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The front page of The Washington Post takes a couple of new shots at Herman Cain today, looking beyond his recent to scandal to suggest that the real problem with his job at the National Restaurant Association is that he wasn't very good at it.
The main A1 story, under the headline, "For Cain, some troubles as trade group chief," mentions "problems" and "struggles" for the president candidate when he was the head of the NRA in the late 1990s. But digging into the actual story, it's hard to see what exactly those struggles were. There plenty of quotes from former colleagues, saying that Cain was likable and outgoing and had a talent for schmoozing with Washington power brokers — all important skills when you work in hospitality. But despite five named authors and researcher, the article has a harder time listing any actual troubles Cain had doing his job.
The story (in the third paragraph from the end) says "Some colleagues say he had difficulty with his new job," but it's never made clear what those difficulties were. It's implied that Cain spent too much money and wasn't all that interested in managing a large staff (or taking orders from the association's board), but there's almost no concrete examples of Cain's problems as a leader. The only on the record complaint is that he didn't have the "temperament" to be an association executive, but that doesn't mean he wasn't doing what he was paid for. The article even explicitly says that he helped raise the organization's profile in Washington, DC; a pretty important goal for a trade group.