“Carson’s Admirable Qualities Don’t Extend To Politics”: Count Me Among Those Who Are Skeptical
To read Ben Carson’s memoir, Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story, is to enjoy an uplifting and inspiring tale of a man who overcame a traumatic childhood to become one of the nation’s leading neurosurgeons. That man is certainly worthy of widespread admiration.
But who is the guy taking his place on the campaign trail? Who is the man bashing Muslims, denouncing gays, and dismissing science? Who is the candidate engaging in all sorts of weird conspiracy theories? That Ben Carson deserves nothing but contempt.
Yet, the good doctor remains a leading Republican presidential candidate, either besting Donald Trump for the top spot, according to several polls, or coming in a close second. While he and Trump have managed to befuddle most professional prognosticators with their dominance of the Republican field, a new survey shows Carson has pulled off another equally surprising feat: He’s well-liked by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Indeed, according to Gallup, Carson is among the most popular of the presidential candidates of either party. Among all voters, regardless of partisan affiliation, he’s viewed favorably by 42 percent. Among Republicans, 67 percent have a favorable view, while a mere 8 percent dislike him.
That high esteem is certainly understandable for Dr. Carson, the surgeon, who embodies the quintessential American story of the self-made man. Through grit, hard work, and a deep-seated religious faith, he overcame poverty and teenage recklessness to graduate from Yale and the University of Michigan Medical School.
After a fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the nation’s most prestigious medical facilities, he joined the faculty there, rising to become director of pediatric neurosurgery. His memoir was turned into a TV movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr., and the millions of viewers who’ve seen it probably count among his many admirers.
Besides that, if you’ve watched any of the GOP presidential debates, Carson’s low-key demeanor compares favorably to the boisterous braggadocio of The Donald, whose every sentence struggles under the weight of first-person pronouns and whose every pronouncement is a heroic tale of his own achievements and talents. If you’re watching the neurosurgeon next to the reality TV star and real estate mogul, you certainly come away with a more favorable impression of the former.
Still, candidate Carson holds some distressing views. He has declared that he doesn’t think it would be appropriate for a Muslim to hold the presidency of the United States — a bias that directly contradicts the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly states that there shall be no religious test for political office. He opposes same-sex marriage and has dismissed homosexuality as “a choice.” (For the record, he also disputes broad areas of scientific consensus, including evolution, global warming and archeologists’ views of Egypt’s pyramids.)
The good doctor is also given to outrageous rhetoric, comparing Obamacare to slavery, for example. In a recent interview, he claimed that limiting firearms in the United States could lead to the rise of a government like that of Nazi Germany.
Given Carson’s worldview, it’s perhaps folly to try to find, among his beliefs, those that are most outside the mainstream. But a leading candidate for that dubious distinction is Carson’s fixation on a John Birch-type figure named W. Cleon Skousen, who has been described by the conservative National Review as a “nut job.” Carson frequently quotes works by the late Skousen, who wanted to repeal the minimum wage, outlaw unions, eliminate anti-discrimination laws and repeal the income tax.
Leave aside, for a moment, the fact that Carson knows next to nothing about how the government actually works. Shouldn’t a candidate for president, especially one who is so widely admired, at least be comfortable with the social and civic mores of the late 20th century — if not the 21st?
Count me among those who are skeptical that Carson’s stock will remain high throughout the primary season. By the time he’s done with his candidacy, his poll numbers won’t be the only thing in decline. It’s likely his broad appeal will have evaporated, as well.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, November 7, 2015
“Why Are Candidates So Afraid Of The Press?”: What Presidential Candidates Lack Today Is Guts
Just before the doors to the press bus close with a sigh, a tall, tanned man with weathered skin leaps aboard and walks to the rear.
He is wearing a brown suit with a carefully folded white handkerchief in the pocket. His dark hair is slicked back. It is 1976. He is Ronald Reagan, and he is running for president.
