by Jules Witcover

Herman Cain's reaction to the allegations of sexual harrassment against him, that "I really know what it feels like to be No. 1," has as much truth as humor in it.

While any such charges against any presidential candidate were bound to be blood-hounded by the news media, the fact that the former head of the National Restaurant Association had risen to the top of several public-opinion polls guaranteed the wide circulation of the story, first published by the Politico news organization.

Nor did it take long for one ultraconservative, rabble-rousing commentator, Ann Coulter, to allege that "this is another high-tech lynching," in Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's outrageous characterization of his confirmation hearings investigating only generally similar allegations against him in 1991.

So far at least, no accuser has come forward publicly with allegations against Cain, as Anita Hill did in her comprehensively detailed charges against Thomas, her former employer at a federal government agency. The fact that both Cain and Thomas are African-Americans is the obvious reed to be clutched in making the comparison.

In this day and age of greater awareness and sensitivity to sexual harrassment in the workplace or anywhere else, officials and celebrities are particularly vulnerable to such charges. They often are made for justifiable reasons or just in the accusers' pursuit of publicity or even blackmail money.

In the Anita Hill case, the stakes were especially high, not only for Thomas himself but for the country; hanging in the balance was the question of putting him on the U.S. Supreme Court for a lifetime. His unvarnished conservative views, which in subsequent practice made him a near-clone of the court's conservative leader, Justice Antonin Scalia, were critical in a host of the court's rulings.

Not only was Hill, now a prominent law professor at Brandeis University, a very public and direct accuser of Hill, offering astonishingly lurid details of her allegations against Thomas. Her testimony was backed up by other African-American women with whom she had confided.

Furthermore, other such women told Senate Judiciary Committee investigators of other accusations against Thomas and were brought to Washington to testify. At least two of them were prepared to appear before the Committee in the final hours of the memorably marathon weekend hearings but were not called.

The then chairman of the committee, Joe Biden of Delaware, now the vice president, later cited disagreement among committee members about calling them, and the lateness of the hour, as reasons they never testified. But their depositions were included in the hearings' printed record and seemed clearly pertinent to the allegations. Biden himself said later he believed that if Thomas had been a white man, he never would have been confirmed, seeming to imply that being a black man saved his appointment.

As for Thomas's charge that the hearings were "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks," that characterization was a blatant playing of the race card by a man who often in prior years had deplored the use of race as an apology for lack of personal advancement.

Throughout the hearings, Thomas had refused to respond to any of Hill's explicit allegations, despite urgings from Biden and other Democrats that he at least comment on them. Instead, he used the allegations to cast himself as a wronged black man. All he would say was that Hill must have "misconstrued" any of his actions -- and, if so, "I am so sorry, and I wish I had known."

Cain to his credit so far has declined to play that race card in the Thomas manner. He finally has conceded that he has been told there was some "settlement" made by his association to one accusing employee, but that he was unaware of it, and that he hopes it was small, because he hadn't done anything wrong.

Unless Cain's political comet continues to climb, which is not expected, the whole matter is likely to fade. That is, unless his ultraconservative defenders continue to bleat the totally inappropriate "high-tech lynching" canard that was so shamelessly but successfully exploited by Clarence Thomas 20 years ago.

 

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