Two days before Christmas, Steven Ginsberg and Robert Costa of the Washington Post landed an interview with Ben Carson. It was conducted in Carson’s basement man-cave. The below ground-level setting is appropriate because the transcript reads like an obituary.
Dr. Carson laments virtually everything, from his annoying advisers who keep urging him to be more combative, to his inability to get mulligans for his many missteps, to the quality of the electorate, to the way the media twists his words, to the way his campaign has spent money. The overwhelming sense you get is of a man who has already come to grips with failure.
And that’s a failure in itself because the interview was supposed to demonstrate that he understands his campaign’s problems and is preparing to retool and make a big push before Iowa.
What struck me more than anything, though, is how there was no mention of any of the 13 ridiculous things that Ben Carson actually believes. The mistakes, insofar as they are detailed at all, are limited to foreign policy blunders, like his insistence that the Chinese have a large presence in Syria. But, arguably, Carson began to slip right around the time that it came out that he thinks the Egyptian pyramids were built to store grain. It became increasingly clear that Carson doesn’t just have some far-right views on abortion and war crimes and the Holocaust and censorship, he actually has a borderline crazy belief system.
One wonders in this day and age how much this actually hurts you in a Republican nominating contest. After all, the guy in first place is the country’s most famous Birther. There are certainly areas where being an over-the-top bomb thrower helps you win support from the GOP base. Arguably, this was the way Carson won his initial popularity and support on the right. I assume this is what his advisers believe, too, and it’s why they’ve urged him to throw bombs not just at the president and his health care plan and reproductive rights, but at his Republican opponents.
Maybe his lack of foreign policy experience really is the best explanation for his precipitous fall in the polls. The only problem with that explanation is that Donald Trump should have suffered right along with Carson in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Maybe Trump’s bluster and bravado cover his lack of expertise better than Carson’s mellower act.
Whatever the explanation, Carson seems like a man who is already beaten before the first vote is cast. And he knows that he’s injured his reputation in the bargain.
Carson: A weak person isn’t selected by CNN and Time magazine as one of the 20 foremost physicians and surgeons in America. That was before they discovered that I’m conservative. A weak person doesn’t have all of these honorary degrees. Most people of accomplishment have one, maybe two or three honorary degrees at most. It’s the highest award that a university gives out. I have 67. That’s probably not indicative of a weak person who doesn’t get things done.
Costa: Has this campaign helped or hurt that reputation, that legacy?
Carson: Without question, it will hurt it. But it’s not about me. I’m willing to sacrifice that legacy and that reputation if we can get our country turned around. One person is not a big deal as far as I’m concerned.
If Carson thought there were the slightest chance that he’d win the nomination, he’d certainly not answer that question by saying that “without question” the campaign will end up hurting his reputation.
You can stick a fork in him. His presidential ambitions are done.
Just throwing this out there, because I have no special insight into this, but I think that the crazies who share Carson’s beliefs don’t like it when they sense that the rest of the world is laughing at them and switch allegiance to someone else when that happens. This could explain at least some of what we’re seeing.
Authoritarians don’t like losing by their very nature.
Well, those 13 things were published on Thing Progress back in October. And in reading down through the list, I really don’t see anything that has not been mainstreamed in the GOP primary. I think that maybe in another time, when there wasn’t such a perfect character like Trump for the media to gravitate toward and salivate over, Carson might have gotten a little more traction. But as crazy as Carson is, he simply will not be able to out-crazy the Trump’s and the Cruz’s. His style just does not fit and fuel the rage that the base requires. It’s not enough to simply hold crazy views or say crazy things. You have to state them viscerally, and make people BELIEVE that you would actually be all right with “Lighting the motherfucker on fire”! Trump supporters are there already. Some of them are just looking for the opportunity, and the wink and the nod from their Dear Leader.
More wacky beliefs on display or exposure of to his penchant for fibbing about his “sinner to redemption” life story? Also, publication of his portrait with a clear depiction of a “Jesus” at this back is so creepy that some fundies might have recoiled.
What Carson demonstrates once again is that a wholesale campaign based on nothing other than a perceived admirable resume of a person that’s a government outsider and devoted Christian has a short shelf life. His campaign existed only in the sense that fundraising pros were able to collect a lot of money from a lot of people and almost all of the receipts were used for the fundraising operation. That did raise Carson’s public profile and plenty of people willingly flock to a candidate that looks good to others. They don’t hang around for long when a candidate’s obvious flaws and/or obvious self-misrepresentation begin to surface. This was seen in ’08 with Cain — he didn’t fly as high as Carson but he also didn’t start with such a well-developed fundraising and fleecing the fundies operations.
