The keynote speaker at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, in Washington, D.C., is expected to be an agile performer: a preacher, but a nondenominational one; an orator, but a nonpartisan one. In 1997, the speaker was Benjamin Solomon Carson, who was both an accomplished pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University and, unlike most pediatric neurosurgeons, something of a celebrity. Ten years before, he had separated twins who were joined at the head, and he used the attention that followed to establish himself as a writer and inspirational figure. He grew up poor and black in Detroit, the son of a single mother who, he likes to remind audiences, could barely read. And he has a knack, common to great motivators, for making his accomplishments seem both extraordinary and achievable.
“I don’t feel that I really belong here,” Carson said, when he took the lectern, but his casual posture and gentle smile suggested that he knew he did. The anecdotes he dispensed had been polished smooth over the decades, and they helped him administer a carefully calibrated dose of political and spiritual incitement. He lamented the secularization of American society, asserting that religious faith was no longer acceptable in political discourse. “If it’s in our Constitution, it’s in our Pledge, it’s in our courts, and it’s on our money, but we’re not supposed to talk about it, what is that?” he asked. “That’s schizophrenia!” But he also delivered a black-history lesson, enumerating a long list of African-American inventors who were, he said, absent from school textbooks, thereby depriving young black men of role models. Midway through his talk, he issued a whimsical—and bipartisan—call to action. “What if everybody in this room, with all your influence, wrote a letter to Kellogg’s and General Mills and said, ‘Put on your cereal boxes Nobel Prize winners and people of intellect, instead of just people who use sports and entertainment,’ ” he said. “Those kinds of things, I think, will make a big difference.” When he was finished, Bill and Hillary Clinton stood up to applaud, and they pumped his hand as he returned to his seat.
Perhaps President Obama was expecting a similar performance when he settled in for Carson’s encore appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast, in February, 2013. But by then Carson’s political vision had come into sharper focus. The political pundit and entrepreneur Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend and adviser of Carson’s who is currently his business manager, remembers watching Carson “agonizing” in the greenroom, as he tried to decide whether, and how much, he should criticize the President. In the end, Carson decided not to single out Obama, but he offered a strongly divergent view of America’s problems and potential solutions: he sounded an alarm about the national debt; he called for a strictly proportional income tax, based on the Biblical principle of tithing; and he laid out a health-care reform plan, which he said would reduce “bureaucracy”—a veiled reference, perhaps, to Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The speech became an online sensation, partly thanks to its unnamed target, who stopped smiling about halfway through and skipped an opportunity for a post-speech handshake. Clips have amassed millions of views on YouTube: “Obama Destroyed by Dr. Benjamin Carson’s Amazing Speech”; “Dr. Benjamin Carson Wipes the Smile off Obama’s Face.” (Among Carson’s fans, his honorific often serves as a term of affection.) And the speech inspired the Wall Street Journal to issue the first major endorsement of the 2016 campaign cycle: “Ben Carson for President.”
The Journal editorial wasn’t actually intended as a Presidential endorsement; it was a jocular salute to a newly minted folk hero, and a mischievous suggestion that even this political layman was more sensible than Obama. But the cult of Carson grew, aided by the formation of the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, and by tacit encouragement from Carson, who seemed to enjoy the speculation. Soon after the speech, he announced that he was retiring from neurosurgery and hinted that he was considering public office. This May, after two years of contemplation, he declared that he was running. He recalled praying for guidance. “Lord, I don’t want to do this,” he said. “But if you’re going to open the doors I will go through with it.”
During a recent appearance at a retirement community in Exeter, New Hampshire, Carson, who is sixty-four, was interrupted by residents making a common complaint: he was speaking too softly. He adjusted the microphone and leaned into it. “I can’t get it any higher,” he said. “It would be in my mouth.” And then he returned to his subject, which was the dire prospect of a country in which citizens were afraid to criticize their government. “Back in Nazi Germany, a lot of those people did not believe in what Hitler was doing,” he said. “They kept their mouths shut and they kept their heads down. And look at what happened.” Carson has an ability—honed, no doubt, during his previous career—to deliver alarming statements in a soothing manner. “Some people say, ‘Oh, nothing like that could ever happen in America,’ ” he said. “I beg to differ.” When he speaks, Carson sometimes blinks slowly, or closes his eyes in thought, and he uttered this last phrase in the same tone of voice that you might use to recount a pleasant dream.
