By Javier Manjarres

It remains to be seen if businessman Herman Cain’s recent rise in the polls in the Republican Presidential primary is indicative of solid support or if he’s just the latest “flavor of the month”, but one noticeable feature of Cain’s growing campaign is that it is similar to the grassroots campaign Senator March Rubio waged in 2010.  Like Rubio, Cain started his campaign very early and lagged behind the favorites in his race and was facing an “insurmountable” deficit in the early polls.  Cain has also followed Rubio’s blueprint in that he started his Presidential campaign a grassroots movement as opposed to a traditional ‘establishment-type’ campaign where the elder statesmen of the party determine who the nominee is.

Cain has established a powerful online grassroots following, much like Rubio did early on in his campaign, and Cain is raising small dollar donations from across the country in spite of the substantial deficit he faces in the money “race” with the other candidates.  Pundits are still skeptical as to whether he will be able to raise the money necessary to defeat President Barack Obama even if he were successful in the primary.

Cain rhetorically asks audiences “How’s that working out for you?” when referring to President Obama’s failed economic policies and the current economic state that we’re in.  Can he now be asking the same question of primary voters as they consider the other candidates and their in the primary race?  Cain’s rise to prominence is a gut check to establishment Republicans, who have long felt that they were in control of the political process and have tried to dictate who the eventual Republican Presidential nominee would be, let alone any of the other down-the-ticket candidates who play second fiddle in the general election.

This has been”the way things work” until the the Tea Party movement bucked the establishment and ushered in grassroots conservatives like Senators Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, as well as Congressman Allen West. But this has not changed the efforts by the Republican ‘powers-that-be’ poobahs who are actively trying push upon who they feel is the better candidate.

Remember, this is the same Republican establishment that pulled out the knives on Mitt Romney and others as they backed Senator John McCain in 2008 largely because ” it was his turn.” So how far do Republicans go in trusting the GOP overall? Is the establishment again taking the ‘it’s his turn’ approach to nominating the Republican Presidential nominee as they did in2008, and as they tried to do in the 2010 U.S. Senate race between Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Charlie Crist? Rubio crushed Crist and sent him fleeing from the Party- how did that election work out for ya?