Herman Cain Blasts Obama: He‘s Not ’A Strong Black Man’

When GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain sat down with The New York Times, he made his opinions about President Barack Obama known (and painfully so). The interview, published earlier today, tackled Cain's partisan allegiances, the Tea Party, his reasons for becoming a Republican, and his opinions surrounding the president's background, among others issues.

The first question the Times' Andrew Goldman asked regarded whether or not Cain had insinuated that Obama isn't really a black man. Cain's response is intriguing:

...Look, I’m not getting into this whole thing about President Obama. It is documented that his mother was white and his father was from Africa. If he wants to call himself black, fine. If he wants to call himself African-American, fine. I’m not going down this color road.

That statement caused Goldman to probe further. The reporter replied "But you're saying he's not really a black man." To that, Cain said:

Not in terms of a strong black man that I’m identifying with. I identify with a strong black man like Martin Luther King Jr., or my dad, Luther Cain Jr., who didn’t have a lot of formal education, but he had a Ph.D. in common sense.

At one point Goldman asked the awkward question, "When did you start referring to yourself in the third person?" Cain's answer? "I’ve always done that."

Other issues dealt with in the interview include the Tea Party's alleged racism (which Cain flatly rejects), the path through which the businessman made his way to the Republican Party, his willingness to take advice from Obama (Cain admits that his campaign staff read David Plouffe's book about the president's 2008 fundraising strategy) and plenty more.

Click here to read the entire interview.