His presence on the press bus — virtually unheard of for a candidate today — does not attract any special attention. Reporters fill the air of the bus with the clack, clack, clack, ping, zip of their portable typewriters.
The bus begins to roll and one by one the reporters go back to talk to Reagan. Finally, I am the only one who has not spoken to him. The press secretary looms over me in my seat.
“C’mon,” he says. “Time to talk to the governor.” (Reagan had been governor of California.)
“Think I’ll skip it,” I mumble. “Don’t really have anything to ask him.” It was my first campaign and I was very nervous.
“You’ve got to go back there,” the press secretary says. “The governor will be hurt if you don’t.” He is serious.
I unfold myself from my seat and follow him.
Reagan greets me warmly. He has an easy smile and long laugh lines that crinkle his face.
“Is there something you would like to ask me?” he says.
I paw through the pages of my notebook, which are limp with sweat. Reagan’s favorite issue is the Panama Canal and how Jimmy Carter wants to give it back to Panama.
At each stop, Reagan says one of three things about the canal:
“We bought it, we paid for it, we built it, and we intend to keep it.”
“We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours and we are going to keep it.”
“We built it. We paid for it. It’s ours.”
I flick through my damp notes. Um, um, I say. Um, how do you feel about the Panama Canal?
Reagan’s face brightens. He leans forward and speaks to me with the utmost seriousness. “We built it,” he says. “We paid for it. It’s ours.” He then leans back in his seat.
Great, I say. Thanks a lot. Really.
I get up and he stops me to shake my hand. “Nice meeting you,” he says sincerely. “I’m sure we’ll do this again.”
And we do. Day after day. (I learn to ask slightly more complex questions.) And nearly every day, Reagan also holds a full-fledged press conference at which reporters can ask him anything.
This, too, has gone the way of the carrier pigeon, the great auk, and the woolly mammoth. These days, candidates have advisers and coaches and pollsters. What they lack is guts.
They hide from the press whenever possible.
Today, covering a presidential candidate means never having to say you saw him.
Ronald Reagan railed against a number of things including communism, big government and high taxes. But I never heard him rail against reporters. He was not a blame-the-press president.
Flash-forward to Nov. 6, 1992. This is how my column begins:
“After one of George (H.W.) Bush’s last campaign speeches, Torie Clarke, his spokeswoman, climbed onto the press bus to answer a few questions.
“As we pulled away, Clarke gazed out the window onto a familiar sight: Crowds of people shaking their fists at the media.
“‘I hate it when I ride with you guys,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I’m always afraid someone will throw a Molotov cocktail.’
“She was kidding. A little.
“At nearly every stop in the last weeks of his campaign, George Bush would bash the media.
“Attacking the media was good politics. Just like Willie Horton had been good politics. A scapegoat had to be found to explain the lousy poll numbers. And the media were convenient.”
At the time, I interviewed a photographer who told me how he had been standing by a cyclone fence taking pictures of Bush, when a man reached over the fence, grabbed the photographer’s hair and slammed the photographer’s head into the fence.
“He kept yelling, ‘Get an honest job, get an honest job.’ I thought it was bad when they just spat on us,” the photographer said. “But this was worse.”
In Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, a large crowd awaited us. Two yellow ropes created a gauntlet for us to walk through.
A gray-haired gentleman leaned over the rope line and waved his small American flag in my face.
“Scum!” he yelled at me. “You scum!”
Bush walked out and delivered what had become his stock line.
“Annoy the media!” he shouted. “Re-elect George Bush!”
The people did not re-elect George H.W. Bush, but now just about everybody — including me — has warm feelings about him.
I actually had forgotten about his incidents with the press and only stumbled across them when I was looking for columns about how presidential campaigning has changed and how attacking the press has become a tactic that guarantees cheap applause and maybe a point or two in the polls.
Recently, Donald Trump said of reporters: “They’re scum. They’re horrible people. They are so illegitimate. They are just terrible people.”
