Sweet Marie, there's another GOP debate tonight. With Ceo-of-Self Herman Cain still leading the field, he's sure to receive lots of attention from the moderators--and his competitors. They're going to want to know why, for example, he doesn't think foreign-policy experience--or knowledge, really--matters much in this race.Which reminds me. InThis Is Herman Cain! by Herman Cain, the self-inspirer relates a watershed moment for his foreign-policy philosophy. After the second debate in New Hampshire,

People came up to me and said, "You know what I like most about what you said in the last debate? When you said you don't have all the information--that you didn't pretend to have a plan for Afghanistan."

As Cain explains in an Appendix A (there are five appendixes), "it is naive to think that someone running for president must have an answer for everything.... A real leader has the right questions for everything." When it comes to Afghanistan, Cain doesn't want to propose a "half-baked plan just to pretend to know everything" because "I do not have access to every piece of classified information." Or, apparently, a subscription to a major newspaper. But he does have enough information to be disappointed in President Barack Obama's June 22 statement proposing "an abrupt withdrawal of our troops." (In fact he proposed no such thing.)"In essence," Cain claims, "his statement was a stark reminder that while one might campaign in poetry, one must govern in prose."(Tune in next time for a sample of Cain's verse.)

Grant Gallicho joined Commonweal as an intern and was an associate editor for the magazine until 2015. 

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