“Whispering ‘Sweet Nothings’ In Conservatives Ears”: How Ben Carson’s Snoozy Demeanor Masks His Bonkers Views
Ben Carson is calm — calm like a cool spring breeze, or a long nap on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The Republican presidential hopeful speaks softly and slowly. He doesn’t wave his arms about. He shows barely any emotion at all. But Ben Carson is also the possessor of ideas that are positively bonkers, not just about policy questions, but about the world and how it works.
This odd combination of a gentle manner and extremist ideas seems to be just what a healthy chunk of the Republican electorate is looking for. Carson is running a close second to Donald Trump nationally, and leading in Iowa. As The New York Times recently reported, Iowa voters in particular are enraptured with Carson’s manner. “That smile and his soft voice makes people very comforted,” said one farmer. “I believe someone as mild-mannered and gentlemanly as Ben Carson is just about the only kind of person that could” get things done in Washington, said another Iowan.
You’d think they were talking about someone with moderate views who’d be able to get along and work with anyone, not someone who wants to outlaw abortion even in cases of rape and incest, thinks we should ditch Medicare, and holds to all manner of weird conspiracy theories. And that’s not to mention all the stuff the retired neurosurgeon says about slavery and Nazis, his belief that Muslims should be barred from the presidency unless they offer a public disavowal of their religion, or his latest proposal to turn the Department of Education into something that sounds like it comes out of China’s Cultural Revolution, in which he would have students report professors who displayed political bias to the government so universities’ funding could be cut.
Most of the time, we expect that when politicians take radical stands, they do it with raised voices and fists pounding on lecterns. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Barry Goldwater thundered in his 1964 convention speech, and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” We assume that ideologues will be the angry ones, while moderates will come across as sensible and ordinary.
In primaries, though, it’s often the loud candidates who burn brightly, at least for awhile. Deliver a stem-winding denunciation of the other party, and you can get at least some of your partisans to rally to your war banner. The mild-mannered don’t tend to have as much success, which is part of what makes Carson’s candidacy so unusual. But maybe his supporters are on to something. Mike Huckabee used to say that he was a conservative, he just wasn’t angry about it — an acknowledgement that to lots of voters in the middle, conservatism is associated with disgruntlement and contempt, as though the GOP were a party built on the fundamental principle that you damn kids better get off my lawn or else.
For the last eight years, conservatives have been angrier than ever before — mostly at Barack Obama, but also at a world that continues to change and evolve in ways they don’t like. Of late their anger has turned most particularly on their own party, which many of them view as feckless and cowardly.
In that context it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Donald Trump has done as well as he has. If nothing else, he’s untainted by any association with GOP leaders. Carson can say the same, but instead of grand pronouncements about how super-luxurious America will be once he’s in charge, he whispers sweet nothings into conservatives’ ears, at a volume so low they have to strain to hear.
But there’s no question which one is the more ideologically radical. It’s hard to tell how many primary voters understand that, particularly since most Americans don’t have a fine-grained understanding of where everyone in politics stands ideologically. Many don’t even have a particularly good grasp on what the ideological differences that distinguish the two parties are.
One thing we do know is that Ben Carson’s string of offensive and bizarre statements hasn’t hurt him at all with primary voters; if anything, they’ve helped. So it’s unlikely that too many people are being fooled by his calm into thinking he’s some kind of moderate; perhaps they think other people might be fooled. But if any of them actually think that he could change the way business is done because he’s gentle and genteel, they haven’t been paying much attention to politics in America lately.
Of course, Carson’s chances of becoming the GOP nominee are still less than great, even if he is doing surprisingly well now. Whoever that nominee is, when the general election begins he’ll claim to represent the soul of mainstream thinking, while his opponent is a dangerous extremist whose beliefs and proposals are strange and frightening. That opponent will say the same about him. And one of them might be right.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, October 27, 2015
“Carson Thrives Because Of, Not In Spite Of, Bizarre Rhetoric”: Comments About Muslims, Hitler And Slavery Attractive To Likely Republican Caucusgoers
For much of the summer, Donald Trump dominated Republican presidential polls everywhere, and Iowa was no different. The New York developer may not seem like a natural fit for Hawkeye State conservatives, but statewide surveys consistently showed Trump leading the GOP field.