When Carson announced his candidacy, he was overshadowed by Jeb Bush, who was viewed as the favorite, and then by Donald Trump, whose groundswell began a few weeks later. But Carson kept speaking, quietly. Ryan Rhodes, Carson’s Iowa state director, says that the candidate’s “soft touch” is particularly effective among women voters and Evangelicals. By this fall, national polls showed Carson catching Trump, and even overtaking him. In some ways, this is not a particularly meaningful achievement: national polls, conducted long before the primary season has begun, have little predictive power. (At this point four years ago, Newt Gingrich was the front-runner.) And Carson’s big numbers have had little effect on the skepticism of political experts, who continue to believe that the next President will be a professional politician; Marco Rubio emerged as the betting favorite for the nomination, despite polling about half as well as Carson. Even so, it’s hard to think about the crowded cluster of Republican candidates for President without considering the startling fact that, for months, none were able to command much more support than a former surgeon whose campaign platform is barely more granular than the speech that made him a conservative hero three years ago.
Like most popular political candidates, Carson promises to deliver his audiences from politics. At campaign rallies, he gets a warm ovation when he inveighs against the nameless forces of division. (“They want Democrats to believe that Republicans are evil,” he says. “Or Republicans to believe that Democrats are evil.”) But that doesn’t make him a moderate. In Exeter, he condemned Planned Parenthood, saying that he would rather direct federal funding to “organizations that don’t engage in killing babies.” A few hours later, at the Durham campus of the University of New Hampshire, he warned about the peril of “global jihadists” and said, “There are many of them, already, within our nation.” That evening, he travelled to a boathouse on Goat Island, off the Portsmouth coast, where a group of local doctors had gathered to slurp milky clam chowder and listen to a former colleague share his belief that physicians should use their “healing instinct” to revive the country. Carson was in his element, joking about the hassles of dunning insurance companies and mentioning, briefly, his interest in trigeminal neuralgia. But even there he stayed on message: when a man in the audience asked about the rising cost of medical school, Carson suggested making colleges pay the interest on student loans, to help keep down tuition, yet firmly rejected the idea of universal government-funded college education. “Anything that we do to add to the debt right now is almost like treason,” he said.
During the Obama years, there has been no shortage of conservative leaders eager to squeeze the words “debt” and “treason” into the same sentence. And there are moments when Carson seems almost retro, thrilling audiences with an anti-deficit, anti-Obamacare message that had already started to lose its freshness when he delivered that famous speech. What distinguishes Carson from his Tea Party predecessors is his biography, which also distinguishes him from the rest of the Republican field: he has been telling and retelling his life story for nearly thirty years, hewing to a narrative that emphasizes the Biblical virtues of grace and humility. Other candidates in the race, with the notable exception of Trump, have been reluctant to criticize someone so well loved, perhaps because they don’t view Carson as a long-term threat. In the most recent Republican debate, the other candidates not only refrained from trying to hurt Carson but seemed eager to help him. After he gave a meandering soliloquy in response to a question about banks, Rubio took it upon himself to implement a Troubled Assertion Relief Program, exclaiming, “He’s right on point, there.”
Journalists haven’t been quite so supportive: BuzzFeed recently posted an old video of Carson suggesting, in defiance of archeological scholarship, that the Egyptian pyramids were actually grain-storage units, built by the Biblical patriarch Joseph. During an excruciating Fox News interview after the Paris attacks, Chris Wallace tried and failed to get Carson to tell him which countries he would recruit to help fight ISIS. (Carson promised to involve “all of the Arab states—and even the non-Arab states.”) Last week, on an Iowa television station, Carson called his foreign-policy education “an ongoing process.” Two days later, he talked about the importance of screening refugees, using an infelicitous analogy: “If there’s a rabid dog running around your neighborhood, you’re probably not going to assume something good about that dog.”
At times, the scrutiny has led Carson to engage in atypically peevish exchanges with the media. Williams, his adviser, has been heartened by Carson’s willingness to fight back. “Somebody’s attacking your good name, your word,” he says. “He needs to get emotional. He needs to get fire in his belly.” It would make sense for any other politician to react this way, but Carson’s appeal is based largely on his seeming to be above the fray: a Baptist youth minister in Florida told me that he admired Carson because he was humble, and not “bombastic and adversarial”; a volunteer in Iowa cited his pledge to work for “all the people,” including the ones who wouldn’t vote for him. The most suspenseful thing about his surreal campaign is seeing how long he can stay in the fight without looking too much like a fighter.
