The political education of Ben Carson

 

 

In 2013, Ben Carson told Glenn Beck that he had no plans to run for president. “I would be a terrible candidate,” he said.

Two years later, that statement has proven to be both true and largely inconsequential. Carson has been a bumbling candidate, but it hasn’t mattered. He has risen to nearly a first-place tie with Donald Trump in national Republican presidential primary polls, and has stayed there since early September.

Carson’s rise coincided with the first Republican debate. In early August, Carson was in a virtual three-way tie for fifth place, stuck at 6 percent in the polls. Viewers apparently liked what they saw from Carson on the debate stage in Cleveland, perplexing political observers who believed the soft-spoken retired neurosurgeon would be a nonentity.

Carson is now at 21 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average, trailing Trump by only 2 points. He is second to Trump in Iowa and runs in third place — just behind Carly Fiorina — in New Hampshire. And in the third quarter of 2015, he raised $20 million, with donations coming from more than 300,000 supporters.

Like Trump and Fiorina, Carson is popular because he is not a politician. He spent most of his career as a neurosurgeon, rising from an impoverished childhood in Detroit with a single mother to become head of the Johns Hopkins pediatric neurosurgery division at age 33, and the first surgeon in the world to successfully separate twins conjoined at the head. His inspiring personal story is married to a willingness — some might say compulsion — to speak plainly and without regard for political propriety.

Most people’s virtues are also their vices, but that is especially so for presidential candidates whose personal traits are magnified under the searing scrutiny of a campaign. For Carson, his blunt, often heedless rhetoric has attracted GOP base voters who are in such a rebellious mood that they judge candidates on their willingness to appall the establishment, rather than on their specific policy positions. That’s allowed Carson to thrive during this angry populist moment.

The question, though, is whether these same qualities that are clearly resonating during the speed-dating phase of the campaign become serious liabilities when voters begin to settle down to make more pragmatic judgments about electability and governing abilities. A day spent recently with Carson discussing everything from immigration and the Black Lives Matter movement to gun control and Kanye West, raised some serious questions for me about this particular candidate’s readiness for that phase of the campaign.