This week, however, he’s been replaced. A Quinnipiac poll in Iowa, released yesterday, showed retired right-wing neurosurgeon Ben Carson leading Trump, 28% to 20%, a big swing from early September, when Quinnipiac showed Trump ahead in Iowa by six points.
Today, a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll offers very similar results, with Carson leading Trump in the Hawkeye State, 28% to 19%. In August, the same poll showed Trump up by five.
But this line in the DMR’s report on the poll results stood out for me:
Even Carson’s most controversial comments – about Muslims, Hitler and slavery – are attractive to likely Republican caucusgoers.
This isn’t a conclusion drawn through inference; the poll actually asked Iowa Republicans for their thoughts on some of Carson’s … shall we say … eccentricities.
The poll told GOP respondents, “I’m going to mention some things people have said about Ben Carson. Regardless of whether you support him for president, please tell me for each if this is something that you find very attractive about him, mostly attractive, mostly unattractive, or very unattractive.”
If we combine “very attractive” and “mostly attractive” responses, these are Iowa Republicans’ positive feelings about Ben Carson:
1.“He is not a career politician”: 85%
2.“He has no experience in foreign policy”: 42%
3.“He was highly successful as a neurosurgeon”: 88%
4.“He has said the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is the worst thing since slavery”: 81%
5.”He has an inspirational personal story”: 85%
6.“He has raised questions about whether a Muslim should ever be president of the United States”: 73%
7.“He has said he would be guided by his faith in God”: 89%
8.“He has said that Hitler might not have been as successful if the people had been armed”: 77%
9.“He approaches issues with common sense”: 96%
10.“He has conducted research on tissue from aborted fetuses”: 31%
In case it’s not obvious, pay particular attention to numbers 4, 6, and 8.
For many political observers, one of the questions surrounding Carson’s candidacy for months has been how he intends to overcome some of the ridiculous rhetoric about his off-the-wall beliefs. But this badly misses the point – Iowa Republicans like and agree with Carson’s ridiculous rhetoric about his off-the-wall beliefs.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, October 23, 2015
“Will Jindal Make It To Caucus Night?”: In Weaker Financial Position Than Candidates Rick Perry And Scott Walker Were Before They Quit
On January 10, 2016, Bobby Jindal will without question obtain one of his heart’s great desires: liberation from any further obligation to the People of the Gret Stet of Loosiana. As noted here often over the past couple of years, the Gret Stet has become less and less fond of its often-absentee governor, and at the moment he’s doing better in presidential polls in Iowa than he is among the Republicans who know him best.
Three weeks after he becomes a former governor, Iowa will hold its Caucuses. But as third-quarter fundraising numbers drift into view, the question is whether Bobby has enough money to super-size his lunch order, much less organize an effective Caucus performance. Here’s The Hill’s Jonathan Swan:
The presidential campaign of Republican candidate Bobby Jindal looks barely viable, with the Louisiana governor finishing the most recent fundraising quarter with just $261,000 in the bank.
Jindal’s campaign spent more than it raised, taking in $579,000 and spending $832,000 between July 1 and Sept. 30.
And here’s the hammer:
The Louisiana governor is arguably in a weaker financial position than former candidates Rick Perry and Scott Walker were before they quit the race last month.
While Perry had less cash in hand than Jindal — the former Texas governor had just $45,000 in his campaign account last quarter — he at least had a well-funded supporting super-PAC.
Both Perry and Walker benefited from super-PACs that had more than $15 million that they could spend to boost the candidates. But the main pro-Jindal super-PAC, “Believe Again,” disclosed contributions of $3.7 million in its midyear report.
Now Bobby’s also got a “dark money” 527 nonprofit group plumping for him, and all the outside groups pulled in a reported $8 million as of July. But the Super PAC’s been spending some serious coin on Iowa ads, where Bobby’s actually been doing more paid media than anybody else. So it’s unclear how much is left to get Jindal to the end of the year (Super-PACs and 527s only report semi-annually). What he really needs is some fresh evidence he’s doing as well in Iowa as a September NBC/WSJ poll indicated, which placed him tied with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio at 6%.
