Cain seen by some as ‘force of nature’

In that five-minute performance, the crowd saw the budding Hermanator: practiced, polished, sometimes hilarious, able to make the Cain Experience into more than the sum of its parts.

This was Cain’s Omaha period — 14 years when he realized youthful dreams of success, connected with power brokers and constructed a larger-than-life version of himself.

He became known as a fix-it guy who projected confidence and burnished an image. Cain closed more than a quarter of Godfather’s outlets, yet is remembered not for cutting hundreds of jobs but for saving the company. He went to Washington to pick fights as the restaurant industry’s chief lobbyist, opposing minimum wage hikes and smoking bans, but is remembered for booming oratory and mischievous wit.

And people began to urge him to run for office —particularly when he criss-crossed the country selling his boot-straps story, seasoned with a helping of anti-government fervor.

These days, The Hermanator is so hot, he could be called The Thermanator. Two polls last week — New York Times/CBS and Fox News — showed Cain atop the GOP presidential field, leading Mitt Romney by four points in each. He shows no sign of fading, even as opponents and critics savage his 9-9-9 tax plan and deride his command of foreign policy.

An examination of Cain’s Omaha years provides insight into Cain as a candidate. Interviews, media reports and public records show that vision and inspiration, not necessarily details, have long been Cain’s strong suit.

At Godfather’s, he rallied the troops and made tough decisions while a partner made sure the bills got paid and pizzas got delivered. With the National Restaurant Association, he became the face of opposition that killed President Bill Clinton’s health care plan, but a critic charged that he never really absorbed the nitty-gritty of the proposal he fought.

Recently, he boasted “I created millions of jobs for 40 years.” But the arithmetic is not on his side: Even to reach just 1 million jobs, Cain would have had to create 25,000 a year for four decades. That might be a tough number to justify: The Godfather’s saga includes store closings, and Cain sat on Whirlpool’s board when the company subsumed Maytag, cut 4,500 jobs and moved a factory to Mexico.

Cain is bigger than life and sometimes his rhetoric, honed for 25 years in convention speeches and after-dinner talks, is even bigger than him.

“I think of Herman as a force of nature,” said Sibby Wolfson, an Omaha woman who worked for T.H.E. Inc. (The Hermanator Experience), his speech-making firm, from 1997 to about 2003. “We called him the Hermancaine, like a hurricane. If you met Herman, you noticed him. He was charismatic, magnetic. You could almost feel the air change when he came into a room.”

But Judy Wicks, a Pennsylvania restaurateur who debated Cain on national television in 1994, remembers malarkey, not motivation.

Earlier that year, Cain made a name for himself when he confronted Clinton at a town hall meeting, telling the president his health care mandate would destroy jobs and that his calculations were wrong. Wicks supported the plan and the administration asked her to tell her side of the issue.

“I went out and bought a copy of the Clinton plan, looked at the formula and saw it’d be good,” said Wicks. “I found out he [Cain] hadn’t even read it. He had a knee-jerk reaction to the plan and pontificated without knowledge. To me, it’s the same with the 9-9-9. He still hasn’t done the research.”

Cain, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, dismissed Wicks’ assertion as “silly.”

“I read enough of it to know it would destroy jobs,” he said Friday, speaking by phone from a bus heading to an appearance in Alabama.

Cain said his time in Omaha was transformational; he experienced success while determining that government over-regulation could harm a business. “That helped convert me from an independent to a conservative,” he said.

Life in Omaha

Cain’s now almost-legendary story of business success is built on turning around Omaha-based Godfather’s Pizza. Cain, a rising executive of Pillsbury, which owned the chain, arrived 1986 (he jokingly notes it was April Fools Day) with orders to stop the financial bleeding. Cain made Ron Gartlan, a Godfather’s executive, his right-hand man and set about simplifying the menu and cutting non-performing franchises.

“I was looking forward to having the responsibility that the buck stops here,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘I can do this.’ ”

Within two years, the chain went from about 725 restaurants to 525, and the profits returned. Cain told the Nation’s Restaurant News he wished he made the cuts quicker. “After you spend a while working with people, it gets difficult,” he said.

His efforts to stabilize the company were substantial. But it was not a one-man show, said Tim McMahon, Godfather’s former marketing director who worked with franchisees’ advertising campaigns.

“When Herman came in, he came in with fire; he comes in with a discrepant view of the status quo,” he said. “He changed the culture of the company; it was very dramatic.

“But you can’t give Herman all the credit,” said McMahon. “Ron Gartlan was really the meat, the substance. He was the money guy, the operations guy, the logistics guy. Herman Cain is the guy who brings the excitement and motivation.”

Cain and Gartlan bought the company from Pillsbury in 1988 for a reported $50 million, with Cain staying on as CEO until 1995, when his attention shifted to the National Restaurant Association.

Despite Cain’s success at Godfather’s, the chain is not considered a significant national brand, said Wally Butkus, of Restaurant Research, a firm tracking chain restaurants. “That name really doesn’t come up,” he said. Godfather’s was ranked third or fourth among national chains in 1986, but PMQ Pizza Magazine ranks Godfather’s as 10th among pizza chains in sales.

When Cain moved to Omaha 25 years ago, it was a city of 300,000 with a political culture less conservative than Nebraska as whole. Godfather’s is an important company there, although ConAgra, Mutual of Omaha and mail-order staple Omaha Steaks dwarf it.

