If you want to watch an uncomfortable moment from the “debate” between Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain this weekend, take a look at Cain’s answer on whether he preferred a premium support or a defined benefit plan in the context of Medicare. These are the type of policy questions that presumably should be in Cain’s wheelhouse. His main selling point, after all, is that he’s a successful businessman who knows how to right our economic ship; and no program has more bearing on our fiscal future than Medicare. Yet on what is a fairly basic question about Medicare, Cain is utterly lost. That ought to matter to conservatives as they determine who is the individual best equipped to prosecute the case against President Obama less than a year from now.

I understand early on there was a certain freshness to Cain’s style. But we’ve now had several months in which we’ve been able to watch Cain in debates, during interviews, and at center stage, raising this question: Has any recent major presidential candidate shown as little mastery of the basics, when it comes to policy matters, as Cain? He’s shown his limitations time and time again, from debates in which he can’t articulate his policy preference on Afghanistan, to his cluelessness on the so-called Palestinian “right of return,” to his contradictory stands when it comes to abortion and a willingness to trade GITMO prisoners for hostages, to his (unconstitutional) declaration that he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet or a federal judgeship, to his inability to defend his 9-9-9 tax plan. Yet some defenders of Cain actually celebrate his lack of knowledge, portraying it as a virtue, a sign that he’s an outsider, a non-establishment figure, authentic, the appealing anti-politician.

But this has very little to do with whether or not one is a slick, pre-packaged politician and has everything to do with whether an individual who seeks to be president has taken the time to study, even minimally study, the urgent issues facing our nation.

Perhaps adding to my inability to understand Cain’s rock-star appeal is the fact that I recently watched a January 14, 1980 “Firing Line” interview between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ronald Reagan. During the interview, Buckley assumes Reagan is president and proceeds to ask him a series of hypothetical questions, from race riots breaking out in Detroit, to the value of the dollar and the way government bonds should be issued, to a strike by postal workers, to a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, to CIA concerns that it cannot discharge a recent directive because of having been hamstrung by legislation championed by Senator Frank Church.

It is a very impressive display by both Buckley and Reagan – Buckley because the questions were both challenging and well-put (today it would be labeled as a “gotcha” interview) and Reagan because of his fluency and mastery of all the issues. Without having been told in advance what topics would be covered, Reagan time and time again spoke not only with a command of an issue at that moment in time, but he also touched on its relevant historical background.

In the 1980s, one of the Republican Party’s main sources of attraction to younger conservatives like myself was its growing reputation for intellectual seriousness. “Of a sudden,” wrote Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, in 1981, “the GOP has become a party of ideas.” The way such things happen is by rewarding intellectual excellence among those vying for the presidency rather than making excuses for their lack of knowledge.