“While he speaks eloquently and passionately about the importance of doing homework in his own life and for children everywhere, it’s not obvious he’s taken those lessons to heart when it comes to politics.”
.. In fairness, Trump’s answers shouldn’t cut it either. But Carson is admiringly honest about his shortcomings and admits when he gets things wrong, while Trump makes up for his shortcomings and ignorance with bluster, bullying, and bombast. Sadly, that continues to work for him.
With Ben Carson, the Doctor and the Politician Can Vary Sharply
“He says what he thinks,” Dr. Brem said. “He clearly doesn’t get a preapproved consensus.”
“Medically he was that way, too,” Dr. Brem added. “He didn’t worry that other neurosurgeons said, ‘You can’t do this.’ He wasn’t worried that other people weren’t doing it, because he felt the way he sees the world he was generally right and there were good outcomes from it.”
.. Before he became so famous, though, Dr. Carson was occasionally mistaken for an orderly and received chilly receptions from some patients who had not encountered an African-American doctor, he has written.
Carol James, his longtime physician assistant, recalled meeting with parents who used “extremely biased” language in speaking of black people. “I simply stopped and said, ‘Do you understand that Dr. Carson is black?’ ”
They agreed to let him treat their child. “I think they ultimately were very embarrassed,” Ms. James said, “and had gone and spoken with other people who knew who he was.”
.. Dr. Brem said that as a surgeon, Dr. Carson “did have a profound sense of confidence,” operating on some “children who other people felt surgery wasn’t an answer for.”
.. Previous separations taught Dr. Carson that “eventually the surgeons fell apart because of exhaustion,” Dr. Brem said. So one of his rules was that each surgeon rotate out after four hours, although normally, “we never leave an operation in the middle,” Dr. Brem said.
.. She said she later decided it might reflect another quality: “how he is open to compromise.”
Where Is Ben Carson’s Money Going?
But Carson is also spending a ton of money—he spent nearly seven out of every $10 he raised in the quarter. What is that money being used to do, and is that rate of spending sustainable?
.. In Carson’s case, a majority of what he’s raising is being plowed right back into fundraising costs—$11.2 million of the nearly $20.8 million. That means 54 cents out of every dollar Carson raises is going to raise more money. Carson’s campaign only spent roughly $3 million on everything else—merchandise, office supplies, field staff, space, travel, and so on.
.. But Sanders’s overall burn rate is less than 45 percent, and he’s spending very differently—by far his largest expense is on digital consulting and advertising, and he spent less than $100,000 on postage. Sanders’s trick is that much of that money is coming in through ActBlue, an online platform for making donations to liberal causes. It’s highly useful because it provides candidates an off-the-shelf tool, it tends to hook donors by, essentially, gamifying giving, and it’s extremely cheap—in general, it charges less than 4 percent commission to candidates. So while Ben Carson is netting around half of every dollar he raises, Bernie Sanders is taking in 96 cents of each greenback. (So much for the free-spending socialist.)
.. Leon Wolf at RedState rolled his eyes at the move. “If Ben Carson wanted the job of being President, there is no way that a book tour would prevent him from doing everything in his power to expand his campaign right now and to take over the lead for good from Donald Trump,” he wrote.
What If Sarah Palin Were a Brain Surgeon?
As the two men turned to the TV, they began dissecting Obama’s performance.
“He looks good,” Williams said. “He looks clean. Shirt’s white. The tie. He looks elegant.”
“Like most psychopaths,” Carson grumbled. “That’s why they’re successful. That’s the way they look. They all look great.”
For those unfamiliar with the mood of America’s far right, casually branding the president a psychopath is exactly the sort of talk that strikes a chord—and just the thing that has made Carson a sensation in the GOP.
.. “He faces the same challenges you will face,” Williams said of Obama as he spoke. “He’s gotta convince people to believe him. That’s all he’s doing: selling his narrative.”
“But he knows he’s telling a lie!” Carson vented. “He’s trying to sell what he thinks is not true! He’s sitting there saying, ’These Americans are so stupid I can tell them anything.’ “
.. He likes that goatee. But do you know a president who’s been elected with a goatee?”
.. “It sounds complex,” he finally said. “Why don’t they just adopt the system we have?”
.. Although Carson was only 61, he wanted to leave medicine behind while he could still enjoy life. He and Candy had bought a house on a golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.
.. “God speaks through him, and it goes into that Dragon”—Carson’s voice-recognition software—”and we have a best-seller,” Candy, who serves as her husband’s book researcher, told me. Armstrong Williams offers a less exalted rationale. “He is a hot property. His brand is huge right now.”
.. “Ben’s unlike any national political figure I’ve ever met,” the influential Iowa conservative talk-radio host Steve Deace told me. “He’s less a politician and more like a life coach.”
.. He expects that, between the various conservative causes Carson has lent his name to (or had his name appropriated by), the campaign will have a mailing list with upwards of 2 million potential supporters on it—all of whom have expressed their interest in Carson in the past two years. “If I can get $100 from 1.5 million people,” Giles told me, “I’ll have $150 million for the first four primaries, and we’ll be extremely competitive.”
.. What if Barack Obama, I posited with a bit of hyperbole, decided to change careers and said that he now wanted to be a neurosurgeon—and, what’s more, that he wanted his first operation to be separating conjoined twins? Did Carson see any parallels between that hypothetical and his situation? “No,” he said emphatically. “Just the fact that you would ask that question tells me that you don’t understand all that’s involved in becoming a neurosurgeon. There’s so much more than becoming a political figure, it’s not even in the same ballpark.”
.. For instance, though he’s answered criticism about his lack of experience by promising to rely heavily on his advisers, he has little notion of who or what he’d be looking for in his cabinet.
.. And when I asked Carson to name his favorite secretary of the treasury, he was stumped. “Andrea Mitchell’s husband,” he eventually offered. I reminded him that Mitchell’s husband, also known as Alan Greenspan, had actually been chairman of the Federal Reserve. “I don’t know that there’s anybody that really stands out to me as an outstanding treasury secretary. I mean, that’s a pretty hard place to be outstanding,” he finally said. “Secretaries of the treasury, for the most part, are not big policy people.”
.. He’s taken the same sincere up-by-the-bootstraps message that he once preached to black children and grafted it onto a worldview promulgated largely on conservative talk radio, validating many of the most provocative sentiments popular on the far right by repeating them in his mellifluous tone. He’s that rarest of breeds: a soft-spoken demagogue.
.. On several occasions, I tried to get Carson to concede that his analogy likening the U.S. to Nazi Germany was out of line (he’s said that Americans under Obama are as intimidated and afraid to criticize their government as Germans under the Third Reich).