The Cain train pulls back

Herman Cain's presidential campaign has suffered through a few gaffes and oddities since his surge to frontrunner status in national polls last month. He's hanging in there, but his team is pulling back to avoid any more immediate damage, self-inflicted or otherwise.

From The Daily Beast:

“We’re trying to slow down a little bit, make sure he’s rested, make sure he’s focused,” says J.D. Gordon, the campaign’s vice president for communications. The goal is to achieve a “more deliberate pace…so we don’t make those kinds of mistakes.”

Gordon says his boss has been doing as many as seven or eight events a day, “and when you do that and don’t use a Teleprompter, sometimes you can make a mistake… People understand he’s not a career politician; he’s very spontaneous, they know how fast he’s going. People give him more leeway than they would someone who’s in Congress or a governor.”

Lack of sleep is the problem, says Gordon. Of Cain's incoherent position on abortion, as he articulated (for lack of a better word) on "Piers Morgan Tonight," Gordon said Cain was "really tired." And of Cain's botched explanation about possibly negotiating with al-Qaeda, Gordon said he was "was only going on about four hours’ sleep."