"I'm out here trying to get my Mitt Romney on," said obscenely ridiculous Lil B at his recent rambling New York University lecture. This is a sentiment with which most of us can agree, including the unendingly compelling Herman Cain. Besides discussing the road to success, which Cain characterized as having many zigs and zags, he also postulated Mitt Romney's Republican nomination at his Northwestern University speech on Tuesday, praising him in a more articulate manner than Mr. B.
Besides the shared appreciation of Romney between these two men, there are plenty of other comparisons that can be made between the Based God and the CEO of Godfather's Pizza. Neither of them takes themselves seriously, as far as I understand their enigmatic personas. Lil B inundates the Internet with absurd amounts of music and social networking diatribes, all in what seems to be a satirical manner. Cain similarly acknowledges the sillier aspects of his presidential campaign, most notably the use of content from the Pokemon 2000 movie. He spoke self-deprecatingly, truthfully admitting that he initially had no idea the quote was from this film.
Lil B and Herman Cain are ardent supporters of their own life philosophies and plans. B's is a little harder to pin down, but it has something to do with loving everyone and appreciating ants. Cain told the crowd at the recent speech that we could acquire our dreams with simple goal-oriented stepping stones. They both find value in the individual, declaratively supporting work ethic and fruition of aspirations. Each man also has their respective strange, niche focus. For Cain, it comes in the form of a tax plan he labels as 9-9-9, something he is standing by with the fervency of the Rock of Gibraltar. He revealed himself to be a media savvy, self-promoter al a Mr. Based God, reminding his audience frequently that he has a website where the 9-9-9 film can be observed, as well where its novella adaptation can be purchased.
These are self-made men cut from the same cloth with only a generation to separate them. One of the only real discernable differences between their presentations was whether or not they supported fracking. Lil B trumpeted preventative action against it, saying, "let's stop fracking. Who knows about hydraulic fracking?" Cain alternatively claimed that fracking was necessary in order to combat the United States' dependence on foreign oil. This was after he labeled a report false, which was released by Brookings regarding his tax reupholstering policy's inability to ameliorate the government's debt.
Cain is neither a bad speaker, nor a bad person, but rather a misguided individual. It is tough to ascertain whether his entire political agenda is a sham predicated on revealing how idiotic politics can be, or if he has ever believed some of the most ridiculous stuff that has emerged from his mouth. The same can be said for the man that has reinvented himself as Lil B. His life philosophies are delivered with a degree of sincerity that is hard not to believe him. The only flaw in this comparison is that Cain at one point may have actually been a contender for the Republican nomination. It's a shoddy representation of the party itself. And on a remarkably liberal campus, it was simply stupid for the Northwestern University College Republicans group to draw the poor man into the lion's den. Warnings were issued by a member of the group that students who took their shirts off would be vacated from the premises. They knew what they were in for.
It is easy to revel in the charisma and sheer weirdness of both of these figures but it's somewhat of a perturbing notion to think of Cain as a potential policymaker. Then again, if this is all a joke, as I believe Lil B's image is, Cain has played a masterful prank. As he stumbled through insensitive references to Muslims, historical inaccuracies and various one-liners, I realized that I might want to hang out with Herman Cain as little as I would with Lil B. Until that fateful day when either of them shows up at my doorstep and says in a satisfyingly creepy manner, "I'm paying taxes and loving it." Now you decide which one of them said that.