2012 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain unleashed a blistering rebuke to 2016 hopeful Jeb Bush Monday over Bush's recent referencing of his failed campaign, saying "[a] guy with his name, his money and the team behind him" "should certainly not be letting Donald Trump wipe the floor with him."
In a posting on
his official website, Cain pulled no punches in replying to
Bush's remarks last week at a Longboat Key, Florida fundraiser, in which the former Sunshine State governor brought up "the fall of Herman Cain," as Cain put it, as a way to dismiss the current insurgent outsider candidacies of Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
"If you want to say I had a 'fall,' go ahead, I guess," Cain wrote. "You can't fall when you've never gotten any higher than the floor in the first place, and that's the state of the Jeb Bush campaign."
"A guy with his name, his money and the team behind him should be one of the top-tier contenders, and he should certainly not be letting Donald Trump wipe the floor with him if Trump is as unserious and unqualified as Bush would have you believe."
The former Godfather Pizza executive defended his 2012 effort, which he claims made much more of an impact than Bush has so far with the enormous resources at his disposal.
"At the height of my campaign I was in first place at 24 percent," he wrote. "Even when I left the race I was in third place at 14 [percent]. Who am I? A guy who ran a pizza company and had a successful corporate career before hosting a talk show in Atlanta. I was not anonymous but I was hardly famous."
"Who is Jeb Bush? He is the former governor of Florida and he has one of the most famous political last names in America. He has more political money behind him than any candidate in this race with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton. And how is he doing in the polls? The current Real Clear Politics average shows him in fifth place at 5.5 percent."
Cain, noting that he had accepted Trump's invitation to speak at a campaign rally in Georgia Monday, warned Bush not to count on any such "fall" from the current runaway front-runner for the GOP nomination.
"Trump is very smart, has done his homework and has learned a lot from what happened in many previous campaigns – including mine," he wrote.
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