The Daily Hatch

Ames, Iowa — Following last night’s debate, Herman Cain greeted reporters inside Iowa State’s basketball arena, talking up his performance and his chances. He told National Review Online that regardless of where he finished in Ames, he would stay in the race. “The naysayers are reading the wrong tea leaves,” he said. “We had already decided that based upon the momentum we had coming into this debate, the debate and the straw poll, we’re not going anywhere. People need to get off this stuff, trying to pronounce us dead and out of the race.”

In the final hours before Iowans pile into tents, Cain downplayed the straw poll’s significance. “Our objective at the straw poll is more to measure our supporters’ intensity more so than to win the straw poll,” he said. “We also put a lot of stock into the national polls that still show that I have the highest positive intensity of all of the candidates for eleven straight weeks.” The naysayers, he emphasized, are “not looking at the right metrics. We’re looking at those metrics which is encouraging us to keep going with the campaign.”

For a bit of fun, I asked Cain about his campaign’s straw-poll menu. He told me he will be serving Godfather’s Pizza and Coke. As the former chief executive of that Midwestern chain and a Georgia native, those choices make perfect sense. “If people act right, they can have a slice,” he chuckled. “A little slice of heaven.”