"9-9-9."
It's a slogan and tax plan that GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain has often turned to, even on strange, off-topic occasions.
After straying away from this refrain over the past month, however, Cain's campaign appears to be trying to get back on message with a new, animated explainer video reminding voters about his trademark idea for overhauling the tax system.
"The federal tax code is an overgrown monster -- but it's not even a cool monster, It's a dorky, mechanical monster held together with a bunch of tattered red tape and driven around by squirrelly bureaucrats," the video's narrator says.
"What would happen if we scrapped all 82,000 pages of the current tax code and simplified things with Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan?" the narrator asks. "The economy would accelerate faster than Barack Obama on his way out of town. We would add $2 trillion to GDP and create 6 million jobs. Business investment would increase by a third. Wages would go up 10 percent. At the same time, federal revenues would go up 15 percent."
While the video is entertaining and well-made, it ignores some of the biggest criticisms of Cain's plan, such as a review by the Tax Policy Center, which found that it would serve as a nearly 950 percent tax increase on some households making between $10,000 and $20,000
Cain's campaign, once propelled to the top of the pack with the help of "9-9-9," has taken knocks over the past month amid persistent sexual harassment allegations, which he has continually denied, and a number of high-profile verbal stumbles. He claimed over the weekend that some of his comments had been taken out of context but that they had nonetheless damaged his polling performance.
Cain made a similar admission on Monday, but said that his supporters remained loyal despite the distractions.
"Here's the good news. We didn't drop all the way down to sixth or seventh. We dropped to third" in most polls, he told Fox News. He says supporters "didn't defect because of all the noise that was going on."
According to the latest polls, Cain is at third place in the GOP primary field, behind former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former House speaker Newt Gingrich.