, that I talk a little bit more about those ideas in the booklets that we have.

And let me give you an example.  Energy.  We need an energy independence strategy.  We have the resources.  It was just reported by the Congressional Research Service that if you look at all of our fossile fuels with respect to oil, natural gas and coal and shale oil we have the largest total depository in the world, but we will not develop it because of conflicting interests.  We can develop an energy independence strategy.  It's putting together the plan to make it happen, if the president makes it a national priority.  When John F. Kennedy in 1960, even though he didn't, he wasn't here with us no more than about a thousand days, when he said by the end of the decade of the '60s we will walk on the moon, that's leadership, that's determination, that is putting a priority on it.  He didn't say we might.   He didn't say let's take a poll.  He said we will.  Since we know we have all of these energy resources, as my grandfather would say, do something!  Rather than just sit on them.  Rather than just sit on them.


Let me close out with this Ovide.  Thank you all for being here.  I look forward to seeing and talking to you.  Let me answer the question that some people didn't ask but you might have already picked up on.  Why am I running?  I feel compelled to run.  I really do.  After the birth of my first grandchild, back in 1999, Chris has heard this story, when I first looked in her face, and the first thought that went through my mind was what do I do to make this a better world.  That was 12 years ago, and I didn't know where that was going to lead.  My life has continued to unfold. 

And then when I went through the cancer treatment that Ovide mentioned, back in 2006, I had a 30-percent chance of survival.  I had 30 percent of my colon removed, 70 percent of my liver removed and before you go oh my God, I asked the doctor, wait a minute, if you're going to take out 70 that only leaves 30 percent.  I said can you live off of a sliver of liver.   He said yes, it grows back.  I didn't know that.  I missed that in 10th grade biology.  I didn't know that.  And so I was able to go through chemotherapy, go through double surgery and go through chemotherapy and that was five years ago.  So I believe God has said not yet, I've got something else for you to do.

Thank you very much.