- … I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I’m a black man in America. Barack Obama is more of an international. … he was raised in Kenya, his mother was white from Kansas and her family had an influence on him, it’s true, but his dad was Kenyan, and when he was going to school he got a lot of fellowships, scholarships… He spent most of his career as an intellectual.
- GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain • Speaking to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, in an interview he wrote for Bloomberg View. Goldberg, to his credit, corrected Cain that President Obama spent some years of his childhood in Indonesia, not Kenya, to which Cain replied, “Yeah, Indonesia.” Whether this was a sincere mistake or not is impossible to say, and frankly doesn’t entirely matter — Cain is trying to paint Obama as mysterious and foreign, as opposed to himself, an American black man who rejects the term “African-American.” He also throws in some anti-intellectualism for good measure, but really, the story here is his stoking of, if not birtherism, the core belief that allowed that rumor to spread — he ain’t one of us. In trying to seize momentum with his recent, strident remarks, Cain’s campaign slogan could easily share a title with a classic 80s film — “Say Anything.” source
