Cain On Immigration: Electric Fence, Barbed Wire, Alligators

Herman Cain, the GOP darling du jour, was in Tennessee this past weekend where he shared 2 main points about his ideas on immigration: build a fence;  electrify it.

Context doesn’t make what he said any better: he spoke at a Tea Party sponsored rally where, according to the New York Times, he said his plan is to “secure the border for real.”

“It’s going to be 20 feet high. It’s going to have barbed wire on the top. It’s going to be electrified. And there’s going to be a sign on the other side saying, ‘It will kill you — Warning.’” At an earlier rally, on the campus of Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville, Tenn., he added that the sign would be written “in English and in Spanish.”

It makes you nostalgic for Rick Perry. The Texas governor may have fallen in the polls for lacking substance, but at least he doesn’t fill the lack with shtick.  Cain’s campaign, so far, has been filled with catchy ideas and attention-getting pranks. Almost every expert who has weighed-in on Cain’s “9-9-9” econimic plan find it regressive, but when he serenaded a crowd with his rendition of Impossible Dream, no one seemed to care.

This is the same guy who says he wants to dig a moat along the border, is okay with putting alligators in it and barbed wire over it, then reinforce that with a 20 foot-high electric fence. The humanitarian in him, though, wants to put a warning sign on the fence, in English and Spanish, and that could make him look soft on immigration – he should be careful about what he says.

Try as I may, I can’t be upset over this. This is so over the top, so sideshow-ish, that it can’t be taken seriously, and that may speak volumes about the Cain campaign itself.  What caught my attention about the electrified border fence idea was this:

The remarks, which came at two campaign rallies in Tennessee as part of a barnstorming bus tour across the state, drew loud cheers from crowds of several hundred people at each rally.

If the political sooth-sayers are right, Cain will fizzle in direct proportion to the attention he attracts. But what about the feelings of the crowds that cheer his radical ideas? Cain was “chastised” about his “insensitive” immigration plan – his response:

“It’s insensitive for them to be killing our citizens, killing our border agents,” he said. “That’s what’s insensitive. And that mess has to stop.”

That’s the kind of  inflammatory misinformation that drives hard wedges for the sake of political gain. And this is the GOP front-runner?