La inusual estrategia de Herman Cain

The New York Times:

On a whirlwind trip through New York City this week that marked the beginning of a nearly monthlong book tour, Herman Cain chatted with the hosts of ABC’s “The View,” promoted his new memoir on Fox News, met local titans like Donald Trump, shared ideas with former Mayor Edward I. Koch and enjoyed power lunching in Midtown.

Mr. Cain, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, did all but one thing — campaign. Not in the traditional meet-the-public and kiss-the-babies sense, anyway.

And according to his public campaign calendar of events, where 19 of the 31 days of October are blank, there will not be much glad-handing in the immediate future. That is just fine with Mr. Cain, a former business executive who has recently surged to the top tier of candidates in early polls. The latest Quinnipiac University poll, released Wednesday, found Mitt Romney and Mr. Cain essentially tied within the poll’s margin of sampling error.

“I’m trying to run this campaign like a start-up business, which means lean and mean,” Mr. Cain said in an interview on Tuesday, wearing his signature black cowboy hat. “There’s a new sheriff in town.”

(...) But it is not clear that Mr. Cain, 65, has any particular plan to seize this moment, beyond using the attention to sell books. Like the other candidates vying to become credible alternatives to Mr. Romney and Mr. Perry, Mr. Cain is operating on a shoestring. He raised $2 million last spring. More money is coming in, he said, and he has 40 staff members, mostly in Southern states. Still, an adviser to the campaign said the campaign had only four people working in Iowa, and there is no plan to change strategy.

Many Republicans doubt this will be enough to launch Mr. Cain in the crucial early states, especially if he decides to avoid retail politics.

“No candidate can afford to spend two or three weeks not being in New Hampshire this year,” said Steve Duprey, a Republican National Committee member from the state. “He has not made as much progress organizing in New Hampshire as he could have, but there’s time.”

When asked why he would launch a book tour while running for the presidential nomination, Mr. Cain said that “the two complement one another” and that the benefits go beyond raising his name recognition among voters — one of his main goals.

(...) Mr. Cain rejected the suggestion that he was not taking the early primary states seriously enough, saying he had made 28 trips to Iowa since the beginning of the year. “We have a strong base there and will be going back,” he said. “We didn’t have a front-loaded Iowa-New Hampshire strategy. No, we’ve got a multistate strategy, so we’ll get back to Iowa in due time.”

And in 2012, a front-loading of primaries in Southern states like South Carolina and Florida might benefit a candidate with a Southern focus, like Mr. Cain.

If his book tour is in some ways a proxy for a campaign, his strategy appears clear: the tour’s first stop after New York is in the Orlando, Fla., area, followed by signings in Texas, Virginia, South Carolina and Tennessee. These are some of the same states where Mr. Cain describes his organization as strong.

But he admits to needing a bigger operation. And his director of communications quit last week.

“We are staffing up now because within the last week and a half, our contributions have gone up,” he said. “We’ve always had plans to add more staff, but I didn’t want to add them if I couldn’t afford them.”

Mr. Cain estimated that donations were up tenfold, “and that might be low now considering what’s happening in the last few days.”

The campaign says that 75 percent of donors have contributed $100 or less. “My mood is a lot better these days because the mainstream media has finally figured out that they’re not going to determine who the top two candidates are,” Mr. Cain said. “The voters are going to determine that. I wake up in the morning excited and thrilled, and looking forward to the day.”

Una de las razones puede ser su compromiso de no gastar más de lo que se tiene, que ya expresó en verano.

Hasta ahora el tiempo le ha dado la razón: con una campaña pequeña, está en una posición privilegiada a menos de tres meses de las primarias; mientras tanto, Pawlenty, que montó una gran organización, está fuera porque operó por encima de sus posibilidades; y Bachmann está padeciendo el mismo mal.