Free Playbook 2012 by Mike Allen Page A

responded, “Have you ever been accused of sexual harassment?”
    “Have a nice day,” said Martin, and headed back to his car.
    The inevitable feeding frenzy was on. Cain meant to spend the next day talking about his economic plan to the National Press Club, the American Enterprise Institute, and various news outlets. But he was surrounded by reporters who wanted to know about his alleged misdeeds. He struggled with damage control. He denied any impropriety, but offered shifting explanations. At first he said he knew nothing about any financial settlements, but then amended his answer to admit an “agreement” to pay one of the women. He tried to suggest his behavior had been essentially harmless—teasing a woman about her height—but acknowledged that the woman might have felt uncomfortable.
    Right-wing bloggers and talkers rallied to Cain as the victim of a liberal media “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 campaignpromptly 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