For now, I’d guess Bobby’s staff probably isn’t going to get paid for a while, and non-campaign groups will do more and more of what the campaign ought to be doing. But his money troubles have already caught the attention of media vultures, who will be watching his campaign closely for signs of non-vitality. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, The Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 16, 2016
“A Pointless Exercise”: The Iowa Caucuses Are A Big Fat Joke, And Jeb Bush Is The Only One Laughing
Jeb Bush’s heartless betrayal has sent shockwaves through the presidential race. I’m not talking about his advocacy for Common Core educational standards, or his disturbing habit of talking about undocumented immigrants as though they were human beings. No, it’s the news that broke Monday: Bush will not be competing in the upcoming Iowa Straw Poll this August.
The chairman of the Iowa Republican Party was predictably contemptuous of Bush’s excuse that he’ll be going instead to a different gathering of Republicans in Georgia: “We don’t buy this excuse and neither will Iowans,” he said. Et tu, Jeb?
How on earth could Bush ignore the Straw Poll, an event whose winner four years ago was future non-president Michele Bachmann? It may be because Bush is lagging in the Iowa polls and he’s worried he’ll do poorly. Or it may be because the Iowa Straw Poll is a pointless exercise.
In fact, everything about Iowa’s role in the presidential election process is absurd, and I say that as not only someone who reads, thinks, and writes more about politics than any sane person ought to, but also as one who counts actual Iowans among my friends.
Iowans are, as a whole, fine people — as much as any other state’s residents. But do they really deserve the power we give them every four years? Granted, some state has to hold the first presidential contest, but the fact that it’s in a state with a comical election system and where the overwhelming majority of voters can’t be bothered to make it to their state’s contest is particularly maddening.
You’d expect that with a dozen or so presidential candidates practically moving to the state so they could meet each and every voter in all of Iowa’s 99 counties, turnout in the caucuses would be high. No such luck. In 2012, turnout was a measly 6.5 percent, meaning 14 out of 15 Iowans didn’t vote in the caucuses. While it’s true that only one party had competitive primaries that year, even in 2008 when there were tight contests in both parties, it topped out at 16 percent. Not exactly an inspiring show of their commitment to democracy.
Part of the explanation may lie in the fact that caucuses are time-consuming and involve standing around in a high-school gym while people give speeches, then moving about in little gaggles according to your favored candidate. Whatever old-timey nostalgic thrill that might give you, it’s undeniably a hassle compared to just pulling a lever or punching a chad. Nevertheless, don’t you think that if multiple candidates had literally shown up to your house to beg you in person to choose them, you’d manage to make it out on caucus night?
That’s not to mention that the event next February is actually merely the first step in a ridiculously baroque multi-stage process. What Iowans will be selecting on that evening is precinct caucus delegates, who will later go to the county convention (remember how there are 99 counties? Yeah, that means 99 conventions), and from there to the district convention, after which it’s on to the state convention (can you feel the excitement building?) where they’ll actually select the delegates who’ll go to the national convention next summer.
You’d be hard-pressed to offer a persuasive explanation for why they bother with all that, and more importantly, why the rest of us should care. But Iowa is first (and will stay that way, because there’s a state law mandating it has to be), so candidates will continue to troop through the state, testifying to their affection for the “heartland” and their love of ethanol, and heading to the Iowa State Fair to consume food on a stick.
(Permit me a brief digression: Sadly, deep-fried butter on a stick — in which, yes, an entire stick of butter is battered and deep-fried, then stuffed down your food hole — is for some reason no longer on offer at the Iowa State Fair as it was for a brief but glorious period. Last year’s fair did, though, feature no fewer than 69 food-on-a-stick options.)
You can understand why politically involved Iowans are so protective of this process. After all, if you’re a Republican precinct captain in Oklahoma or Rhode Island, you’d no doubt love to have Scott Walker and Marco Rubio sit at your kitchen table and tell you how important you are to their campaign. But the real fault lies with the news media, which looks at the results of this bizarre contest and decides that it’s actually freighted with meaning about the will of the electorate.
Perhaps it’s because after months and months of covering a campaign without any concrete results, they can’t help but go a little nuts over the first actual votes anybody casts. But they play an inane game of expectations — setting them, interpreting them, and spinning them — to try to enhance the uncertainty and drama. At the end of it, some candidates will be said to have failed to meet expectations and thus be consigned to permanent loserdom, their campaigns no longer worthy of attention, while others will be elevated on high (only to be pulled down soon after). Imagine if we reported sports that way: “Analysts are calling the Red Sox the clear winner in last night’s contest after they came within two runs of beating the Yankees, whom most had expected to coast to an easy victory. Hard questions are now being raised within the Yankees organization about what the failure represented by this narrow win means for their chances in the fall.”