If a rightwing, wacky, fundie centered candidate was ever to win the GOP nomination, it was in ’08 with Huckabee. He ticked more boxes than Carson does. But like Carson, didn’t build much of a campaign operation. NH is where fundie candidates go to die. Coming in a weak third in NH after his Iowa win hobbled Huck enough in SC that McCain was able to edge him out.
The trouble with early polling, I think. The people who said they supported Carson didn’t mean they wanted to vote for Carson, they meant they wanted to prove the GOP is not a racist party. As with Herman Cain, who was the frontrunner in October 2011.
Agree. You stated what I perceived. Carson, like Herman Cain, was the GOP token that “proves” that the GOP is a “big tent” or something.
None of those people in the early days who said they “supported” Carson had any intention of actually voting for him. Carson proved his usefulness, and no doubt has been handsomely rewarded, which is what Carson really wanted. CHA CHING!!
Seemingly, Carson does not know how the game is played enough to know how to end his campaign gracefully. This story is not over yet.
There are more past-shelf-life candidates still in the campaign. Will Carson signal the end for them as well or will they drop one-by-one slowly over the early primaries.
And against all signs, is this the moment when the Republican establishment tells the voters to go to hell, eat their spinach, and turn out for Jeb!, Christie, or Kasich? It seems unlikely, but the old-line pols are getting antsy.
I am guessing that the “old-line pols” will soon find themselves holding their noses and stepping behind Trump or Cruz. They can be all kinds of nervous if they want to, but in the end I think they will all fall in line, as is almost always the case. Even if the tell the voters to go to hell, in the end almost all of them will support the nominee, regardless who it is. For every Tom Ridge there are ten thousand lemmings who will walk in lock-step and do their tribal duty.
Carson can still matter in two ways:
Theoretically, yes. But GOP candidates that begin to fade after a respectable showing in the polls don’t seem ever to make a comeback in Iowa. If such a candidate is also fading in NH and/or was never well positioned there, it’s basically over for him/her.
A month before the 2012 IA caucus Bachmann was polling around 10%, about where Carson is now, but her campaign staff in NH had quit in October.
All hoping to be the 2016 Iowa ‘Santorum.’
Does Kasich stand a chance as the primaries unravel. He seems to me the best Republican in the race and likely a real threat to either Sanders or Clinton in the general. If one or two of the other crazies fade, and the other kiddy table candidates go away, wouldn’t he be Republican’s best bet this go-around?
I don’t think the base will ever abide Kasich. Yes, theoretically he could be a competitive candidate in a nationwide election. But I don’t think he could ever pass the right wing purity test. I just don’t think that after getting all stoked by the proto-fascistic bleatings of Trump, that they could ever swallow a guy who expanded Medicaid in his state under the ACA and claims to have humanitarian leanings because he’s worried about what he’s going to tell St. Peter at the pearly gates.
How did they abide Rmoney? Seriously, Kasich is more in line with the mods and fundies than Mitt was.
Mittens was richer that Gawd. That’s how they abided him. Really.
My rightwing fundie family has long dissed the Mormons as non-Xtians (ergo, devil worshippers – I’m not exaggerating). Yet when the PTB rammed RMoney down their throats, they dutifully stepped in line and began praising RMoney for being such a wonderful family man and other nauseating hype.
If the GOP “nominates” a rich, white MAN who fakes out being “Christiany”… the marks, er rubes, er voters will fall in line. No doubt, their rightwing Family/Fellowship “churches” were also dictating that it is NOW “ok” to vote for Mormons.
Mitt is at the poor end of “richer than gawd.”
Is MAN negotiable?
Can Xtrian be stretched to include Jewish?
How many rightwing churches would a billion dollars buy?
Southern Baptist Christianity is a lot like Mammon worship. Mammon worshipers don’t just worship Mammon, but those who Mammon has blessed.
Mitt Rmoney has clearly been blessed by Mammon. That is enough for them.
I think the landscape has shifted for the base since 2012. I don’t think they really ever imagined that they would get their dream candidate like this. It was at the point that it always seemed they had to take what they were getting; a wink and a nod to their nativism and xenophobia, hatred of the blahs and loathing of the poors. And along comes Trump, proudly speaking and advocating all those things, and more. Yes, Kasich is in line with the fundies and the mods. But the base is now mainly angry white people who are not largely motivated by their religious convictions or anything resembling Republican moderation. They are largely crusaders for their race and for white supremacy. And Trump is the leader who will take back the country for them, the deserving white people who have had their riches and legacy stolen from them by the black Muslim in the White House, and all his fellow travelers.
