2016 Postmortem

mahatmakanejeeves

(57,283 posts) Mon Jan 27, 2014, 11:50 AM Jan 2014

Why Is Herman Cain Trying to Cure Your Erectile Dysfunction?

Why Is Herman Cain Trying to Cure Your Erectile Dysfunction? When failed presidential candidates become spam kings

BY BEN ADLER

It has been more than two years since those giddy weeks when the political press brimmed with stories about Herman Cain, front-runner for the Republican nomination for president of the United States. But Cain die-hards can still stay abreast of the ex-candidate’s positions, via his e-mail list. Roughly 360,000 people receive the messages, which are sent through Best of Cain, the online media venture he set up after the campaign. The e-mails from Cain and the website’s small stable of writers arrive at a steady clip, many of them elucidating the Cain take on the news of the day. “A serious leader would have abandoned Obamacare long ago,” one proclaimed in December, clearing up any doubt about where Cain stood on the Affordable Care Act’s less-than-smooth rollout.

But sometimes Cain’s digital missives, like a conversation with a weird uncle, veer into the unexpected. An example—there are more and more to choose from—is a message that Cain sent to his followers last July bearing the subject line, “BREAKTHROUGH: REMEDY FOR ED!”
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The erectile-dysfunction ad is one of more than 50 similar pitches for miracle cures and easy-money tricks that Cain has passed along to his e-mail followers over the past two years. While he has been particularly unabashed in his embrace of the practice, he is not the only past presidential candidate hawking sketchy products. Newt Gingrich now pings the e-mail subscribers to his Gingrich Productions with messages from an investment firm formed by a conspiracy theorist successfully sued for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mike Huckabee uses his own production company’s list to blast out links to heart-disease fixes and can’t-miss annuities.