Is this the moment Herman Cain fell out of the race?

AND ANOTHER one bites the dust. Following Rick Perry's embarrassing fumble over which federal agency he wanted to eliminate, fellow Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain has been caught red-faced with a gaping hole in his foreign policy knowledge.

In an interview with the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the former pizza chain owner is clearly completely stumped when asked what he thought of President Obama's approach to the war in Libya.

"President Obama supported the uprising, correct?" Cain asks. "President Obama called for the removal of Gaddafi. Just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing."

This comment is followed by several minutes of excruciating pauses and empty pre-rehearsed explanations that fail to address any of Obama's actual policies.

The media's reaction was predictably scathing.

"Cain clearly hasn't thought at all about a war his country was fighting while he ran for president," writes The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf. The Daily Telegraph's US editor, Toby Harnden, agrees that this has "confirmed that he has no grasp at all of what is going on in [Libya]".

Cain's spokesman, J D Gordon, defended the Republican nominee by saying that he was just tired. "The video is being taken out of context. He was taking questions for about 30 to 40 minutes on four hours of sleep," Gordon told MSNBC.

But a new CNN survey suggests that Cain, whose popularity had previously seemed impervious to numerous sexual harassment claims, is finally suffering in the polls. He has dropped 11 points since October, and is now tying in third place with Perry at 14 per cent.

"For the record, I don't think Herman Cain is stupid," writes Daniel W Drezner in Foreign Policy. "I do think he's willfully ignorant about anything to do with foreign policy however... until Herman Cain surges back in the polls again... there's no point in blogging about him anymore. I can only pick on an ignoramus so many times before it feels sadistic." ·