by Justin Soutar
(This article was originally published on the website Intellectual Conservative
May 11, 2016 at http://intellectualconservative.com/the-political-rise-and-fall-of-dr-ben-carson/ )
More than two months ago in early March, following a slew of major
defeats in the GOP primary elections, award-winning neurosurgeon, popular speaker,
bestselling author and Tea Party candidate Dr. Benjamin
S. Carson officially announced that he had decided to withdraw from the
presidential race. For those millions of us citizens across America
who had been his loyal and dedicated supporters for the previous
several months and years, the sudden demise and fizzling out of Dr.
Carson's remarkable presidential campaign came as a jarring and profoundly
disappointing anticlimax. Carson's stunningly dramatic rise from relative
obscurity to a leading presidential candidate in less than a year's time
appeared to bode well for his chances of winning a substantial number of
state primary elections--and thus a sufficient number of delegates to the
upcoming Republican National Convention--to secure his adopted party's nomination
for President of the United States in 2016.
Unfortunately, however, Dr. Carson's performance in the early Iowa, New
Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada primary election contests in February, as
well as in the Super Tuesday primaries of March 1, failed to meet the
expectations of his hardworking organizers and supporters, who
had reasonably expected him to carry at least a handful of these
critical early voting states. Instead, closely reflecting national polling
data at the time, Ben Carson came in consistently third or
fourth in each state's election returns behind Donald Trump, Ted Cruz
and Marco Rubio. In the wake of Super Tuesday, with more than one fourth of the
states having already voted, Carson had amassed a total of only about 60
delegates--not even one-twentieth of the total necessary to clinch the GOP
nomination. Since the math and polling trends now rendered electoral
victory extremely unlikely if not impossible, Carson's campaign team realized that
it would be futile for him to continue to stay in the race. Calmly facing the
unpleasant reality of defeat with his characteristic humility and wisdom,
Carson acted prudently in bowing out of the primary election contest when
he did.
Within two and a half years' time, Dr. Ben Carson's political star
had climbed with extraordinary steadiness from the horizon to
the zenith, where it shone with dazzling brilliance, and then suddenly it
plunged toward the opposite horizon, disappearing from view entirely
in a matter of weeks. What happened here? How did the previously
little-known Dr. Carson so quickly achieve the status of a major
presidential candidate, only to find himself leaving the race just as things
were heating up?
Paradoxically, Dr. Carson had laid firm groundwork for his presidential run
by building a solid reputation outside the political realm in the fields of
medicine, education, business, and culture. He is probably best known for his trailblazing
twenty-nine year career as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns
Hopkins Medical Institutions, during which he performed more than 36,000 surgeries with
an extremely low patient mortality rate, including the first-ever successful
separation of twin boys joined at the back of the head. For his veritable
encyclopedia of stunning achievements as a neurosurgeon, President George W.
Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008.
For a number of years, through the Carson
Scholars Fund, Ben and his wife had been working to reform and improve
America’s education system by setting up reading rooms in inner-city elementary
schools across the country to encourage more kids to read books, stimulating
better academic performance through a merit-based reward system, and offering
scholarships to promising students from low-income families.
In addition to the significant
business experience he accumulated as head of the multi-million-dollar
pediatric neurosurgery division at Johns Hopkins for three decades, Dr. Carson
had served on the corporate boards of a number of Fortune 500 companies,
including Costco and Kellogg’s. Finally, Carson’s fascinating
rise from a single-parent childhood of poverty in inner-city Detroit
to a world-class neurosurgeon had won the respect and admiration of many
Americans of different races and backgrounds who had read his popular
autobiography
Gifted Hands (1990) or seen the TV documentary of the
same title (2009)
. More recently, Ben Carson’s influence on American
culture was further strengthened by several other widely read books, including
the number one
New York Times bestsellers
America the Beautiful (2012) and
One Nation (2014); the latter sold an
astonishing forty-two million copies in the ten weeks following its release,
outselling Hillary Clinton’s simultaneously released autobiography
Hard Choices three to one.
What initially catapulted Ben Carson into the political limelight
was his brilliant, thoughtful, frank, courageous, and
respectful off-the-cuff address at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast
attended by President Obama and Vice President Biden—a monumental discourse which
deserves a place in the annals of conservative oratory alongside Barry
Goldwater’s 1964 speech at the Republican National Convention and Ronald
Reagan’s famous “Evil Empire” address of 1983. In this eloquent and well-balanced
critique of contemporary America, delivered while he was still practicing
neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Carson put ObamaCare, our nation's tax
system, our national debt, and our moral decline into perspective and
suggested some biblically-based, common-sense solutions to these problems. To
those who heard him speak that February morning, it was obvious that Dr. Carson
was endowed with a rare ability to discuss complex issues in simple terms that
any layperson could easily understand. It was this highly accessible speech
that introduced him to the nation as a great communicator with a solid grasp of
America’s founding principles and ignited a national movement to draft Ben
Carson into the 2016 presidential race.