Carson certainly seemed serene on a recent Tuesday afternoon in Florida, sitting in his temporary living room aboard a chartered bus emblazoned with his face; his head was framed by a backward “D” on the window behind him, the last letter of “BEN CARSON, M.D.” His wife, Candy, emerged from a private room in the back to show Carson a message on her mobile phone, and then disappeared. Carson pointed out that he is used to travelling a lot, and that he has been contending with big crowds for years. “When people would come to the clinic, they always would come with their cameras and their books to be autographed,” he told me. “The magnitude has just increased exponentially.” His campaign has followed an astonishing trajectory, but so has his life; he published his autobiography, “Gifted Hands,” in 1990, and it reads like an extended parable. He writes that his mother, Sonya, was a domestic worker, and sometimes left Ben and his older brother, Curtis, with neighbors while she sought clinical help for “confusion and depression”; his father, an autoworker and part-time preacher, left the family when Carson was eight.
Carson was raised in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church—he was baptized at eight and again, for good measure, at twelve—and he has remained a member. His surgical skill seems, in his telling, like a compensatory gift from God: afflicted with poor eyesight, he discovered that he had a knack for spatial visualization, making him well suited to navigate the delicate tangle of a child’s brain. Like many Adventists, Carson is a vegetarian, though he downplays any differences between Adventists and other Christians. Decades ago, in an interview in Vegetarian Times, he expressed certainty that meat eating would fade away by 2010, and that animals would “breathe a sigh of relief.” But, on the bus in Florida, he was eager to explain that his diet is merely a personal choice, and that he has nothing against meat eaters or hunters. He offered a brief explanation of his church’s best-known tenet. “There’s no place in the Bible that says the Sabbath was changed from Saturday to Sunday, so we worship on Saturday, that’s all,” he said. “Does that mean that people who worship on Sunday are evil? No! Of course not.”
In “Gifted Hands,” Carson recalls the two years that he and his brother spent in Boston, living with his mother’s sister: he remembered “winos and drunks,” as well as “squad cars racing up the street.” At the retirement community in Exeter, he added grislier details, saying, “I saw people lying on the street with bullet holes and stab wounds.” The Boston Globe talked to longtime residents of the neighborhoods where Carson lived, who remembered a less menacing atmosphere; one called the claim of bodies in the streets a “vast exaggeration.” Of course, Carson’s exaggeration, if that’s what it is, surely wouldn’t seem so vast if he were not a Presidential candidate; one suspects that few motivational speakers would emerge unscathed from an encounter with a pack of investigative reporters.
A number of Carson’s favorite anecdotes seem impervious to research. When he tells his life story, he rarely omits the moment when, at the age of fourteen, he tried to stab another boy with a camping knife; he struck the boy’s belt buckle, the blade “snapped and dropped to the ground,” and Carson retreated to a bathroom, where he begged God to rid him of his violent temper. In Carson’s telling, the prayer worked. “Since that day,” he wrote, “I have never had a problem with my temper.” It says something about Carson’s reputation that reporters have grown suspicious not of his redemption but of his original sin: CNN talked to former friends and classmates and noted, solemnly, that “the violent, impulsive person Carson has described himself as is unrecognizable to them.” Similarly, Carson often talks about a moment of rage when he attacked his mother with a hammer, but, in 1988, the Detroit Free Press published an article in which Carson’s mother recalled the altercation differently. In her version, it was she who wielded the hammer, and might have used it, if Curtis had not intervened.
The most damaging potential debunking is also the least clear-cut. Carson was part of the R.O.T.C. program in high school, and in “Gifted Hands” he remembers being “offered a full scholarship to West Point.” But, earlier this month, Politico reported that Carson’s campaign had “admitted” that “a central point in his inspirational personal story was fabricated”: he had never applied to West Point, let alone been accepted, and the school does not charge tuition. But Carson had never mentioned applying, and so Politico, under pressure, softened its language, saying only that Carson “conceded that he never applied nor was granted admission.” Since then, the controversy has grown more obscure—it is now an argument over what “offered” means, and whether a West Point representative might have made some encouraging remarks that Carson misinterpreted. In a press conference, he called the reports a “witch hunt.” Raising his voice (possibly for the first time all year), he claimed that Obama had not faced similar scrutiny. “There is a desperation, on behalf of some, to try to find a way to tarnish me,” he said, dejectedly—unlike Trump, Carson takes no visible pleasure in tangling with the media. “It’s just ridiculous!”
