Herman Cain Feels Pain After Politico Report

Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain could show that when it comes to running for the White House, experience winning elections matter.

The Georgia Republican was arguably one of the biggest surprises in the Republican race for the White House, winning a Florida straw poll and taking the lead in many national opinion surveys. That was a marked

But on Sunday, Cain’s campaign was rocked to the core by a Politico article that reported two women complained about Cain’s behavior during his tenure at the National Restaurant Association. The story, heavily infused with anonymous sources, touched off a firestorm that’s threatening to crash Cain’s campaign.

Throughout the melee, Roll Call reporter Shira Toeplitz might have made the most astute observation. In a Tweet, Toeplitz wrote “candidates like Cain -- businessmen w/ little political exp -- are campaign oppo researchers dream. Betcha we'll see more by week's end.”

And Slate columnist Dave Wiegel took things a step further when he Tweeted that he was starting “to doubt that the former pizza company CEO who has never won an election will become president in 2013.”

"Mitt Romney is dully, ploddingly doing exactly what he needs to win this campaign," Wiegel wrote on Wendesday. "And then we have campaign No. 2. A tag team of quotable, viral-video-ready TV stars are taking turns as frontrunners."

Both Toeplitz and Wiegel were at least touching on a worthy point: Candidates who’ve previously won election to office are much more likely to win their party’s presidential nominations than virtual political neophytes. And even candidates whose first election victory was the presidency were typically either generals or cabinet secretaries.

Even those examples come with some caveats. Two recent examples of men who went from a presidential cabinet position to the presidency—Republicans William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover—won mainly thanks to their work within the governmental sphere. (And it should be noted that both men lost re-election by huge margins—Taft only won eight electoral votes.)

The only recent and comparable example of a businessperson winning a presidential nomination would be Wendell Willkie, who surprisingly won the GOP nod in 1940. Willkie, of course, didn’t come close to beating incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt that year.