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By Root 76 0

“witch hunt.” “A high-tech lynching,” said conservative commentator Ann Coulter, alluding to the sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas at his confirmation hearings in 1991. But then, on Wednesday—Day Four, with the scandal running its predictable course—Cain accused the Perry campaign of leaking the allegations. The Perry campaign promptly suggested that the Romney campaign was to blame. “Not true,” said a Romney spokesman. A lawyer for one of the women asked the National Restaurant Association to free his client from her confidentiality agreement. Although she later issued a statement, at the time she did not want to get into the details—she did not want to become “another Anita Hill,” the lawyer said, referring to Clarence Thomas’s accuser. But she wanted to make a public statement to the effect that Cain had, in fact, sexually harassed her.

On November 7, a former restaurant association employee, Sharon Bialek, held a press conference to say that Cain had groped her while the two sat in a car in Washington. Cain denied the charge as “baseless, bogus, and false,” and offered to take a lie detector test (“if I think it’s necessary,” he hedged). The Cain campaign worked to discredit his accusers, and many conservatives remained loyal, suspicious of a Democratic plot. But Cain began to slip in the polls.

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Cain may have been Romney’s chief challenger throughout much of the fall, but the Romney camp did not welcome Cain’s demise. A Romney adviser said he was sorry to see Cain tangled up in a scandal. “We didn’t want oppo on him coming out,” the adviser explained. “We wanted him to stay where he is. He keeps Perry down.” With two months remaining before the Iowa caucuses on January 3, Romney was stuck at no more than 25 percent or so in the polls in Iowa. His Mormonism was a real, if largely unspoken, issue among many of Iowa’s Christian GOP activists, the sort of voters who are willing to come out on a winter’s night to stand around a caucus meeting for two hours.

The Romney camp wanted to keep Cain in the race to divide up the true-believer conservative vote in Iowa. If Cain fell away, that left an opening for a charge by a conservative, possibly Rick Perry, who was launching a big TV buy in Iowa. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s campaign strategist, was worried about Perry stealing a march in Iowa. Stevens was weighing whether to make a real push in Iowa—and risk an early disaster if Romney was surprised, as he had been by Huckabee in 2008. Stevens was fretting that if Perry really camped out in Iowa and talked incessantly about his own Christian faith, he could make a late run. Most Iowa voters remained undecided. Should Romney try to lower expectations in Iowa? Or accept his front-runner status and go for the early kill in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Perry, meanwhile, was self-immolating. Throughout the fall, Perry repeatedly disappointed influential audiences who wanted to see his policy chops. In early November, he flew into Washington for an unusual meeting with unaligned lobbyists, hosted by the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors. Perry started strong, saying of his rocky launch: “The first three weeks was a lovefest. And the last three weeks was an ass-kicking.” It was all downhill from there, according to several participants. His worst moment was when a financial lobbyist asked him his view of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform. “Repeal it!” said Perry, apparently not realizing there were parts of the new law that the financial industry embraced, and that his audience did not favor wholesale repeal. “He couldn’t talk about it in any detail at all,” one attendee said. Another later took Perry aside to warn that the governor’s shallow understanding of such a key issue would be hazardous in debates. By mid-November, the Texas governor was fighting for his political life. At the November 9 GOP debate in Michigan staged by CNBC, Perry grandly announced that he would eliminate three federal agencies. He named two (Commerce and Education) and then—for an agonizing minute that