The only redeeming factor in this whole exercise is that for all the importance the political press puts on Iowa, winning seems to have little relationship to whether a candidate wins his or her party’s nomination, let alone the presidency (as Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, winners of the last two GOP caucuses, can attest). Just don’t get me started on New Hampshire.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Week, May 13, 2013
“Cowering Before A Few Rotting Corn Stalks”: Scott Walker, The Gutless Wonder Of The 2016 Presidential Race
Sometimes the most inside-baseball political stories tell you something essential about a presidential candidate. That’s what happened this week to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who apparently wants to win the Iowa caucuses so badly that he’s willing to torch his staff and his reputation to do it.
The Walker campaign recently announced that it had hired Liz Mair, a highly regarded Republican consultant. Mair has also played pundit at times, and is generally more pro-gay rights and pro-immigration than the average Republican. But that’s typical of Republican consultants in general. It is assumed that policy is set by the candidates themselves, not by the people advising them on their social media accounts.
However, Mair’s hiring was subject to an unusual amount of scrutiny. Muckrakers on the right pointed out that Mair supported “amnesty” for immigrants who had entered the country illegally, or something like it. The Des Moines Register ran an article highlighting some sharp remarks Mair had made about Iowa’s distorting influence on national politics, with its first-in-the-nation status forcing candidates to embrace Iowa’s agricultural subsidies and a federal mandate that requires fuel-inefficient ethanol to be mixed with all gasoline. And finally, Jeff Kauffman, Iowa’s GOP chairman, suggested to The New York Times that Walker should give Mair “her walking papers.”
Mair was gone. Officially, she resigned.
Forcing Mair out was like amputating your finger to deal with a paper cut. Instead of having a problem with a few Iowans and a writer at Breitbart.com, Walker has now baffled his admirers across the right. Mair’s resignation signaled that Walker’s team either didn’t do its homework before hiring Mair, or that it was too spineless to defend her. It is hard to believe the former, since Mair consulted for Walker before during his 2012 recall.
Walker’s unwillingness to defend his own hire will give other consultants and policy experts jitters before joining the team. It totally undercuts his reputation as a tough-minded fighter who stands on principle. And it may contribute to an alternate interpretation of Walker as a ‘fraidy cat. Earlier this month, Walker caved to Iowa ethanol interests by reversing his position on the federal mandate.
The problem, in other words, wasn’t the tweets of a single staffer, but the way Iowa’s parochial concerns act like kryptonite on Walker’s convictions and reputation. He can certainly recover from this, but if Walker thinks his path to the nomination runs through Iowa, he needs to figure out how to win that state’s caucuses without turning into Tom Vilsack before he arrives in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Walker’s approach also contrasts badly with Jeb Bush’s. Bush has been hiring policy brains and strategic brawn from across the right and center-right. He recently hired the social conservative legal activist Jordan Sekulow. Jordan is the son of Jay Sekulow, a pioneer in forming the modern right’s commitment to religious liberty issues at home. The hire was not well-received in the media. It was described as a “lurch to the right.” A number of stories bringing up Jordan Sekulow’s support for anti-gay rights laws in Africa popped up across the media.
Did Bush panic and throw Sekulow under the bus? Nope. He assumes, correctly, that adults won’t confuse the positions of one of his hires with his own. And as it happens, having people who disagree with you on staff is incredibly useful.
If you were a top expert, a policy-thinker, or a consultant, which candidate would you want to work for? The guy who tosses his people out on the say-so of an Iowa Republican whose name he had just learned, or Jeb Bush, who doesn’t give a jus exclusivæ to his enemies?
How would Walker handle a tough Supreme Court nomination battle against a united Democratic Senate, if he folds instantly after some whinging from a right-wing muckraker? Until this week, Walker supporters could have pointed to his white-knuckle fight with Wisconsin’s public-sector unions. Now his critics can point to the way he cowers before a few rotting corn stalks.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, March 19, 2015
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