“Why Ben Carson Is White America’s Perfect Black Candidate”: Murdoch’s Tweet Reflects View Held By Many Conservative Whites
To hear Rupert Murdoch tell it, what America needs is a “real black president.” In a string of tweets Wednesday, the chairman and CEO of the News Corp signaled his support for Dr. Ben Carson, who is among the top tier of 2016 GOP candidates. The media mogul’s use of the word “real” was met with outrage on social media and particularly offensive to the sitting president (Murdoch quickly apologized).
Murdoch might be a troll with a billion dollars, but he is not alone in celebrating Carson’s political fortunes. In recent weeks, on the heels of controversial remarks about Muslims, a head-scratching deluge of money—said to be in the millions—poured into Carson’s campaign coffers. He has watched his poll numbers triple. He bounced from one warmly lit television studio to another—unfamiliar territory for a man most renowned for his heroics in a Baltimore operating room.
Can he actually win the Republican primary? The answer—depending on whom you ask—varies between “damn right, he can” and “hell-to-the-nawl.”
“Everywhere pundits keep underestimating Ben Carson,” tweeted Murdoch. “But [the] public understand[s] humility as admirable, listen to the multi-faceted strong message.”
Carson is quick to confess that he is no politician. His genial tone is so low and comforting that it’s easy to miss how closely he aligns with far right-wing activists. Though his style could not be more different than Trump’s over-the-top ranting, both men appear to be benefitting from widespread Republican angst about topping the ticket with another D.C. insider. Grassroots activists are looking for someone they can trust in the proverbial foxhole: one who won’t bend on Republican principles. No one expected the soft-spoken, retired neurosurgeon to eclipse former Florida governor Jeb! Bush or Sen. Marco Rubio.
“I don’t think he has ever met or had a conversation with [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell or [Speaker of the House John] Boehner,” said conservative radio host and commentator Armstrong Williams, who serves as Carson’s business manager and personal adviser. “The establishment doesn’t know what to do with him. He’s baffling to them.”
That may well be, but the lure of a Carson candidacy could not be more appealing to some party leaders, Republican influencers like Murdoch, and rank-and-file voters—all of whom have been looking for a way to attract more non-white voters. For them, Carson is the perfect ambassador: an American success story, who spares no breath in deriding liberal economic policies, is ardently pro-life, and knows his way around a Bible.
These people will tell you that Carson, raised by a single mother in hard-knock Detroit, is proof positive that the American Dream is alive and kicking, much like the conjoined twins he brilliantly separated as a surgeon. “You can’t question his intellect. You can’t question his accomplishments,” Williams continued. “He loves this country. He’s the genuine article and people are in tune to that.”
If Williams is right, his candidate is polling “around 17-18 percent” among black voters. In a general election, that’s game over. Those numbers come as no surprise to Joy-Ann Reid, a national news correspondent for MSNBC.
“I think the black community, writ large, and particularly those of us who are Generation X and older, viewed Dr. Carson as an icon,” Reid recalled. “[He was] a favorite son who made good, and reflected glowingly on the potential for black folk to excel, even from humble beginnings.”
However, if history is any indication, black conservatives do not draw any more support from the black community than their white counterparts. Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) trounced his Democratic opponent to become the first African-American senator elected from the South since Reconstruction. But he did it with marginal backing from black voters. That hasn’t stopped Scott from becoming a critical voice on key issues, such as criminal justice reform and police body cameras, and working to earn the support that has eluded him.
“Scott is the real deal,” said former South Carolina lawmaker Bakari Sellers, who is a Democrat. “Ben Carson is no Tim Scott.”
To be sure, there is a solid conservative streak running through the African-American community, especially among people of faith. Many, however, still consider the Republican brand toxic and find many tenets of the national platform antagonistic to their interests. Then too, the GOP owes much of its modern-day success as a national party to its stronghold in the South, gained largely through acts of defiance against the Civil Rights movement.
