REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL hopeful Herman Cain yesterday attempted to destroy the credibility of Sharon Bialek, the woman who on Monday accused him of saying “You want the job, right?” when groping her in a car 14 years ago.
Ms Bialek was the fourth woman in a week to alledge sexual misconduct by Mr Cain, but she is the first to have done so publicly.
“Who is Sharon Bialek?” Mr Cain asked in an e-mail to his supporters hours before he promised to “set the record straight” in a press conference in Arizona late yesterday.
Ms Bialek’s story was “patently false”, the e-mail said.
“The fact is that Ms Bialek has had a long and troubled history, from the courts to personal finances – which may help explain why she has come forward 14 years after an alleged incident with Mr Cain, powered by celebrity attorney and long-term Democrat donor Gloria Allred,” Mr Cain’s message said.
In two opinion polls published yesterday, but conducted before Ms Bialek’s press conference, Mr Cain remained tied for first place with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
A USA Today/Gallup poll showed Mr Cain and Mr Romney at 21 per cent, followed by the former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich at 12 per cent and Texas governor Rick Perry at 11 per cent.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed 28 per cent for Mr Romney and 27 per cent for Mr Cain.
But the second poll also indicated that the percentage of voters with a negative opinion of Mr Cain had risen from 18 per cent last month to 35 per cent now.
This is the second week that the scandal over Mr Cain’s alleged harassment of employees at the National Restaurant Association, which he headed in the late 1990s, has dominated US news.
The former pizza magnate’s ignorance of domestic and international politics – the fact he did not know who the neo-conservatives were or that China possesses nuclear weapons – have received far less attention.
Last week Mr Cain refused to discuss the accusations. He changed course on Monday night, after Ms Bialek went public. “There is not an ounce of truth in all of the accusations,” he said, explaining his about-face thus:
“When I made a statement that I’m done talking about this, I was talking about the firestorm last week, I wasn’t talking about this new firestorm that we discovered . We are going to talk about this one... I will talk about any and all future firestorms.”
In one of the more bizarre moments of Mr Cain’s appearance on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, he adopted the air of an ingénue to quote his wife Gloria, who had watched Ms Bialek’s press conference on television: “ ‘The things that that woman described,’ she said, ‘that doesn’t even sound like you, and I’ve known you for 45 years’.”
Mr Cain recounted: “My own wife said that I wouldn’t do anything as silly as what that lady was talking about.”
Exactly one year before the US presidential election, the Republican party finds itself with two seriously handicapped frontrunners.
Mr Cain cannot extricate himself from the harassment scandal and Mr Romney cannot overcome the antipathy of Republican voters who regard him as a consummate “flip-flopper”.
If Mr Romney becomes the party’s nominee, influential conservative commentator Erick Erickson of Redstate.com wrote in a much-remarked upon blog yesterday, “conservatism dies and Barack Obama wins.”
The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed Mr Obama would beat Mr Romney 49 per cent to 43 per cent, compared to 46 per cent to 44 per cent a month ago.
“Mr Romney is going to be the Republican nominee ... because the other candidates, right now, are a pretty pathetic lot,” Mr Erickson wrote.
The conservative base would not forgive Mr Perry for granting Mexican students lower university fees reserved for Texans. They could not forget that the thrice-married Mr Gingrich allegedly took divorce papers to his first wife when she was recovering from surgery in hospital.
Because of the harassment scandal, Mr Cain too would be unable to win women voters, Mr Erickson predicted: “Cain’s handling of the story has so far been an epic disaster.”
Mr Erickson said Americans “loath a man so fuelled with ambition that he will say or do anything to get himself elected. Mitt Romney is that man.”