#999 plan

It’s been less than 24 hours since the polls closed and already the first shots in an emerging civil war within the conservative movement are being fired. Right-leaning pundits have been taking turns beating up on Mitt Romney and blaming him for the loss last night. Donald Trump just tweeted, “Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle. Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money.” And GOP leaders are already taking to the barricades on either side of the divide, which basically comes down to this question: Were Romney and the GOP too conservative or not conservative enough?

Steve Schmidt, a top Republican strategist who ran John McCain’s 2008 campaign, invoked the term on MSNBC this morning. “When I talk about a civil war in the Republican Party, what I mean is, it’s time for Republican elected leaders to stand up and to repudiate this nonsense [of the extreme right wing], and to repudiate it directly,” he said.

But on the other side of the fight, Herman Cain, the former presidential candidate who still has a robust following via his popular talk radio program and speaking tours, today suggested the most clear step to open civil war: secession. Appearing on Bryan Fischer’s radio program this afternoon, Cain called for a large faction of Republican Party leaders to desert the party and form a third, more conservative party.

“I never thought that I would say this, and this is the first time publicly that I’ve said it: We need a third party to save this country. Not Ron Paul and the Ron Paulites. No. We need a legitimate third party to challenge the current system that we have, because I don’t believe that the Republican Party … has the ability to rebrand itself,” Cain said.

Fischer, a social conservative leader, noted that he predicted this summer that if Mitt Romney loses, evangelical conservatives would start a third party. “If Barack Obama wins this election the Republican Party as we know it is finished, it is dead, it is toast,” Fischer said in September at the Values Voter Summit in Washington.

Herman Cain was on American Family Radio's "Today's Issues" program today with host Tim Wildmon where he was asked what he thought about the upcoming June recall election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Cain responded by warning that if Walker is recalled, businesses in Wisconsin will leave the state and unions "will continue to destroy the state."  Cain then went on to assert that when he was in charge of Godfather's Pizza, his employees had ever right to try and form a union, just as he had every right to fire them for trying to do so. 

If Governor Walker is recalled, the unions win and Wisconsin loses. I already know businesses in Wisconsin that say if the unions prevail and Governor Walker loses, they are packing up and leaving. 

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When I ran Godfather's Pizza, my employees had every right - every right - to unionize if they wanted to. The good news is, because of the kind of work environment we created, they didn't want to unionize. But they had every right to unionize. Now, if they had decided to unionize, I could also decide to fire all of 'em.

Cain is stuck on stupid.

Once you open the door to ending your candidacy, it’s very, very hard to close it again. But Herman Cain, according to a report in National Review, opened that door in a call with senior staff this morning.

Reporters are scrambling to decipher what exactly Cain said. A Des Moines Register reporter paraphrases it as “@THEHermanCain tells staff on conference call just now that he is reassessing his campaign, like he’s done several times already” — and quotes him as saying, “If a decision is made, different than we should plow ahead, u all will be the first to know.”

Politico has a different read: “one source told POLITICO that the reference had been about how much staff and offices they could afford right now.”