There is certainly all of that. Trump is loud and proud with his white supremacy. The base loves it that someone is finally not “constrained” by the dreaded “political correctness,” which infests the land and makes us all weak and wimpy or something.
Some of the Trump supporters I know, and I have known these people for many years, have had a very difficult time with the fact that it has become less and less acceptable over the years to be outward and open bigots. It has become uncomfortable for them to be able to tell their racial jokes, to disparage others in public and flaunt their visions of racial superiority. In their eyes it has been mainly due to that evil “political correctness” that liberals have shoved down their throats and forced into the public sphere. They are ecstatic that someone like Trump is finally pushing back on this and that they can now proudly and unashamedly watch as their fellow tribe members push around black demonstrators, punch protestors in the face who are on the street and watch a man get rousing cheers by calling for setting a black man on fire, who deigns to speak up in protest at a Trump rally. They are finally back and getting the “respect” they deserve from their lessers.
IOW — they’re too chickenshit to speak like raging sexists, racists, and homophobic assholes in public because of all the negative feedback they get. And they think that the passes a billionaire gets for being an asshole will trickle down to them? Since Reaganomics didn’t trickle-down and turn them into billionaires that get to live by their own rules, they’re now setting for trickle-down hate speech. Someday they might get the only thing that trickles down from the GOP, but wouldn’t wager on that happening anytime before all the real impacts of global climate change hits them/theirs.
Yes, yes and yes.
Not a fan of PC speech police outside of pre-K/elementary/secondary school. Freedom of speech is protected, but like all rights does require one to use it wisely and responsibly.
The GOP “establishment” (which includes Fox, Rush, etc) are all using the terminology “political correctness” in a dumb way that debases what PC actually is. That’s JMHO, of course, but they’re using the anti-PC disingenuously, of course, to sell their racism and say: it should be OK to be a loud and proud racist.
Why do this? Simple: divide and conquer.
What the GOP establishment & M$M & Trump (and the rest of the line up) are STILL super hypocritical about is the fact that they still love to pretend that jerkwads like the Donald “pulled himself up by his bootstraps.” All that sh*tty lying fake libertariany hokum that says: it’s a level playing field, and if you’re poor, it’s your own d*mn lazy fault bc you’re lazy and don’t work hard enough etc etc.
Sure, the rubes love Trump, like W & Mitt RMoney, and they pretend that he “made it” all on his own, which is hogwash.
The other hypocritical thing that the GOP does is to pretend that the Takers in the .0001% got there through some kind of “honest” means. The Donald gets to be all racist and xenophobic about building his damn wall, but R U kidding me? Like he hasn’t used illegal workers – workers paid at pennies on the dollars – to build and work in his empire? Same thing with all the rest of the 1%. They’re crooks, cheats, liars and murderers. But the GOP pretends that they all got there through honest means. They’re all Xtians, after all, and hate abortion (except when they didn’t).
Pull the other one, sparky.
And their Christiany Prosperity Churches pump out the propaganda saying: if you’re rich, then Gawd & Jeebus smiles on you bc if you’re poor it’s because you’re a debased sinner.
Oh the GOP has its own version of political correctness, but they just pretend that their version of PC is “ok” while other versions of PC are “bad.”
Buncha hypocrites. But what else is new?
To the GOP, it is “political correctness” if they don’t have the unfettered ability to openly exclude, marginalize and insult people. Any questioning or demands for explanation, clarification or evidence for their assertions or views is automatically labeled a PC based attack. It’s just another grievance they are carrying because it is no longer fashionable in all corners of their world be openly misogynistic, racist or homophobic. That’s part and parcel of the “taking back” part of Taking Back Their Country.
Understand what the rightwing has been doing with this, but when did PC speech rise to the level of a stated political and national grievance among racists, etc.? They’ve objected to social pressure not to use such racist, etc. speech like forever, but have long known that it’s rude/impolite/etc. and therefore, limited their use of it to their “safe zones.”
Whether or not a majority of Americans understood/appreciated the crimes Nixon had committed in real time, what did disgust a majority was to hear Nixon using racial slurs on his Oval Office recordings. Democrats/liberals didn’t need to scream about that for the public to “get it.”
What I did find sad in 2008 was the outrage when Harry Reid referred to Obama as a Negro. MLK, Jr. referred to himself as a Negro. In prior 20th century decades “Colored” (NAACP) was considered polite but had been depreciated over those years. Then Black was claimed and others looked askance at those that continued to use Negro. Then African-American became the more polite word. Too much of a mouthful to make Black obsolete; plus technically we’re all African-Americans. Of course our persistence in using skin color, origin of one’s ancestors, or religion to describe anyone is not without a status and/or racial component.