From that time onward, as a popular speaker and author of multiple bestselling
books, Dr. Carson became increasingly well-known within both the
African–American community and the wider American cultural arena for his
insightful and articulate reflections on what made our country great; for the
simple stories he often used from his own experience to illustrate a point; for
his intelligent and original opinions on how to resolve our national
problems; and for his optimistic vision of America's future based on a return
to our nation's founding principles. And his character traits of
self-reliance, hard work, honesty and integrity, humility, courtesy, and
compassion, combined with his devout Christian faith, traditional moral values,
and record of exemplary achievement, made him a principled leader and
a shining example of the American dream whose mass appeal transcended
racial and political boundaries. In short, millions of Americans already knew,
liked, and trusted Ben Carson for months and years before
he ever became a presidential candidate.
The ironic thing is that, despite his authentic leadership credentials,
Dr. Carson had never desired or intended to run for President of the United
States. When the suggestion was first made to him immediately following the
2013 speech, he laughed it off as ridiculous. After all, he was a
sixty-plus-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon on the verge
of retirement and a registered Independent with no prior experience
in politics. But his address at the National Prayer Breakfast had
unwittingly prompted the establishment of a super PAC called the National
Draft Ben Carson for President Committee under the leadership of conservative
political activist John Philip Sousa IV—and once that ball got started rolling,
it continued to steadily gain momentum. During the next two years, at
the instigation of this committee, upwards of 500,000 Americans
insistently clamored for Ben Carson to run for president on the Republican
ticket, claiming that his leadership in the White House was desperately needed
to straighten our country out. Finally, in May of 2015, the reticent Dr. Carson
acquiesced to the will of the people and threw his hat into the presidential
ring, entering an already crowded field of contenders for the GOP
nomination.
At that time, national polls registered Ben Carson as the presidential
choice of about 5 percent of Americans, so it wasn't surprising that the
mainstream media initially paid him little attention. He was a classic longshot
candidate for the White House, and most observers never seriously expected
him to surge out of the bottom category into the top tier of
likely presidential candidates. They were in for a surprise. Carson's
entry into the race further elevated his public profile, stimulating
his modest and already growing support base to expand at an
accelerated tempo. Slowly but unmistakably, Ben Carson's national poll numbers
started to climb out of the doldrums, leaving single digits behind within a few
weeks. (During this time, he also made quite a splash as the surprise
winner of the first televised Republican debate.) By the end of June, Dr.
Carson had risen to 18 percent, making him the second most popular
Republican candidate, and he continued to surge throughout the summer,
steadily gaining on Donald Trump. In August, he was tied with Trump for the
number one spot, and by early October, Carson had actually overtaken Trump to
become
the leading Republican presidential candidate in national
polls--and despite the predictions of naysayers, he managed to hold that
enviable position for the next two months straight.
If Ben Carson's five-month ascendancy from near-oblivion to
the pinnacle of the GOP field and his two-month dominance of that field
represented astonishing achievements and newsworthy events from the perspective
of any reasonable observer, the reaction of the radically
secularist mainstream media pundits on both sides of the political aisle
was even more astonishing. With conspiratorial uniformity, they ignored Dr.
Carson almost entirely. Despite their earlier casual dismissals and
negative predictions, here he was leading in national polls, sharing the center
of every debate stage with Mr. Trump, yet there was no serious discussion of
why this was happening, no thoughtful commentary on this remarkable and
unexpected development, no extensive interviews with Ben Carson on the major
networks. Instead, we were saddled with a nearly total mainstream
media blackout of Dr. Carson, while the lion's share of big
media attention remained obsessively devoted to Trump, Bush and Christie.
This incomprehensibly hypocritical and blatantly
unfair treatment of Ben Carson on the part of America's media elite
represented a prime example of biased and irresponsible
journalism. Journalists bear a responsibility to the general public to
convey and reflect upon the truth of what's actually going on, but in this case
the Beltway journalists were obviously at pains to conceal the
truth because it didn't mesh with their radically secularist agenda for our
nation.