For Carson, being attacked is a relatively new experience. In the years after “Gifted Hands” was published, he turned his autobiography into an industry. He embarked upon a never-ending speaking tour and founded a charity, the Carson Scholars Fund, which has recognized more than six thousand students for their “academic achievement and humanitarian qualities.” His book spawned nine sequels, and also two documentaries, a cable-television feature film (starring Cuba Gooding, Jr.), and a long-running play in Baltimore, which was often performed for schoolchildren judged to be in need of supplementary edification. The legend of Dr. Carson was ubiquitous in the predominantly African-American schools of Baltimore. (The essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who grew up there, wrote, of Carson, “I saw him speak so many times that I began to have that ‘This guy again?’ feeling.”) It was ubiquitous, too, in many churches around the country, where Carson’s story served as proof that faith could conquer all. Many of the people who wait in line to hear his stump speech think of him primarily as a religious figure, which is part of the reason that the media skepticism hasn’t harmed him. Like his policy positions, which are often vague or confusing, the precise details of his biography matter less to voters than the opportunity he offers them to become characters in his uplifting story.
In “Gifted Hands,” politics rarely intrudes. Carson joined his high school R.O.T.C. program in 1967, a few months before the Detroit riots, but the book makes no mention of them, or of the uproar over the Vietnam War, or of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Carson recently told the Wall Street Journal that, during the riots inspired by King’s assassination, he sheltered some white students in the high-school biology lab, although the Journal could not find anyone to corroborate this story.) Carson says that he was brought up to be “a fairly partisan Democrat,” but he evidently wasn’t much interested in activism. He attended Yale during a tumultuous period: in 1970, near the end of his freshman year, the campus was overtaken by protests that accompanied the trials of members of the Black Panther Party, who were accused of murder. (Hillary Clinton, then studying at Yale Law School, served as a liaison to the group that planned the protests.) But his campus life seems to have revolved mainly around Candy, his wife, a fellow-student who was also from Detroit. She is the author of a forthcoming book about their marriage, the co-author of his last three books, the leader of the Carson family string quartet (they have three grown sons, who fill out the lineup), and, he often says, the only woman he has ever been with. One of the black student leaders in those days at Yale, Kurt Schmoke, says that Carson was not among the rabble-rousers. “The Ben Carson I knew in college was a very studious person—focussed like a laser beam on going to medical school,” he says.
Carson got his medical degree from the University of Michigan and, in 1977, arrived at Johns Hopkins, where he became known as a precise but imaginative surgeon. Readers who have heard about his life-saving feats might be surprised to learn, in “Gifted Hands,” how many of his best-known surgeries ended in disaster, or in a more equivocal result. Benjamin and Patrick Binder, the German twins who played such a large role in Carson’s career, were seven months old when the operation took place: Carson and his team had to temporarily induce hypothermic arrest so that they could disentangle the interlaced blood vessels before the babies bled out. Both survived the operation, but they suffered brain damage, and one has since died. One of the things Carson learned is how not to become paralyzed by self-doubt. He likes to say that he has performed fifteen thousand surgeries, which would mean an average of more than one a day, for more than three decades.
In Baltimore, Carson was a friend and ally of Schmoke, the former student leader, who transformed his activism into a career in elected politics: from 1987 until 1999, he served as the Democratic mayor of Baltimore, and he and Carson often talked about ways to support young people in the city. At one point, when a Democratic gubernatorial candidate sought Carson’s endorsement, Schmoke urged him to decline, so as not to damage his spotless reputation. “I guess I thought that his story was above partisan politics,” Schmoke says now, chuckling. Back then, Carson liked being politically uncategorizable. In his book “The Big Picture,” published in 1999, he noted with satisfaction that he had once heard hosts on a radio show arguing over whether or not he supported Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March. Carson conspicuously declined to settle the question. Elsewhere in the book, he preëmptively defended himself against the suggestion that he was a conservative Republican. “I’m not,” he wrote, adding that he would accept no political label more restrictive than “independent.”
Schmoke remembers the day, some years ago, when Carson casually mentioned that he was skeptical of the scientific consensus on evolution. Schmoke thought he was joking, but Carson made clear that he wasn’t. “I said to myself, ‘Gosh, there must be a lot of things that Ben believes that I’ve never talked to him about,’ ” Schmoke recalls. Carson now says that his political outlook began to shift in the nineteen-eighties, when he found himself captivated by President Reagan’s message of “self-empowerment.” That became Carson’s message, too, although for many years he delivered it in nonpolitical terms. “Gifted Hands” begins with a letter from Carson’s mother, who reprises one of her favorite phrases: “If you don’t succeed, you have only yourself to blame.” In one passage, Carson declares that it is time for “minorities” to “stand on our own feet and refuse to look to anybody else to save us.” But later, in a discussion of “disadvantaged kids,” he suggests that there is “a system precluding these people from achieving.” Of course, self-help and systemic change need not be mutually exclusive. And, anyway, as a surgeon and motivational speaker Carson didn’t have to choose.