Language and culture changes and people adapt, some more slowly, often far too slowly, than others. Extinguishing any prevalent and previously used slur takes time and in the meantime, turning a slip of the tongue or intended slur into a capital offense in the court of public opinion doesn’t speed up the evolution and risks creating a backlash which may slow down the natural process.
Thanks for some insight into Kasich. Still seems to me he ought to be more highly placed. I understand the Republican Party is dancing on the edge of insanity, so it just seems if / when they get their wake up moment that Trump isn’t just going to lose, he’s going to lose the whole enchilada, they’ll come to their senses and go for a “moderate” Republican, Kasich specifically, that might help them survive to fight another day. Surely, faced with the prospect of an historic, landslide loss, Republican voters will come to their senses.
I’d much rather it were Kasich because it seems he’ll be a more honest debater than any of the others and could provide voters with a (more) rational choice than what they’ll get with Trump, Cruz, or Rubio. Republicans have never nominated anyone that was so ridiculous as these three; it’s still hard to see how they’ll do it differently this time. Thx again for answers. (sorry to take this a little OT.)
It was all about the GRIFT with him anyway.
The grift was what his fundraising operators were in it for. I’m persuaded that he authentically believed that he could be elected POTUS.
That’s how I see it, but Carson is truly weird enough to perhaps have convinced himself – once his poll numbers rose – that he really was in it for the long haul. Based on nothing other than my “feelings,” I still feel he got into it bc he was offered a lotta cash. That’s JMHO, of course.
What’s fascinating about Carson is what happens when you strip away the framework — the cynical fundraising apparatus and the party mechanics and the mail-order donation-based evangelical mechanics and the donor classes and the entire gray area between the church groups and the right wing of the Republican party (the “long con” that Rick Perlstein wrote so eloquently about) — when you strip all that away and look at the actual man, the figure who had the right characteristics to rise into the center of that framework, to be seized upon and elevated the way that Rove famously seized upon Bush when he first saw him speak, you see this really remarkable person; this absolute dolt, this self-centered, ignorant, child-like, entitled man-child who absolutely believes his ridiculous mythos and (now that he’s on the national stage and is getting some real scrutiny) can’t believe that anyone would have the temerity to challenge the God-like superiority he obviously has been led to believe that he actually possesses.
I mean, Trump at least knows what it means to face opposition; to have to fight to get attention, to put your name in gold-plated letters, to struggle for ratings, to have to be canny and conniving when dealing with bankruptcy court or television ratings or media critics (he’s been doing it for decades). With this guy, it’s like we’ve discovered some kind of daughin…like a figure from pre-revolutionary Russia or something; a fragile nobleman who can’t understand why everyone isn’t immediately coronating him as the savior-figure he’s been told he must be.
It’s absolutely despicable, in this day and age, in our country, that there could be such a man. I think I actually hold him in much lower regard than I do Trump. He makes Trump look like some kind of wise, worldly, seasoned figure, in comparison.
you see this really remarkable person; this absolute dolt, this self-centered, ignorant, child-like, entitled man-child who absolutely believes his ridiculous mythos and (now that he’s on the national stage and is getting some real scrutiny) can’t believe that anyone would have the temerity to challenge the God-like superiority he obviously has been led to believe that he actually possesses.
Are you describing Carson or Cruz?
I know Carson, but this description also fits Cruz, which is why in a large sense Carson’s supporters seem to have no trouble migrating to Cruz.
They also feel this way, not on a national stage, just in public .. outside their fundy circles.
They cannot accept their insane belief systems (IE buy-bull based prejudices) are open to challenge, or even worse resistance, especially from the goberment.
It’s hard to hold Trump in any kind of “regard” bc he is such a bloviating huckster. But you make some good points about the difference between blow-hard, racist, sexist, xenophobic Trump and some of the other dolts paraded out by the GOP as “real” contenders for POTUS. Such an absolutely pathetic line up! It does make a modicum of “sense” – if one can use such a term – that the rubes would see Trump as having more capability for the job.
Trump is eminently unfit to be POTUS. Ridiculously so. Yet when one compares Trump to babbling foolish idiots like Carson (and yes, also Cruz), well… there you have it.
Too bad, so sad that the GOP “establishment” is sh*tting in their Depends bc Trump has taken over the race. This is the logical outcome (truly: logical) of Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy, which they’ve all so lovingly embraced and paid big buckaroo$ to ram down our throats. Squirm all you like – this is what you bought and paid for.
Commodities Trader Maris from Eriksdale, usually spends time with pursuits including internet, avocat en ligne gratuit and badge collecting. Has enrolled in a global contiki journey. Is extremely thrilled in particular about visiting Historical Monuments of Mtskheta.