NASHUA, N.H. — Herman Cain’s farther behind in the polls here in the home of the first primary than he is nationally or in Iowa, but he still has high hopes for his chances. 
 
 “Well, let’s just say we always try to come in first,” Cain said after an event in a half-empty hotel ballroom. “But if we come in second, that’s not the end of the world. We still would consider that momentum.” 
 
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 But his first day of campaigning in the state since August will likely make that task tougher. 
 
 Cain’s remark came after he spent the bulk of a 22-minute speech to supporters pushing back on the controversies — sexual harassment, his stumbling answer on Libya on Monday to name two — that have engulfed his campaign. 
 
 Cain himself added a new one Thursday morning when he blew off a scheduled meeting with the publisher, editorial page director and reporters at the Union Leader, the state’s largest and most influential newspaper. 
 
 The cumulative effect has New Hampshire GOP Chairman Wayne MacDonald’s doubts about Cain’s chances growing. 
 
 “It’s political reality that the more you get bombarded by a perceived lack of knowledge on foreign policy, which is obviously critical to the presidency and being the commander-in-chief, whether it’s character issues like sexual harassment or the whole Bill Clinton-type of perception, regardless of what it is it’s going to take its toll,” MacDonald told POLITICO in his Concord office. “You just can’t be having all that stuff come at you without it having an impact.” 
 
 And indeed it has, at least in New Hampshire. While the latest polling by Bloomberg shows Cain in a four-way statistical tie in Iowa, he is in fourth place here with 8 percent support, well behind Romney, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich. 
 
 At Cain’s Nashua rally, which drew about 250 people to a room equipped to handle at least twice that number, he addressed what he called his “powerful pause that went viral on the Internet,” saying that he can’t be expected to have a deep knowledge of foreign affairs. 
 
 “Who knows every detail of every country of every situation on the planet?” Cain asked the crowd. “Nobody! A leader is supposed to make sure we work on the right problems, we’re assigned the right priorities. Surround yourself with good people, put together plans and lead. We’ve got plenty of experts, and a leader knows how to use those experts. We need a leader, not a reader.” 
 
 But despite Cain’s speech, the headline in the state’s largest newspaper was what the Union Leader dubbed his “no-show” for his sit-down at the conservative daily, which is typically a rite of passage for Republican candidates. 
 
 The Cain campaign’s last-minute decision to back out of the event capped several days of drama as it first demanded C-SPAN cameras be barred from the room, then tried to limit the one-hour interview to 20 minutes — a request the newspaper immediately refused. 
 
 The Union Leader’s endorsement is the state’s biggest prize for Republicans leading up to the primary — now just seven weeks away — and is seen as a conservative stamp of approval elsewhere in the country. The newspaper’s been a powerful force in New Hampshire Republican primaries since that primary took on its crucial role in picking GOP nominees, going back to the days of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The newspaper’s 2008 endorsement helped boost John McCain to the New Hampshire win that revived his campaign, and it’s been eagerly sought after by most of this year’s field. ||||| We already told you about Herman Cain’s total lack of a campaign in South Carolina, according to plugged-in Republican operatives there. 
 
 With each passing day, more stories are published proving that South Carolina is not an outlier in the Cain campaign operation. Try as they might, reporters just can’t seem to find any kind of legitimate Cain campaign operation anywhere. 
 
 A quick roundup of the latest updates: 
 
 • Slate’s John Dickerson was the latest to go to Iowa and find no real sign of a Cain campaign: “If Cain does well in Iowa, it could upend the entire premise of the caucus process: In order to win in Iowa, candidates must spend time in the state wooing the famously coddled voters with personal appearances and vast organizations.” 
 
 • In Florida, it’s the same story. The Miami Herald: “Look no further than Florida, where die-hard Cain fans can’t find campaign staffers to contact, where prominent Republicans can’t get calls to the campaign returned and where some people describe themselves as the campaign’s Florida leaders while others say the same people are well-meaning but overzealous volunteers.” 
 
 • No candidate other than Mitt Romney — who’s spent 6 years trying to win it — is expected to do very well in New Hampshire. But Time found Cain’s a popular ghost there, too: “‘There is no sense of a tangible organization that you can point to,’ says Rich Killion, an uncommitted GOP strategist in New Hampshire, who’s unsure of the location of Cain’s Granite State base of operations, or even if there is one. ‘If you said, ‘Rich, tell me who is running the effort here?’ I could not even give you that person.’” 
 
 Even the new guy Cain hired to run Iowa, which is probably a must-win for him, is telling reporters there’s a long way to go before Cain’s got a ground operation in the complicated caucus state. 
 
 From Politico over the weekend: 
 
 
 
 
 
 “This is the most grass-roots presidential campaign I’ve ever been involved with. The work gets done more by volunteers than paid staff, and that’s impressive,” said [new Cain Iowa chair Steve] Grubbs, a veteran of the state’s Bob Dole and Steve Forbes campaigns who signed on Thursday. “Having said that, I think that having my experience will bring some needed organization to the effort. I wouldn’t say that this effort would ever be professionalized.” 
 
 For his part, Cain told Politico, “We may not have as big of a campaign as anybody else, but I certainly consider our campaign to be professional because of the quality of the people that I brought in.” 
 
 So — what’s this all mean? Cain’s continued lack of a robust campaign operation makes his time at the top of the polls perhaps the most doomed of any of the GOP frontrunners so far: it seems clear from all polling and anecdotal evidence watching Cain’s speeches on the ground that the support for his candidacy is there among the GOP. But if Cain can’t put that rubber on the road via the hard, boring but up-to-now essential work of field campaigning, those poll numbers probably won’t matter very much. 
 
 Evan McMorris-Santoro Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.
– An interview Herman Cain had scheduled with New Hampshire’s largest newspaper fell through today, in what the New Hampshire Union Leader dubbed a “no-show.” Cain’s camp blamed the newspaper. Scheduled a week in advance, the sit-down was originally supposed to be an hour long and aired on C-SPAN. But after Cain’s Libya flub in a similar interview in Milwaukee, the campaign said it didn’t want the interview taped. “Videos are typically used for television and it’s a newspaper,” a Cain spokesman explains to Politico. Cain instead scheduled another event, telling the Union Leader he could stop by for only 20 minutes—which the paper deemed unacceptable. “We can catch Cain anywhere for 20 minutes,” the publisher said; the sit-down interview was intended to “really size up the candidate.” The implication? The interview—which three of Cain’s rivals have already done—is key to nabbing the paper’s influential endorsement.