One Of The Men Who Made Newt Gingrich Who He Is: Herman Cain

Republican Presidential Candidates Herman Cain And Newt Gingrich
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Many Americans only learned Herman Can existed after they heard him string the numbers 999 together. But the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza has been a GOP B-Lister for years and his name keeps popping up in the pasts of his rivals for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination with just a little bit of Google searching.

Here’s the latest example, from a 1995 article on Newt Gingrich in the New York Review Of Books:

Among the personalities and books and events that have “influenced” or “changed” or “left an indelible impression on” the thinking of the Hon. Newton Leroy Gingrich (R-Ga.), the current Speaker of the House of Representatives and the author of 1945 and To Renew America, are, by his own accounts, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Isaac Asimov, Alexis de Tocqueville, Tom Clancy, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, Robert Walpole, William Gladstone, Gordon Wood, Peter Drucker, Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, the “Two Cultures” lectures of C.P. Snow (the lesson here for the Speaker was that “if you’re capable of being glib and verbal, the odds are you have no idea what you’re talking about but it sounds good, whereas if you know a great deal of what you’re saying the odds are you can’t get on a talk show because nobody can understand you”), Adam Smith, Zen and the Art of Archery, “the great leader of Coca-Cola for many years, Woodruff,” an Omaha entrepreneur named Herman Cain (“who’s the head of Godfather Pizza, he’s an African-American who was born in Atlanta and his father was Woodruff’s chauffeur”), Ray Kroc’s Grinding It Out, and Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages.

As Jack Kemp and Mitt Romney did before him, Gingrich was quick to highlight Cain’s race when discussing the man who became a big deal in some GOP circles after he took on Bill Clinton in a impromptu debate about health care reform on national television.

Cain and Gingrich, both Georgians, are pretty close so far as rivals for the nomination go.

“We’re friends,” Gingrich has said of Cain. The pair held an extremely friendly debate last month and just yesterday, Gingrich — who took the frontrunner crown from Cain — mentioned his pal as a potential VP nominee.

It’s not clear exactly what Gingrich learned from Cain all those years ago, or how much those muses mentioned in the ’95 review still define him (Gingrich’s current line is that he’s “more mature” than he was when his political career was at its height). But it’s interesting to see how far the connections between the two men who’ve been exciting GOP voters for the past month or so go back — and how close they remain.

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