Carson registered as a Republican only a year ago, as he considered running for President. By all accounts, it was the battle over health care that pushed him to finally embrace a political party. In 2004, President George W. Bush appointed Carson to his Council on Bioethics, and Carson began thinking more seriously about how the federal government might rein in the insurance industry, which seemed to him to consume too much of the nation’s medical spending. At a town-hall meeting in 2005, organized by the Congressional Black Caucus, he suggested a health-care system modelled on “something that already works”: the food-stamp program. (He liked the idea that recipients could shop for medical care, just as food-stamp recipients shop for groceries.) Two years later, at a council meeting, Carson suggested that, if insurance could be made more affordable, universal coverage could be achieved by fiat. He said, “There is where the government perhaps comes in and makes it mandatory, just like it’s mandatory for you to have automobile insurance.”
These ideas don’t seem radically at odds with the reform bill that President Obama eventually passed. But as the debate over the Affordable Care Act began, in 2009, Carson was dismayed to find himself shut out of the process: Obama disbanded Bush’s Council on Bioethics, and Carson tried in vain to secure a Presidential meeting. “It left him very disappointed, and devastated,” Williams says. The 2013 Prayer Breakfast speech was an expression of frustration, and also a final attempt to get through to a President who seemed intent on ignoring Carson’s expertise. On the campaign trail, Carson rarely fails to mention his idea for “health savings accounts,” which would be personal and shareable: family members could contribute to each other’s medical bills, and seniors might pass on leftover funds to their descendants. He hasn’t fully explained how these accounts would be set up, or what would happen to patients who depleted theirs. Even more than the competition, he is devout in his belief that systemic problems can be solved by topical applications of common sense.
By the time Carson launched his campaign, he had completed his evolution from Democrat to independent to eager exponent of movement conservatism. He evinced a newfound passion for gun rights. And although the Adventist Church suggests that in some “exceptional circumstances” a woman might justifiably choose to terminate a pregnancy, Carson is now “unabashedly and entirely pro-life.” Like any successful speaker, Carson knows how to read a room, and he admits that his transformation has been aided by his recent immersion in politics, and by the receptive audience that he has found among conservatives. He has emerged, for instance, as an advocate of tightened immigration laws, arguing that children born in the U.S. to unauthorized immigrants shouldn’t be given citizenship. “In talking to a lot of Americans, I realized how strongly they feel about people who come here illegally, and I think that probably has influenced me,” he says. “Because if you want to be a representative of the people, in a republic-type government, then obviously you have to represent what they feel.”
When Carson’s bus arrives at an event, his supporters often break into applause, although some find other ways to express themselves. In Waterloo, Iowa, a woman hopped in place, in anticipation of being in his presence; more than one fan, after shaking his hand, bent over and wept. In Florida, the crowds included eager teen-agers and shuffling seniors but only a small number of African-Americans. Carson occasionally acknowledges that his ideological journey has put him at odds with black voters, who play a vanishingly small role in the modern Republican Party. On the bus, which was trundling from his hotel, in Clearwater, to a Barnes & Noble in Tampa, Carson thought about how, exactly, Democrats manage to win so many African-American votes. “Don’t you think Lyndon Johnson had it right?” he said. “I’m sure you’ve heard his quote where he said, ‘Give those N-words a few goodies and we’ll have their vote for the next two hundred years.’ ” The quote comes, lightly paraphrased, from a book by Ronald Kessler, who attributes it to a former Air Force One steward, who said that he overheard a conversation between Johnson and “two governors.” The line is meant to illuminate the cynicism of Democratic politicians, although, by crediting it, Carson can’t help but belittle the intelligence of African-American voters, too. This tactic is common in politics, where leaders often devise patronizing explanations for the otherwise unaccountable fact that people sometimes vote for their opponents. (Think of Obama’s claim, during the 2008 campaign, that inhabitants of depressed towns “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”) But the notion of black voters as dupes for white politicians has a particularly nettlesome history in the U.S., stretching back to Reconstruction; nowadays, some Republican politicians prefer to simply say, instead, that their party needs to get better at reaching out.
