Herman Cain to Jeb Bush: ‘At least I was once winning’

Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain lashed out at Jeb Bush in a blistering op-ed published Monday, saying he did better in his losing 2012 run than Bush has been able to do in 2016.

“At least I was once winning,” Cain wrote on his website. “Jeb Bush has been doing nothing but losing throughout this entire campaign. His problem is him.”

{mosads}Last week, Bush reportedly pointed to Cain, a pizza magnate who led the GOP presidential field in October and November of 2011, as evidence that outsiders such as Donald Trump and Ben Carson will falter before the first votes are cast in Iowa.

Cain, who will appear at a rally with Trump on Monday in Georgia, kicked back in the op-ed, saying the former Florida governor has underperformed expectations and failed even to match Cain’s 2012 efforts.

“He is the former governor of Florida and he has one of the most famous political last names in America,” Cain wrote. “He has more political money behind him than any candidate in this race with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton. And how is he doing in the polls? The current Real Clear Politics average shows him in fifth place at 5.5 percent.”

“If you want to say I had a ‘fall,’ go ahead, I guess,” Cain continued. “You can’t fall when you’ve never gotten any higher than the floor in the first place, and that’s the state of the Jeb Bush campaign.”

Cain argued that Bush is underestimating the strength of the outsider candidates this year and called Bush “desperate” for likening the leaders of the current field to “the pizza guy” who was once the party’s front-runner.

“It’s a different year, and Donald Trump is a different guy,” Cain wrote. “I realize that the Bush political cabal may see all icky outsiders as the same, and thus assume that all will have the same fate. I wouldn’t bet on that. … [Trump has] stayed atop the polls a lot longer than I did, and his rivals haven’t accomplished much by sitting around invoking whatever it is that they think happened to me.”

“Even if Trump does come back to the pack at some point, there are other candidates much better positioned to pick up support because they’re much more appealing than Mr. Famous Political Name,” he continued. “And really, when you haven’t come anywhere close to what some pizza guy once did, you sound pretty desperate trying to use the pizza guy as your defense.”