President Barack Obama is playing two games with the American public, says Herman Cain: "distraction politics" and class warfare.
Cain, the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza and a GOP presidential contender in 2012, took aim at Obama's recent statements on the Keystone pipeline and on "phony scandals."
Appearing on Fox News Channel's "Your World with Neil Cavuto," Cain said the 2,000 jobs that will be created directly by the Keystone pipeline doesn't include jobs created indirectly. It also would increase America's accessibility to oil and gasoline, he said.
In a Tuesday speech, Obama said the pipeline, favored by most Republicans and opposed by most Democrats, would create 2,000 jobs during construction, but only about 50 permanent jobs. His own State Department has estimated it would produce more than 40,000 jobs over time.
"He's right about one thing," Cain said of Obama. "Keystone is not a jobs plan, it's a jobs start. Nobody ever claimed that the Keystone oil pipeline was going to be all we needed to get a robust economy going."
The rhetoric is part of Obama's effort at "districation politics," Cain said. "He wants people focused on his careless use of numbers."
The same is true, Cain said, of his recent talk of "phony scandals" that Obama claims his opponents are using as a distraction of their own.
"The American people – those who are not gullible – they're not buying it," Cain said. "There was nothing phony about the people who died in Benghazi. There's nothing phony about the abuse of the IRS."
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