The corrupt mainstream media elite and the corrupt Washington political
establishment--which, for convenience, may be treated as a single entity, since
the same mega-corporate interests essentially run both entities and they share
the same radically secularist agenda--couldn't tolerate the mere idea of an
honest and principled citizen statesman like Ben Carson getting into the
White House. If that were to happen, the deeply entrenched political corruption
that buttresses and sustains their jealously guarded power
and influence would be pulled like a rug from beneath their feet and the
power of the federal government would revert from these usurpers back to its
rightful owners, i.e., we the people. So these cunning and worldly-wise
media moguls had to figure out some way to derail Ben Carson's astoundingly
successful grassroots presidential campaign in order to prevent him from
winning the Republican nomination. They knew they wouldn't be able to smear his
reputation with any dirt from his past because there isn't any dirt in his
past to dig up. They had attempted to spread some lies about him, but that
didn't work very well because most people already knew the truth about him, and
those who didn't discovered it soon enough. They tried to find some juicy
errors or omissions in Carson's income tax returns--a huge potential
"gotcha"--but that search came up empty. And they knew that his
political campaign (unlike their good pal Hillary Clinton's) was being run
entirely in accordance with federal election law, so they couldn't shut him
down legally or call that into question.
Consequently, the mainstream media executives settled on a strategy of
deliberately ignoring Ben Carson and relentlessly focusing their primary
attention on their own favorite GOP candidates, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and
Chris Christie. This approach extended to the Republican debates, where despite
his high poll rankings and central position on the stage, Dr. Carson was
generally given far less time to speak than the mainstream media darlings. As
the months passed, this strategy of marginalization proved effective. Not
seeing or hearing much of their candidate on TV, millions of less
fanatical Carson supporters gradually became discouraged and drifted into
the more visible and noisier Trump, Cruz, and Rubio camps. By the end of
2015, Carson had slipped to second place in national polls; he was at third
place this past January, and had sunk to fourth place by the time actual voting
began in early February.
Yet even with this perceptible decline in nationwide
support precipitated by the big media boycott,
Carson might still have won the Iowa caucus on February 1
had a despicable last-minute dirty trick not been pulled off by a rival
and less principled GOP campaign team. Just hours before voting began, a
false rumor that Carson had dropped out of the race was deliberately circulated
by the Ted Cruz presidential campaign, deceiving who knows how
many thousands of Carson supporters into casting their ballots
for Cruz instead. Spreading this lie about Carson enabled Cruz to steal
victory in the Iowa primary election. Although he would not withdraw from
the race for another month, it's apparent in retrospect that the Ben Carson
presidential campaign was essentially finished at that point. Dr. Carson
already had enough of a challenge trying to win state primary elections with
official campaign and super PAC funding limited to grassroots donations and the
heavy media bias against him, but when a dishonest tactic by a fellow candidate
on opening day was thrown into the mix, the stage was unfortunately set for his
presidential campaign to flounder beyond reasonable hope of
recovery.
Although history indicated that Carson didn't necessarily have to win
Iowa to win the Republican nomination this summer, and so technically his
chances were still pretty good, it was critical that he score
victories in at least some of the other early voting states to give
him a realistic shot at winning his adopted party's nomination.
But with the deck stacked against him, he lost one state after
another, and his chances of making it to the GOP convention as a presidential
finalist correspondingly dwindled. Regrettably, Dr. Carson's campaign never
recovered from the major damage it sustained in Iowa.
So in essence, Ben Carson rose to political prominence on the strength of
his credentials as a principled citizen statesman, but he failed to clinch the
Republican nomination because the corrupt mainstream media and D.C. political
establishment conspired to do him in. Shame on them. However, there
is more to the story than that. While many of us ordinary Americans do
profess traditional religious and moral values, we have nonetheless almost
unconsciously allowed the propaganda being constantly cranked out by
the radically secularist mainstream media machine to influence our thinking and
shape our political loyalties. As a result of this, we have gradually
abandoned a humble, honest, great, wise, selfless,
moral, principled, civil, commonsense citizen statesman candidate--Ben
Carson, a true populist--in favor of an arrogant, dishonest, petty, foolish,
self-seeking, immoral, unscrupulous, rude, and ridiculous establishment
politician--Donald Trump, a fake populist. Shame on us. Apparently, we’ve
allowed ourselves to become so intoxicated by the mainstream media propaganda that
we are unable to clearly distinguish between a counterfeit and the real deal.