Because Carson is African-American, he need not be so circumspect—one of his advantages is his willingness to talk about race in language that his rivals would be wise to avoid. He has called Obamacare “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery,” and has said, of abortion, “I think it’s a moral issue—just like slavery was a moral issue.” While blasting Planned Parenthood, he asserted that its founder, Margaret Sanger, “believed that people like me should be eliminated or kept under control.” (Sanger did suggest preventing “feeble-minded” people from having children, but there is no evidence that she supported sterilization on the basis of race.) Some of his gentler formulations, too, convey a coded racial appeal: Carson often excites largely white audiences by sketching a vision of racial harmony, just as Obama once did. When he tells crowds that “our unity is what provides our strength,” he could be echoing Obama’s famous claim, from the 2004 speech that made him a national figure, that “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
Some of Carson’s biggest supporters see race as an important part of his appeal. Unlike Obama—and, for that matter, Herman Cain, the African-American businessman who briefly captivated Republican voters during the 2012 campaign—Carson entered this race as a figure well known and widely admired in African-American communities. John Philip Sousa IV, the leader of an unaffiliated pro-Carson political-action committee, is the author of “Ben Carson: Rx for America,” a slim paperback that is given out free at Carson events. (The front cover announces, “Over 1,000,000 in Print!”) Sousa, a great-grandson of the composer, argues that Carson could attract a significant minority of the African-American vote, enough to make a Democratic victory mathematically impossible; a Carson Presidency, he argues, would “forever destroy” the “false narrative that conservatives and Republicans are racists.”
There is something paradoxical about Sousa’s argument, which urges Republican voters to agree that race matters in order to demonstrate that it really doesn’t. As Carson’s audience has changed, he has modified how he talks about race, in ways that make him more acceptable to the party he recently joined. Writing in 1999, he affirmed his belief that “our justice system metes out different treatment to blacks and whites,” and declared that police in a Detroit suburb had recently arrested his mother and impounded her car, because she matched the description of a suspect. Now he suggests that African-American frustration with the criminal justice system is misdirected. “I just don’t agree that that’s where the emphasis needs to be,” he says.
At times, there are signs of tension between Carson’s old life, as a community-minded motivator, and his new life, as a Republican favorite. During one recent appearance, his customary reminiscences of boyhood gave way to a memorable digression about the joys of throwing rocks at cars. “Everybody did it, because it was so much fun,” he said, and he chuckled at the thought of police officers scrambling to catch him and his friends. “Of course, that was back in the days before they would shoot you,” he said. He stopped himself. “I’m just kidding,” he said, adding that he had “a tremendous amount of respect for the police.” He paused to accept the crowd’s applause, and, back on safe ground, added that the police were “the very last people that we should be targeting.”
When Carson mentions racial uplift, he often adds a quick disclaimer, noting that his policies are meant “not only for African-Americans but for everybody.” Sitting on the bus, though, he advocated a kind of economic separatism. “If we would learn how to turn our dollars over in our own community, two or three times, before you send it out—that’s how you generate wealth,” he told me. “That’s how the Jews did it. That’s how the Koreans did it.” Half a century earlier, Malcolm X made a strikingly similar argument, saying, “If we try and establish some industry in our own community, then we’re developing to the position where we are creating employment for our own kind.” Of course, Malcolm X’s entreaty was accompanied by a caustic corollary that probably would not impress the Republican electorate. “Once you gain control of the economy of your own community,” he added, “then you don’t have to picket and boycott and beg some cracker downtown for a job in his business.”
If Carson has a specific pitch to African-American voters, it is indistinguishable from his general economic pitch. He wants to lower taxes for everyone in order to spur economic activity and raise interest rates, so that poor and middle-class families can earn more interest in their savings accounts. And he wants to allow corporations to repatriate overseas money, tax free, if they use ten per cent of it to “create jobs for unemployed people and people on welfare.” His campaign’s outreach to African-Americans has consisted largely of a radio advertisement featuring a hip-hop track that not even Carson seemed to enjoy. (“I probably would have taken a little different approach,” he said after it was released.) Maybe it doesn’t much matter, given the racially polarized state of American politics. Florida, for instance, is about seventeen per cent African-American, but exit polls conducted there in 2012 suggest that only about one in a hundred Mitt Romney voters was African-American. Sometime in the future, black voters might help Republicans win the Presidency. But in this cycle it’s highly doubtful that they will help a Republican win the nomination.
