Cain To Make 'Major Announcement' Saturday

Herman Cain says he will clarify the next steps in his faltering bid for the Republican presidential nomination on Saturday with what his campaign is dubbing “a major announcement.”

He told an audience in South Carolina he was “reassessing because of all of this media firestorm stuff because my wife and family comes first.”

News of the upcoming announcement immediately started speculation that he will drop out of the race that he led up until of allegations that he sexually harassed women he worked with in the 1990s.

Just as he appeared to have weathered that firestorm, businesswoman Ginger White claimed that she had had a 13-year-long affair with him that only ended when he began his campaign for the White House.

Cain would not be drawn on what he will say on Saturday. “Tomorrow in Atlanta, I will be making an announcement,” he said. “But nobody’s going to get me to make that prematurely, that’s all there is to that.

“We are going to clarify exactly what the next steps are,” he added.

But even as he was speaking, a senior adviser to his campaign told CBS News that the announcement would merely be that Cain was opening a new office in Georgia.

However the Washington Post said “sources close to Cain’s campaign” were telling it that he had invited his top donors and backers to Atlanta to give them advance notice of whether he would continue his run at the White House.

Cain’s poll numbers have fallen precipitously since the allegations of sexual impropriety became public. The Des Moines Register today said his support in Iowa was now down to 8 percent, down from 23 percent in October.

Cain headed back to Georgia after the South Carolina speech to meet his wife Gloria face-to-face for the first time since White’s alleged the affair on Monday.