Unlike Carson, who truly represented "we the people," Trump is a
charlatan who merely pretends to represent us, while in reality he represents
himself and his bank accounts and the Washington political
establishment he craves to join. Unlike Carson, Trump is a shameless braggart
and a rabble-rousing demagogue who cannot be safely trusted to govern this
nation in accordance with the principles of the Founders. Yet this clanging
cymbal is seemingly trusted by more than two-fifths of the American
populace.
If, at the end of the day, we the people are really on the side of the
corrupt media and political establishment, what does that say about us? It
says, for one thing, that we are a gullible bunch, easily bamboozled into
believing exactly what the establishment wants us to believe. This lack of
discernment and critical thinking would have horrified the Founders, who
regarded an intelligent and well-educated citizenry as indispensable to the
continued health and wellbeing of the American republic. While Carson intuitively
held, as he put it in one of the debates last autumn, that "the American
people are
not stupid" (his
emphasis), he was clearly overestimating our intelligence. Yes, we are stupid. Just
as a certain crowd, at the instigation of certain religious leaders, preferred
the release of a convicted murderer over the innocent Son of God himself, so
we, under the influence of our own media and political elite, would rather
elect an assertive, blustering, corrupt, and ambitious worldly real estate
mogul as President of the United States than a meek, quiet-spoken, ethical, and
trustworthy Christian doctor, philanthropist, speaker and writer. We prefer
Trump to Carson. We prefer vice to virtue. And because of that, we’ve
cavalierly passed up our first real chance to nominate and elect a truly great
president since the days of Ronald Reagan, leaving America vulnerable to the capricious
whims of a corrupt, immoral, and tyrannical Trump or Clinton presidency and
ensuring continued national decline for at least another four years.
During the past two months, I've been asking myself why God permitted Ben
Carson to achieve such remarkable early success as a presidential candidate if
he knew that his campaign was ultimately doomed to failure. I
had sincerely believed that God was raising up Dr. Carson to be our next
president, and I was also convinced--as I still am--that he was the only
presidential candidate who would have healed and united our broken and
wounded nation and restored America to greatness. Apparently,
for some strange combination of reasons, God willed that Ben
Carson emerge for a brief span of time as a prominent national figure in
the political arena, but did not will him to be our next
president. Perhaps one of those reasons is that God wanted to expose
the interior nastiness and rottenness of our radically
secularist mainstream media and political establishment and to show
us how easily we good folks are awed, taken in, and deceived by the gleaming
exterior of that omnipresent establishment. On the positive side, I would also
suggest that God willed to clearly show us, through the beautiful witness
of Dr. Carson's words and actions, the path we must tread as a nation if
we wish to reclaim our former greatness in the years to come. There may be
other reasons as well. At any rate, I continue to trust that God, in
his infinite wisdom and providence, has a plan for this beleaguered
country of ours, and that Carson's tragic political demise—which guarantees a
continued absence of principled leadership in the White House, at least in the
near term—is somehow a part of that mysterious plan.
With his amazing roller-coaster ten-month sojourn in
presidential politics now behind him, the inimitable soft-spoken conservative
genius Dr. Ben Carson is back where he prefers to be, living the quieter
life of a private citizen, albeit a much better known one now. He may have
lost his one and only bid for the presidency, but unlike his fellow contenders
for that high office, at least he had his priorities straight: he would rather
lose an election than lose his soul. He will undoubtedly spend his remaining
years on this earth continuing to serve his beloved country in any way he
can. He will remain and be remembered as a great American physician and speaker
and writer and philanthropist, a tireless defender of Constitutional
government and a fervent champion of liberty and justice for all, respected for
his character and values and renowned for his abilities and accomplishments.
Although he never wanted to run for President of the United
States, Dr. Carson did it on behalf of “we the people”, out
of genuine love for us and genuine concern for our country, offering
a noble and splendid example of both Christian servant leadership
and authentic patriotism. For months on end during the height of his
popularity, he calmly yet firmly stood his ground
and steadfastly weathered the storm of unjustified political and
media hostility and prejudice and indifference that beat mercilessly upon
him, without becoming bitter or retaliating against his enemies. For that
example of selfless service and that tranquil steadfastness in the face of
adversity, he deserves our sincere admiration and our humble gratitude.
Unlike any of the other leading presidential candidates, Ben Carson was
a true Christian gentleman and a true patriot, and his absence leaves our
current political arena acutely impoverished. At a time of constantly deepening
national crisis, Dr. Carson's definitive departure from the 2016
presidential contest exposes a yawning leadership vacuum within the American political system that no lesser candidate can possibly fill.
Copyright
© 2016 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