Against that backdrop, Reid is skeptical about how much black support Carson can actually deliver.
“Now, I think many black Americans look upon Dr. Carson with a mix of puzzlement and disappointment,” Reid said. “The fact that he has made himself nationally prominent by insulting the first black president of the United States, and that he is now building on that with strange utterance after strange utterance leaves many African-Americans just shaking their heads.”
That might not be the real point, Reid said. As Murdoch’s messages seem to suggest, Carson may in fact hold the keys to attracting more white voters who may have been previously turned off by some of the more extreme, virulently racist voices in the discourse.
“Ben Carson is the ideal candidate of color for the right,” Reid said. “He rejects race as a construct for explaining social and economic mobility, just as white conservatives do; and he even rejects the public programs that helped his own family survive, mirroring the donor class of his party who want to get rid of those programs.”
“[Carson is a] vessel that alleviates some aversion guilt,” Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher asserted. “Most mainstream, middle-class Americans don’t want to vote for racists. There is something inoculating about Carson.”
Williams rejects that and says Carson’s appeal within the GOP is based on the fact that “his life story is more like most Americans’ than anyone who is seeking the GOP nomination.”
While Trump is out “Making America Great Again,” the man who hopes to topple the current GOP frontrunner is quietly holding a roving tent revival of the party faithful. In at least one national survey, Carson now leads the billionaire casino magnate by seven points.
Yes, it’s too soon to take a victory lap around an Iowa cornfield. Though, maybe somebody should gas up the truck just in case. And while they are at it, they should change Murdoch’s Twitter password.
By: Goldie Taylor, The Daily Beast, October 8, 2015
“This Callous Arrogance Is Nothing Short Of Staggering”: Carson Eyes Guns In Kindergarten, Boasts Of His Imagined Bravery
In the wake of the latest mass-shooting, Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson appears to have been thinking a bit about gun violence, and the often ridiculous candidate has drawn some curious conclusions.
For example, Carson said yesterday that if he had a child in kindergarten, he’d feel better knowing there were loaded firearms in the classroom. “If the teacher was trained in the use of that weapon and had access to it, I would be much more comfortable if they had one than if they didn’t,” the GOP candidate said.
Last night on Facebook, Carson added, “As a Doctor, I spent many a night pulling bullets out of bodies. There is no doubt that this senseless violence is breathtaking – but I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away. Serious people seek serious solutions.”
To date, the retired right-wing neurosurgeon has offered no solutions, serious or otherwise, to combating gun violence. On the contrary, he’s begun rejecting solutions he used to support.
But Politico flagged Carson’s comments on Fox News this morning, where the GOP candidate was in rare form, first complaining about President Obama traveling to Oregon to meet with grieving families and a recovering community, then indirectly criticizing the victims of the mass murder.
Asked what he would have done had a gunman walked up to him and asked him to state his religion, Carson said he would have been more aggressive.
“Not only would I probably not cooperate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me, I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all,’” he told the hosts.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
It’s genuinely shameful how common comments like these are. After the massacre in Charleston, S.C., a Republican state senator complained he wasn’t satisfied with how the victims reacted to the gunman. After the massacre in Aurora, Colo., a Republican U.S. congressman complained that the victims should have been armed so they could shoot back. After the massacre at Virginia Tech, National Review published a piece admonishing the victims. “Where was the spirit of self-defense here?” John Derbyshire wrote, adding, “[W]hy didn’t anyone rush the guy?
And now we see Ben Carson thinking along the same lines. He didn’t directly chastise the victims in Roseburg, Ore., but by explaining how brave he’d be towards the gunman, Carson was effectively complaining that the real-world victims should have displayed the kind of imaginary courage the Republican candidate described.
For a man seeking national office, this isn’t acceptable rhetoric.
It’s so easy – too easy, in fact – for anyone to imagine what they might do when faced with a life-threatening crisis, but until someone is confronted with such a nightmare, he or she should keep their bravado fantasies to themselves.
