When Herman Cain announced on Tuesday plans to spend the next several days reassessing his campaign, many people assumed that meant he was seriously considering dropping out of the GOP presidential race. Ginger White’s claim that she’d carried on an extramarital affair with Cain for more than a decade was the latest allegation in what’s starting to look more like a trend and, combined with sliding poll numbers, Cain’s frontrunner status is probably lost forever.

But in an interview with the student newspaper at Hillsdale University in Michigan where he presented his foreign policy platform, Cain said that he had no plans to drop out of the race.

“There’s another option. Modify the strategy, modify the campaign,” he said. “Stay in, but with a modified strategy given everything that’s going on.”

During a campaign stop in Ohio Wednesday, Cain said he was a victim of character assassination, ABC News reports.

“They’ve been trying to do character assassination on me,” he told the packed room in a hotel ballroom. “Some of them even predicted that this room would be empty today. I don’t think I see any empty seats.”

Cain is refusing to discuss White’s allegation in detail, but that hasn’t stopped him from using her claim to raise money. In a fundraising letter to supporters he described White as a “troubled Atlanta businesswoman” who is using “national media outlets to promulgate a fabricated, unsubstantiated story.” Cain acknowledged that this is a “trying time” for his family and his campaign, but says he is “not deterred.”

“America’s future is too important,” he said. “We will continue on this journey to make America great once again.”

But fellow Black Republican Rep. Allen West says that it’s time for Cain to end his White House bid.

"I think that really beyond reassessing his campaign, he probably needs to understand that he is a distracter for what's going on right now, and we should move on,” West said in an interview on the WMAL Morning Majority radio show. “That would be my advice to him if I had the opportunity and he asked me."

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