Earlier this fall, Carson startled the press corps—and some of his own advisers—by cutting back on his campaign schedule so that he could promote his latest book, “A More Perfect Union,” in which his political platform takes the form of a constitutional exegesis. (Carson’s ten books all cover pretty much the same territory, and so some conceptual ingenuity is required to keep his bibliography growing.) The plan, which Carson explained by saying that he wanted to fulfill his obligations to his publisher, puzzled many observers; National Review posted a blog item under the headline “this isn’t normal.” And yet the book tour helped him—or, at any rate, didn’t hurt. During October, when he was mainly off the campaign trail, his popularity increased. National polls showed him in a virtual tie for first place, with Trump; in Iowa polls, for the first time, he was the front-runner. At book signings, hundreds and even thousands of fans lined up to buy a copy of “A More Perfect Union,” have it signed, and maybe get a quick handshake. Carson apparently hasn’t lost his surgical dexterity, because often he executed the handshake while holding an uncapped Sharpie in the same hand. At a Books-A-Million in Kissimmee, Florida, employees made sure that customers didn’t linger for more than a few seconds, but one man brought the line to a halt. Bob Santos, a fellow-Adventist who had first heard about Carson through his church, had spent more than five hundred dollars on a basketful of Carson books, which he planned to distribute to friends and relatives. Once Carson had worked his way through the basket, Santos seemed exhilarated, even though he hadn’t quite got everything he wanted. “I thought he was going to personalize one of them,” Santos said. “He said he can’t.”
Before Carson’s Presidential campaign was a campaign, it was a business—one largely independent of Carson himself. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allows political-action committees to be more or less unregulated, so long as they don’t coördinate their activities with official campaigns. In December, 2013, Carson told potential supporters that none of the groups soliciting on his behalf had his blessing, but the pro-Carson groups didn’t need it. They kept making money and plowing it back into fund-raising, creating a virtuous and potentially lucrative cycle. The following year, as the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee—run by Sousa and Vernon Robinson, a political entrepreneur—was raising millions, Armstrong Williams suggested that the organization was dishonest. “People giving money think it’s going to Dr. Carson, and it’s not,” he said, adding, “I don’t like misleading people.”
Once Carson announced his candidacy—yielding, he said, to the people who had been “clamoring” for him to run—he had to make peace with the Carson industry. Williams now believes that the unaffiliated PACs are “not as exploitative” as he had thought, and concedes that they have played an important role in boosting Carson. Williams says that he is careful not to communicate with the Super PACs. (He suffered a scandal of his own, a decade ago: he was working as a syndicated columnist, and it was revealed that the Bush Administration had paid him to promote its No Child Left Behind Act.) This must require special vigilance, because his brother, Alvin Williams, runs Black America’s Political Action Committee, which solicits donations in order to “push Dr. Carson to victory.”
The official campaign has proved adept at fund-raising, too, using expensive telephone and direct-mail solicitations to reach small donors. Last month, the Federal Election Commission reported that Carson’s campaign had raised nearly twenty million dollars from donors who had given two hundred dollars or less—vastly more than any other Republican. Bush, Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Chris Christie have all attracted much more Super-PAC money than Carson, while Trump has attracted about as much as he seems to need, which is none. But, if individual donations were votes, Carson would be the people’s choice.
This is partly a matter of strategy: Carson’s campaign devotes an unusually large portion of its spending—more than fifty per cent—to fund-raising. It is also a result of Carson’s status as a kind of conservative eminence, the kind of figure who makes people excited to put a check in the mail. At the Barnes & Noble in Tampa, Sousa’s Super pac was outside in the parking lot, selling T-shirts and giving away copies of his book. An independent vender was there, too, hawking buttons. One showed Carson with hands clasped in prayer; another said, “Vote Republican—we can’t ALL be on welfare!” An elderly man wandered through the store, gawking at the line of customers that snaked around the bookcases and outside into the muggy afternoon sun. “Is Ben Carson here?” he asked a store manager. “I’ll probably vote for him—but I hate those annoying phone calls.”
Carson’s determination to do right by his publisher, Penguin, has fuelled speculation that he is more interested in making money than in becoming President. Indeed, Carson seems as proud of his business acumen as of his surgical skill—he often reminds voters that he has served on the board of both Kellogg and Costco, and promises to reinvigorate government by bringing in people he knows from “the business world.” One of Carson’s connections has caused him some trouble during the campaign: Mannatech, a multilevel-marketing company that sells nutritional supplements it calls “glyconutrients.” In 2009, the company agreed to pay six million dollars to settle a suit, brought by the Texas attorney general, which accused it of claiming that its products “cured, treated, or mitigated” a list of ailments that included cancer, autism, asthma, toxic-shock syndrome, and attention-deficit disorder. Carson has given speeches at Mannatech events, and he appeared in a regional public-television program about brain health, sponsored by Mannatech distributors, in which he stressed the importance of glyconutrients. When I asked about Mannatech, he said the company had behaved in a way that was “a little bit dishonest,” by uploading a promotional video he appeared in that was supposed to be available only to sales associates. But even now, when discussing the company’s product, Carson can’t help but offer a sales pitch. “I use it every day,” he told me. “Since I’ve been taking it, the incidence of me getting sick has dramatically declined.”