A madman entered a community-college classroom and began shooting people. Ben Carson, from the comfort of a television studio, wants to tell us about how heroic he’d be under the same circumstances.
But here’s the unfortunate truth that the unhinged candidate fails to understand: he has absolutely no idea how he’d respond to such a crisis. Almost none of us do.
Carson probably didn’t intend to insult the victims, indirectly blaming them for failing to meet his standards for bravery. But imagine being the parent of one of the young people killed in Oregon last week, and seeing a presidential candidate talking about how he graceful he’d be under fire – unlike those who actually faced the nightmare and were shot.
Carson’s callous arrogance is nothing short of staggering.
Who knows, maybe Carson’s rhetoric will resonate with Republican primary voters, who’ll cheer his latest comments. But to my mind, this represents a new low for the GOP candidate, one devoid of compassion and basic human decency.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 6, 2015
“Openly Expressing Prejudice”: Carson’s Bias Against Muslims Breaks Unwritten Rule Of Using Veiled Language
When Republican Ben Carson declared Muslims unfit to be president, he crossed a line that historians say no major White House hopeful has breached since the 1940s — openly expressing prejudice.
Carson is not the first to appeal to voter bias, but he broke with a timeworn tradition of using coded language to avert political backlash.
“I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” Carson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sept. 20. “I absolutely would not agree with that.”
Carson’s disparagement of Muslims came after months of derogatory remarks about women and Mexicans by rival Donald Trump, who nonetheless has remained the front-runner for the party nomination. Carson is in second place, some polls show.
Some Republican leaders, already worried about Trump’s insults, fear that Carson’s denigration of Muslims will further damage the party’s efforts to expand its base beyond older, conservative white voters.
Civil rights groups and some of Carson’s Republican rivals denounced the retired neurosurgeon, but he stands little risk of harm in the primaries. A 2013 survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants — a key group for Carson, a Seventh-day Adventist — believe Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence.
Historian Thomas S. Kidd, author of “American Christians and Islam,” said Carson was capitalizing on fear of Muslim terrorists. “But then to turn it into a blanket statement that Muslims in general can’t be full participants in the life of the republic — I do think that’s significant, and it’s alarming,” Kidd said.
Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett said the comments were justified because Islam calls for killing gay people (Muslim clerics say that’s untrue), and that’s incompatible with the Constitution (the Constitution says “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”).
Bennett also said that Carson, as an African-American, “dramatically expands the appeal of the Republican Party.”
Carson later said on CNN that a Muslim would “have to reject the tenets of Islam” to be president.
Presidential candidates typically take pains to avoid showing religious bias. When Republican Mitt Romney, a Mormon, ran in 2008 and 2012, some evangelical Christians were hostile toward his faith. One of his 2008 opponents, Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, apologized to Romney for asking a reporter, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”
In 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, had to reassure Protestants that he would not take orders from the pope. But his main opponents, Hubert Humphrey in the primaries and Republican Richard Nixon in the general election, avoided the topic.
“Humphrey certainly didn’t say anything like what Carson said,” Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek recalled. Nixon didn’t need to stoke doubts about Kennedy’s faith because “there were plenty of people who were doing it for him,” he said.
Since World War II, historians say, the most openly prejudiced presidential candidate was Strom Thurmond, whose racism was unvarnished when he ran in 1948 as an independent.
“There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,” the South Carolinian said.
Alabama Gov. George Wallace, then a Democrat, was nearly as direct in his 1963 inaugural speech, pledging “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.” But in his 1964 campaign for president, he was more guarded in appealing to whites outside the South at a time when many were uneasy about a new housing discrimination ban that would enable blacks to move into their neighborhoods.
“You may want to sell your house to someone with blue eyes and green teeth, and that’s all right,” he told a Maryland audience. “I don’t object. But you should not be forced to do it.”
