There is talk at the convention about the lack of a Republican minority vote, and of course almost no visible minorities can be found on the floor, which appears instead to be a stimulus program for bow tie shops and purveyors of seersucker fabric. One stat you hear, but no one laughs about, is that according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Mitt Romney is losing the African-American vote by a margin of 94 percent to 0 percent. Statistically speaking, Romney is pulling a zero. (John McCain earned 4 percent of the African-American vote, George W. Bush 9 percent.) So, yesterday, far away from prime-time television, Herman Cain raged before a Republican audience about the number. “I am not,” he said, “a zero.” The third-string gag writers were invited to take over from there.