Many of Carson’s supporters are true believers: they earnestly explain how he and no other candidate could pull the country together. It can be harder to detect what Carson himself wants. Throughout the campaign, he has shown relatively little interest in the specifics of policy. His tax plan is more like a statement of general principles—he wants everyone to pay the same rate, but he hasn’t specified what that rate would be. And his foreign policy can seem like one long improvisation. During a recent debate, he responded to a question about Syria and Afghanistan with a confusing claim that “the Chinese” were active in the region; in the days afterward, the campaign clarified that Carson hadn’t meant to suggest that Chinese troops were present in Syria. At times like this, Carson’s insistence that he is a reluctant candidate can seem all too convincing—a few months before he officially announced, he told a medical journal, possibly in jest, that he would be relieved if he didn’t win. Williams remembers Carson saying, of the people urging him to run, “Maybe they see something in me that I don’t see.”
Most Republican strategists maintain that voters will eventually settle on a more conventional choice, chastened by the prospect of President Carson or, more likely, of another President Clinton. But the rise of unaccountable PACs has weakened the party élites, which means that no one seems to have the credibility to tell the Republican base that nominating Carson might be a bad idea. The increasing messiness of the modern political primary has been, so far, a Republican story; this is in large part an accident of history. In Obama, the Democrats have had a leader who inspires loyalty. But in the next election cycle, or the one after it, the Democratic Party, too, may confront a base of voters eager for a candidate who has as little affection for politics as they do. Perhaps sober, élite-approved Presidential candidates, seasoned by decades of political experience, will come to seem as old-fashioned as network news anchors, and for some of the same reasons.
Carson is, even more than Trump, the ultimate 2016 outsider. In the years since the Prayer Breakfast, he has often played the role of soft-spoken firebrand, standing up for the core principles of conservatism. But one sometimes gets the sense that his ideological conversion is incomplete. The Club for Growth, a small-government think tank, often criticizes the timorousness of the Republican establishment, and it has been critical, too, of this year’s insurgents. The group’s Super PAC spent half a million dollars on a television ad to tell Iowa voters that Trump “supports higher taxes.” (The claim relied heavily on a Trump tax proposal from 1999; the Trump campaign responded with a cease-and-desist letter.) David McIntosh, the group’s president, says that he was alarmed by Carson’s suggestion, in a 2012 book, that it was possible to “extract socialism’s positive aspects and actually implement them within capitalism.” (Carson was referring to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.) McIntosh is not reassured by Carson’s frequent paeans to liberty. “In the Republican primary, ‘free market’ and ‘less government’ are the buzzwords,” he says. “I think he may be using those, but they don’t really reflect a well-thought-out philosophy of the role of government.” The group says it is “unable to conclude that Ben Carson would be a pro-growth president,” but its Super pac has not spent money attacking him, because it does not view him as a serious threat. “As he gets closer to the election,” McIntosh says, “people will say, ‘I’m not sure he’s ready, yet, to be President.’ ”
Carson believes that readiness is overrated. “There’s no one person who knows everything,” he says, and he is confident in his ability to learn as he goes. But his struggles with difficult questions about governance have made that confidence harder to credit. There are signs that his popularity in Iowa is beginning to ebb—some polls suggest that Trump has regained a narrow lead there. Carson became a front-runner by deploying his motivational skills on his own behalf: he inspired Republican voters to believe that they could have any kind of President they wanted and that they did not need to settle for a mere politician. Now some of them may be realizing that there is no alternative to politics—no way for a retired neurosurgeon to become a Presidential candidate without becoming a politician, too.
In “Gifted Hands,” Carson admitted, “I don’t handle failure well,” although he added a humblebragging clarification: “I guess the Lord knows that, so He keeps it from happening to me often.” It’s not clear that he would regard an inability to win the Presidency as a failure. If the media interrogations grow too withering, or the polls too discouraging, Carson might happily return to a new version of his old life, talking and speaking a bit more about his journey out of Detroit, and a bit less about tax rates or military movements in Syria. In the meantime, he is enjoying the crowds and the adulation. At a recent book event in Lakeland, Florida, fans filled the parking lot, and a book-tour staffer climbed onto Carson’s tour bus to photograph the scene. A small media pen had been set up near the portable lectern where Carson was signing books, and he strolled over to take questions. One reporter wanted to know how he had been preparing for the next debate. “By listening to your questions,” Carson said.
“Are they good questions?”
“Some of ’em are,” Carson said, chuckling, and then he walked back to the lectern, to sell a few hundred more books. ♦