After Romney’s loss in 2012, Republicans vowed to work harder to attract minority voters. The Republican National Committee released a scathing postmortem saying that “many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”
But Trump and Carson are benefiting from the uneasiness of many working-class whites as the nation becomes more diverse.
Their statements alarm strategist Henry Barbour, a co-author of the RNC report.
“When you say a Muslim’s not fit to be president of the United States, you’re a whole lot more than off message,” he said. “We need to stand on principle, but we don’t need to try to run folks off because they have different backgrounds than some traditional Republicans.”
By: Michael Finnegan, Tribune News Service; The National Memo, October 5, 2015
“Ben Carson; Hitler Is Coming”: The U.S. Is On The Verge Of A Nazi-Like Takeover, And Carson Is Ready To Save Us
There’s a great potential threat in the United States, more dangerous than the Leftist agenda and more powerful than Obamacare, immigrants and ISIS combined. It’s Adolf Hitler or at least the carbon copy of such a dictator. And Ben Carson has been warning about it for years.
On Wednesday at a campaign stop in New Hampshire the neurosurgeon turned conservative hero warned of the potential of a Nazi-esque force coming to power in the United States. And for those who think it could never happen here, he had something he needed to say.
“I beg to differ,” Carson said. “If you go back and look at the history of the world, tyranny and despotism and how it starts, it has a lot to do with control of thought and control of speech.”
“If people don’t speak up for what they believe, then other people will change things without them having a voice. Hitler changed things there and nobody protested. Nobody provided any opposition to him.”
He suggested that there is already somebody currently in the United States who is like Adolf Hitler. But is it Obama? No, of course not!
“I’m not going to go into that. I think that example is pretty clear,” Carson said when asked this question. When pressed, he denied that he was implying Obama was like Hitler. “No. I am saying in a situation where people do not express themselves, bad things can happen.”
This fear is not new for Carson. In fact, he’s been pretty damn scared of Nazis and the potential of their ideology taking hold in his country for years. In nearly all of his several published books, he makes references to Nazi Germany and Hitler.
He often suggests that the overreaching acts of the U.S. government into the private lives of citizens could give way to a mirror image of WWII Germany.
In the 2014 classic One Nation: What We Can All Do To Save America’s Future, he writes: “Throughout history many societies have failed to push back and have allowed an overly aggressive government to expand and dominate their lives. Nazi Germany is a perfect example of such a society. One can only wonder what would’ve happened if people had not tolerated the foolishness of Adolf Hitler’s appeal to the baser instincts of greed and envy and his institution of an official weapons confiscation program.”
And it could happen soon. Dictatorial regimes in the United States are imminent.
“Such domination is considerably more difficult when people have arms and can put up significant resistance,” he writes in 2015’s What I Believe. “This is the reason that brutal dictators like Fidel Castro, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler and Idi Amin tried to disarm the populace before imposing governmental control. Such domination could occur in America in the not too distant future if we are not vigilant.”
The real problem is socialism, which Carson says involves people giving up their personal liberties. When that happens, the country is just steps away from a Nazi-esque takeover.
“Sure, there are several different brands of socialism—at least as many types as there are would-be people-planners who wish to impose their plans to control the moral and economic lives of other people,” the doctor writes in 2014’s America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What This Nation Great. “But are you willing to surrender your precious liberties to a socialist state which promises ‘security’ for everyone and government-enforced equality? Isn’t this what Hitler and other socialists promised the German people in his Nazi (national socialist) platform—a country in which government guarantees security and ‘equality’ in exchange for giving up individual freedom? Will Americans fall for the same scam?
“Since Americans are by nature individualistic and entrepreneurial, by definition, then, the socialist program is anti-American, to say nothing of totalitarian.
“Socialism is an old dream. Some dreams are nightmares when put into practice.”
This is a nightmare Carson will stop at nothing to prevent. His campaign has not responded to a request for comment about Carson’s concerns about Nazis.