Cain split time between white, middle-class west Omaha, where he worked and lived, and more ethnically diverse north Omaha, where he attended Pilgrim Baptist Church, sang in its choir and contributed to community programs.

“Nebraska is a very conservative state; we used to call it the Mississippi of the Midwest,” said Bob Armstrong, an African-American who headed the city’s housing authority. “You don’t have a large, thriving black population.”

Cain, he said, used his business influence to fund scholarships and other programs in the African-American community, but he was not necessarily deeply tied to it.

“Herman was in a different world than most of us; he was a CEO and associated himself with CEOs,” Armstrong said. “We didn’t fault him for that. We were proud of him. For a black man to reach that status at that time, especially in Omaha, well, that was unheard of.”

In interviews, Omaha residents remember Cain mostly the same way: positive, aggressively outgoing, decisive.

“If you are looking for someone to say something negative about Herman, I don’t know of it,” said local attorney Dennis Hogan, who called Cain the embodiment of “the American dream.”

But Michael Strauss, former principal violist with the Omaha Symphony, calls Cain “an egomaniac and a narcissist.”

Strauss was fired after 12 years with the symphony after arguing with Cain following a 1994 performance featuring the CEO as guest vocalist. Strauss, who is Jewish and liberal, said Cain peppered the performance with “Christian testimony and snide political jokes.”

Strauss cornered Cain after the show. “This is the first time I’ve seen politics done on a symphony stage,” Strauss recalled telling him. Cain, he said, “started screaming at me. I was shocked at the way he treated me. He immediately started talking down to me.”

After the argument, Strauss said, Cain told management he would not perform unless Strauss was gone. Strauss was later fired.

Cain, in a letter to the orchestra’s director, said he was the one who was shocked by Strauss’ complaint, calling it an “emotional stomach punch.” He denied using the concert as a political forum.

An arbitration committee reversed Strauss’ firing, but he had moved on to another orchestra.

‘Fighting the Beast’

Cain served on the regional Federal Reserve Board from 1989 until 1996, becoming chairman of the Kansas City branch. The board is one of 12 nationwide that assess regional economic trends and advise the U.S. Fed.

But that board was not a platform that could propel a man with Cain’s ambition and oratorical talents.

In the early 1990s, Cain started serving on the board of the National Restaurant Association, a Washington lobbying organization. In April 1994, Cain who was still Godfather’s CEO, was set to take over as the association’s president when he took on Clinton at the town hall meeting.

Cain said the exchange was “providence.”

“I just thought, ‘If I get a chance to ask a question I want to open people’s eyes,” he said. Telling Clinton that the plan would kill jobs “was the fundamental stake-in-the-heart question.”

“He put us on the map as an officer,” said Thomas Kershaw, a Boston restaurateur whose tavern was the model for the TV show “Cheers.” “He took a sleepy organization doing a reasonable job to a dynamic organization with a new face and a new mission.”

In 1996, Cain was hired to be the full-time face of the organization. He still lived in Omaha but flew to Washington to take on government every chance he could. He called it “fighting the Beast,” opposing smoking bans, minimum wage bills, bills to lower the blood-alcohol levels for drivers and, of course, mandated health care. He called the plans job killers.

“I reduced the mission statement to three simple words: Represent, educate and promote,” he recalled, laughing that it is akin to his 9-9-9. “It was simple, resonating and powerful.”

Cain made people listen. “He likes to make it simple,” said Kershaw. “He knows people don’t like to digest too many messages.”

Cain moved the association to recruit and focus more on the issues of large restaurant chains. He also was part of a movement, headed by Kershaw, to move the association toward the GOP, said Bill Zeliff, then a Republican congressman from New Hampshire who led the association in the 1980s. In 1990, association members and their political action committee donated $588,000, about 80 percent to Republicans. By 1996, it was more than $1 million, 89 percent to Republicans, according to The Center for Responsive Politics.

“There’s no doubt this was a stepping stone for him,” Zeliff said. “It put a guy who runs a pizza operation into a different box. You’re affecting national legislation and then one day you look in a mirror and say, ‘I can do this.’ ”

Political ambitions

Cain often spoke of running for office during the 1990s, although he says it was others who brought up the subject.

He had a solid mentor in Jack Kemp, the former quarterback and 1988 GOP presidential candidate. Kemp had watched Cain on TV taking on Clinton in 1994 and liked what he saw. “Here’s a black guy who stands up with the voice of Othello, the looks of a football player, the English of Oxfordian quality and the courage of a lion,” Kemp told a reporter. Cain left the Fed to help Bob Dole’s presidential campaign because Kemp was Dole’s running mate.

In December 1996, the Omaha World Herald newspaper noted that Cain had ruled out running for local offices, saying he would prefer federal office or Nebraska governor. Asked about the presidency, Cain said with a booming laugh, “I don’t think America is ready for me.”

In 1998, he ruled out a U.S. Senate bid, saying he had a bigger goal: president.

In 1999, the National Journal profiled Cain in a story titled, “From Pizza to K Street to President?”

Cain last week said he didn’t want to spend time “working my way up the political ladder” like he had to do in business.

Shortly after, Cain moved back home to Atlanta, a bigger stage. He ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, finishing second, ahead of a longtime congressman.

Zeliff, the former New Hampshire congressman, was asked about Cain’s claims of being an outsider. He chuckled.

“He’s no outsider,” Zeliff said. “The bottom line? He wants to be an insider.”

Tune in

Herman Cain will be a guest on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” airing at 10:30 a.m. Sunday on WGCL-TV, Channel 46.