Politico is up with another interesting article about Herman Cain’s time at the National Restaurant Association:
With Cain at the helm as CEO in 1998, the association created a video to explain sexual harassment laws to its members – and created a sample sexual harassment policy for individual restaurants to use, according to a Chicago Tribune story at the time.
The NRA’s Educational Foundation began offering a training program for member restaurants called, “What’s the Big Deal? Sexual Harassment Prevention Program,” in addition to its ServSafe safety and alcohol training materials. Today, according to the ServSafe website, restaurants can purchase employee and manager training brochures, as well as DVDs to explain acceptable practices.
Scher, who observed the NRA’s actions at the time and has read about them since, said the organization’s actions were, at the time, a proactive step.
This in no way absolves Cain of any past wrongdoings. Mark Foley also helped create legislation to protect children from predators while he was a predator. What Cain did was what every CEO in America was doing at the time, addressing sexual harassment. With Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton, the phrase “sexual harassment” become very common and companies realized they had to take steps to help prevent it.
Of course some on the right insinuate that this maybe Cain’s reprieve. Here’s William Jacobson:
After spending a week portraying Herman Cain as a sexual predator, allegations which so far have resulted in NO FACTS sustantiating the innuendo, Politico now wants to be fair and balanced and tell us that Cain actually led industry efforts to fight sexual harassment, Under Herman Cain, NRA launched Sex Harassment Fight:
Jacobson, a Cornell law professor, seems to be missing a lot here. I would be curious to see what “facts” he wants to see regarding the innuendo. My reading into that statement by Jacobson leads me to believe he won’t believe anything, short of maybe an actual video or Cain admitting it. Wait! The second already happened. Cain described his version of what happened on Fox News Monday night. Another fact that we do know is that there were at least two cases of sexual harassment against Cain while at the NRA and those cases were severe enough and with enough proof that the NRA’s lawyers decided to give these two complainants a year’s salary as severance. That indicates there was wrong doing, which still absolves Politico of any wrongful reporting on their initial article.
I want to focus on something another rightwing blogger is saying about this. Dan Riehl, someone who I generally disagree with, has a great assessment of the situation:
Jacobson seems to entirely miss the more subtle, though still obvious, slant of the piece. They’re portraying Cain as someone who mostly viewed sexual harassment charges as a threat to business, not someone more likely to be sensitive to how a woman should be treated in the workplace. They’re also emphasising the point that Cain was well aware of the issue, while not backing down from any of their reporting. Claiming some type of victory, however small, when the opposition is still on the attack isn’t a sound strategy.
I read the Politico article before reading Dan’s post and I felt the exact same way. It also angered me a little bit. Anyone who has worked in the restaurant industry, especially before sexual harassment became such a big deal, knew that it was a very common occurrence. It’s just part of the atmosphere of the industry. I’ve worked in fast food, went into restaurants to repair their equipment, bartended, cooked and about any other job you can think of in the industry and I witnessed sexual harassment countless times.
Riehl also brings up another very valid point:
Unfortunately, what Jacobson is doing is akin to what Clinton’s Bimbo Eruption managers did. Nothing in Politico’s copious reporting on the topic tells me the woman is the one who raised this issue. I suspect someone leaked it to Politico, she may have confirmed the complaints existence and validity when approached; however, at least so far, she hasn’t been seeking the limelight, or a payday.
Now, if she turns around tomorrow and takes money to go on the record, we’ll know more upon which to judge her. But for now, we don’t know that. If, as she does assert, she had a legitimate claim back then, she’s now been further harassed by Politico because of their dredging it all back up – assuming she wasn’t the original leaker.
BINGO! If this was some attention starved, money seeking person, like many on the right is making her (them) out to be, then we would already know a name and face. They would making paid appearances on every news show they could get booked for. The fact that these people choose to remain anonymous and out of the media firestorm surrounding this story proves that they aren’t out for money or fame. In fact, this proves that they did get harassed and want it behind them. They don’t want to relive what they endured under Herman Cain and that tells a lot.
We’ve seen a lot happen in the six days since this story broke. Herman Cain has changed his story more times than anyone can count. The right was mostly circling around Cain when the story first broke, but now they are fracturing as they put politics aside and start seeing Cain as a disaster. We also found out that Herman Cain is totally unprepared for disaster control. He was given 10 days warning about this article and chose to ignore it. And finally, we saw that the biggest media smear of Cain came not from the “liberal media”, but rather the very “conservative media” when PJ Media published a story taking this incident to a whole new level of sex, verging on possible rape, and then later “retracted” it through an update.
I can easily see this story living another week, so I wonder what we will see next….