Herman Cain: A Grave Dilemma for Democrats and White Liberals

Belafonte (the “Calypso king”) derided Cain as a “bad apple.”

In response to Belafonte, Cain stormed: “The only tactic that they [black liberals] have to try and intimidate me and shut me up is to call me names, and this sort of thing. It just simply won't work.”

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As for Cain, he has handled the slings and arrows thrust upon him with humor, charm and aplomb -- and with some potentially inflammatory statements. Notably, he has said that black Americans have been “brainwashed” into voting Democrat and also boasted that he escaped the Democratic “plantation” long ago.

Meanwhile, if Cain’s campaign continues to gain momentum, the mainstream media will have to deal with him – and it will be fascinating to see how they acquit themselves.

Aside from Fox News and The Wall Street Journal (both of which are controlled by Rupert Murdoch and clearly espouse a conservative, right-wing bias, whether they admit it or not), most mainstream, big-time media outlets in the U.S. are, to put it mildly, left-of-center.

Thus far, most conservative media has praised Cain, while liberal outlets have either been mildly negative or maintained a cold distance.

For example, Cain told conservative radio host Neal Boortz on Tuesday: "A lot of these liberal, leftist folk in this country, that are black, they're more racist than the white people that they're claiming to be racist… How dare Herman Cain, first, run as a Republican? How dare Herman Cain be conservative? And how dare he move up in the polls, so that he just might challenge our beloved [President Barack] Obama? That's the problem they have."

These contentious remarks seemed like a direct challenge to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Obama himself.

Indeed, perhaps most controversially, Cain has questioned Obama’s “blackness.”

"He's [Obama] never been part of the black experience in America," Cain told reporters. "I can talk about that. I can talk about what it really meant to be 'po' before I was poor."

As risky as this remark might have been, it was a brilliant gambit by Cain -- as a black American man from the Deep South who grew up under segregation he has turned the tables on Obama and his supporters by pointing out that the president (who is of mixed race and grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia) has little or no familiarity with the “authentic” black American experience.