Cain to Newsmax: Romney Needs to ‘Keep Telling the Truth’

Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain tells Newsmax.TV that “Mitt Romney should ignore the media and keep telling the truth.”

“This media, the mainstream establishment media, is in the tank with President Obama, and this is another example of how,” Cain tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview. “Mitt Romney’s stated a fact that 47 percent of the people don’t pay taxes. He stated a fact that many of them are going to vote for President Obama because they want to continue to get assistance, not pay taxes or whatever the case may be. He simply stated a fact.

“Here’s another fact that he stated: ‘I’m probably not going to convince those people to vote for me.’ That was a fact. But now the mainstream establishment media want to turn that into something that’s controversial.

“The liberal media sees anything that’s factual as controversial when it’s being stated by the Republican candidate or whether it’s vice-presidential candidate Ryan,” Cain said.

Cain, former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, entered the presidential race in May 2011 and was the front-runner for a time during the fall. He suspended his campaign on Dec. 3 and has endorsed Romney.

He was among the many Republicans who rallied to Romney’s defense on Tuesday after a videotape surfaced showing him characterizing supporters of President Obama as people "dependent on the government" who "believe that they are victims."

“He said absolutely nothing wrong,” Cain said of the former Massachusetts governor’s remarks to a private group of donors in Florida earlier this summer.

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Cain is crisscrossing the nation over the next 30 days as a part of his “Job Creators Solutions Truth Tour.”

Organized with Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot Inc., the tour brings national business executives and economic experts to 30 cities to share “truth” with college students, job creators and business leaders – as well as with faith-based and community leaders.

Arthur Laffer, who served on President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Advisory Council, will join Cain on Wednesday for a luncheon with business leaders in Tampa, Fla. Laffer also endorsed Cain’s “9-9-9 Tax Replacement Plan” on Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal.

“We believe that those three constituencies we need to reach out to on behalf of conservative values and conservative principles in order to achieve what is my ultimate mission and the ultimate mission of millions of people: to defeat Barack Obama,” Cain said. “Research shows that young people, students, they have gotten over the promise of hope and change because they see that it is not the hope and change that they thought.

“With business people, we have an untapped resource: their employees. So we want to share the facts and the truth about the economy, about energy, about spending and about the future of this country such that they can take that message back to their employees and the community leaders.”

Among some of the biggest lies being told Americans, Cain said, concern the economy, unemployment, energy independence and the national debt.

“The top lies start with this economy being in a recovery. No it is not. All you have to do is look at the fact that economic growth is measured by GDP and that has been averaging less than two percent a year for the last three years. China is growing at 7 or 8 percent in a bad year.

“The lie that we are becoming more energy independent: No we are not. We are more energy dependent because of the barriers created by this administration.

“The unemployment rate, that’s another lie,” Cain continued. “It’s not 8.1 percent because it’s closer to 15 percent, if you count the unemployed and the underemployed in that particular number.

And, “The situation relative to the debt: The administration wants you to think, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Yes we do. It turns out that the interest on $16 trillion alone is almost equal to what we’re going to spend on national defense.

“This is why we’re doing this Truth Tour. When you present people the raw facts about what’s happening, they get it. And we want more people to know what the facts are.”

Cain then added: “The biggest liars in Washington would be a tossup between many of the Democratic leaders, members of the administration and – with all due respect – let’s say that our president has stretched the truth.”

He points to President Obama’s claims about creating 4 million private-sector jobs since taking office. “What he’s not telling you is that we’ve lost 4.5 million jobs in the private sector. What does that mean? The net is this economy is down in the private sector by at least 500,000 jobs.

“Some people will say that’s not a lot but when you omit the rest of the number, it turns out to be the same thing in my opinion.”

Also in his exclusive Newsmax interview, Cain:

• Rebuked critics who said that Romney’s comments at the Boca Raton gathering were racist. “They were not racist in nature. They want to make Mitt Romney the subject. They want to basically demagogue him because they are in the tank for Barack Obama in this election,” he said, referring to the liberal mainstream media.

• Said Romney’s presidential campaign will not lose its luster because of the remarks. “At the end of the day, I don’t think it will hurt Mitt Romney’s campaign because the people that aren’t going to vote for Mitt Romney, they’ve already decided that they’re not going to vote for Mitt Romney. The reason it’s going to be a close race is because he is not going to try and convince those people that have already made up their mind that they’re going to vote for President Obama.”

• Summed up the president’s foreign policy in three words: “appeasement, confusion and weakness. I firmly believe that this administration had prior warnings that this could happen, and they did not step up security, especially in Benghazi. There’s no way that these outbreaks in all of these countries are an accident. And for this administration to think that the American people are stupid enough to believe that these are spontaneous shows you just how out of touch they are with reality and with the American people.”