While he’s generally concerned about it, Carson is a forgiving individual, one who is willing to let bygones be bygones.
“Every person makes mistakes, so it should come as no surprise that every nation of the world has made mistakes as well,” Carson writes in America the Beautiful, in which he also questions whether the rise of the Islamic State is similar to that of the Nazis. “Talk with a German national about the hope their country placed in Hitler’s rise to power on the heels of the Great Depression. Or consider our own nation’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and you’ll agree that the question is not whether a nation makes mistakes; the question is whether a nation learns from its mistakes, builds on that knowledge it gains over time, and grows in wisdom.”
For Carson, this question remains. Has the U.S. learned anything or is another Hitler just waiting around the corner?
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, October 4, 2015
“Outsiders Looking In”: Truly Off The Rails, It’s Just A Matter Of Time Before Trump, Fiorina And Carson Fade Away
I get the outsider schtick. America has seen it over the years, but rarely have the American people elected someone who is truly off the rails.
In this field of Republican candidates for president, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are off the rails. Their current polling advantage is due to their outsider persona, no question, but none of them have, to use Richard Ben Cramer’s book title from the 1988 campaign, “What it Takes.”
Wendell Willkie ran as an outsider/insider business guy in 1940 against Franklin Roosevelt. He was an experienced, viable national figure, knowledgeable on the issues, but lost to FDR in his bid for a third term.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was hardly an outsider, though he had never held elective office before. He was an immensely popular general who had helped mastermind D-Day and was courted at times by both political parties.
Jimmy Carter was surely an outside Washington candidate. That did him enormous good in 1976, but he was still an accomplished governor, two term state senator and experienced politician.
Popular General Ulysses S. Grant and experienced government hands William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover were other presidents never to hold elective office, but few questioned their experience or qualifications.
In 2015, you have to ask yourself when examining the candidacies of Trump, Carson and Fiorina whether they are truly presidential. Do they have the temperament, experience, knowledge and understanding of “what it takes” to run for president and be president?
Trump is clearly number one in the off the rails category. Everything is an attack, everything is a show, and everything is about him and his outsized ego. There is no uplifting message of substance, no indication he understands the nation’s problems or is ready to offer any concrete plans to solve them. This is a soap opera on steroids, “Entertainment Tonight” that is rapidly ceasing to be entertaining. It is a candidacy that is no longer, if it ever was, meaningful. Trump has no where to go but down and with each passing day of his antics he drops in the public’s estimation.
Carson is totally out of his league. There is truly no reason for him to be a candidate. He does not understand the issues. He appears not to have read the Constitution on just who can be president or even how the government works. He may understand brain surgery, but he doesn’t have the slightest understanding of basic foreign or domestic policy. His participation in debates and as a candidate subjecting himself to scrutiny will doom any future campaign faster than the Washington Nationals got swept by the New York Mets.
As for Fiorina, she is no wunderkind, as her career at Hewlett-Packard can attest. In fact, most analysts are appalled at her performance. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld pointed out that during her tenure the value of HP fell 55 percent, 30,000 people were laid off, and she invested $25 billion in the dying Compaq computer company. She walked away having made $100 million after her failure and her firing. Not exactly a record to run on.
But, more important, she does not appear to have the leadership skills or the temperament to be a strong leader in the political world. She does study her briefing books, she does prepare for the debates more than some of the others, and she is not shy and not afraid to mix it up. But at the end of the day, she shows her true inexperience by stating that she will refuse to talk to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and shows very little understanding of issues, from Planned Parenthood to Iran.
So my guess is that even though these three have taken the lead in some of the polls they will fade quickly and then we will be back to more serious Republican candidates: Bush, Kasich, Christie, Rubio and Cruz. When voters get serious, Trump, Carson and Fiorina will be the outsiders, looking in, and wondering what hit them.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. Newsa and World Report, September 25, 2015
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