Pregnant Pause

(Stephen is on break this week, so I will fill in with news and commentary that I think is pertinent.)

A pregnant pause is a pause that's maybe a little bit longer than usual, but Herman Cain took it to new levels in his interview at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He paused, a lot, when asked about Libya, specifically whether he agreed with the way that President Barack Obama handled Libya. You can read about it over at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and you can even watch the video of the Libya part of the interview about midway down the page. (Note: If you need to take a break while you are watching the approximately 5-minute video, just hit the pause button.)

A few things come to mind. And I will note that lots of other blogs and news outlets have some of the very same concerns so I'm not pretending to be the first person to write about the pause.

First off, Herman Cain doesn't seem to know how to answer the question. He seems to be looking to the heavens for inspiration, in much the same way that a high schooler will look at the ceiling hoping to find answers to the SAT up there. Cain's answer is not really an answer, he is dodging the question. Just imagine a beauty contest contestant taking that long to answer a question about world peace. Or if Mommy asks little Johnny if he took the last cookie out of the cookie jar. "Cookies, ummm, let me think. Now are you asking about ginger cookies and do you mean today? And is it the cookie jar on the table or that old one in the pantry? I need more information before I can give you a yes or no answer to that question, Mommy."

I also suspect that he has no idea of what President Obama has done in the past few years about Libya. That is what made it so hard for him to answer whether he agreed or disagreed about what the president did.

More telling is what Herman Cain has said after the interview about his awkwardness with the question.

"It was a pause!" Cain said in a tone of disbelief. "That's all it was! Good Grief!"

Anyone watching the video, other than Cain's "EBCs" (Early Believers in Cain) knows that it was not a simple pause. A pause is when you're at the counter at McDonalds and the guy behind the counter asks if you want fries with your burger. "Um, okay, yeah. Fries would taste good. I'll take a medium bag of fries."

So, while everyone knows it was much more than a pause, Herman Cain keeps insisting that it was nothing more than a pause.

Now backtrack to the allegations of harassment. If Cain doesn't recognize his befuddlement over the Libya question, how can he understand what harassment is? And when he claims that there was no harassment, that it was nothing but a comparison of how tall someone was in comparison to his wife, well it makes me wonder about that situation also. If he can't come to grips on the whole Libya pause thing, then what can we expect in the future? How will he handle difficult issues and the stress of the job? I like humor as well as the next person, but there should be some serious discussion with well-thought solutions when someone is running for President.