Some of the Republican candidates want debate moderators who will be easy on them — or else.
“I’m not going to allow them to ask stupid questions,” Chris Christie said recently. (Maybe he knows some guys.)
Today, Republicans invoke the name Ronald Reagan as if he were a god. But they forget how he actually behaved. Reagan, for all his faults, had something today’s candidates lack: a spine.
He did not quiver like a bowl of Jell-O or whine when asked a “gotcha” question.
A gotcha question is one that seeks to reveal a difficult truth.
So you can see why today’s candidates are so afraid of them.
By: Roger Simon, Chief Political Columnist, Politico; The National Memo, November 5, 2015
“The Republican Reality Show Rat Race”: Embracing Magic Hairball Economics And Quack Cures
The current Republican presidential race is less a political contest than a reality TV series: a stage-managed melodrama with a cast of characters selected to titillate and provoke. By that standard, last week’s CNBC debate succeeded far beyond expectations — all but guaranteeing a larger audience for the next exciting installment.
Viewers who tuned in to see Donald Trump boasting and hurling insults at the Sleepwalking Surgeon, the Sweaty Senator, and the Amazing Spineless Governor, found themselves invited to boo an entirely different set of villains — CNBC’s frustrated and argumentative moderators.
In professional wrestling, of course, the referees are always part of the show.
Senator Ted Cruz got the party started with a cleverly contrived bit of bombast camouflaging evasiveness as high principle. Asked if his opposition to the recently negotiated congressional budget compromise showed he wasn’t “the kind of problem solver American voters want,” Cruz attacked moderator John Harwood instead.
“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” Cruz said. “You look at the questions: ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?”
In fact, none of those characterizations was accurate. Nobody called Trump a villain, although Harwood did ask about his “comic book campaign” promises to deport 11 million immigrants, build a giant wall, make Mexico pay for it, and slash taxes by $10 trillion while balancing the budget.
Nobody had to urge Ohio’s governor Kasich to insult Trump and Ben Carson. He’d opened the debate by lamenting that his party’s two leading candidates were people “who cannot do the job.” He’d specifically cited their fantastical budget promises along with Trump’s immigration vows. Elsewhere, Kasich suggested that many Republicans had lost touch with reality.
CSNBC’s Becky Quick never challenged Dr. Carson’s mathematical ability. But she did get visibly frustrated at his serene unwillingness to acknowledge basic arithmetic, and fell into bickering.
No matter. Sen. Cruz, who has carefully avoided antagonizing Trump, had identified the villains. The studio audience of GOP loyalists went ape — hooting, beating their chests, and all but flinging dung at the hapless CNBC moderators. Nothing so animates the GOP base as the perception that they’re being sneered at by effete intellectuals. Pollster Frank Luntz reported thunderous approval among his all-Republican focus group. Poor babies.
I’d argue that something historic is going on. As Kasich suggests, beleaguered Republicans are currently engaged in a retreat from reality as profound as communist apparatchiks during the last days of the USSR. Hence the predominance of hucksters, sharpers and mountebanks among the candidates onstage.
In deference to the astonishing avarice of billionaire donors, instead of Five Year Plans they’re embracing magic hairball economics and quack cures. It’s no accident that the renowned brain surgeon Dr. Ben Carson lent his prestige to Mannatech, an outfit peddling “nutritional supplements” that supposedly cure autism and cancer.
The company recently paid $7 million to settle a deceptive practices lawsuit brought by the Texas Attorney General. Texas! Asked by CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla about this unseemly connection, Carson dismissed it as “propaganda.”
Anybody can watch Carson’s video endorsements online.
Similarly, Mike Huckabee promised to cut health care costs by curing Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Of course, the former Arkansas governor has no more chance of becoming president than I do. He’s in it for the book sales, going so far as to hint during the debate that his predecessor Bill Clinton had political opponents murdered.
Hay for the cattle, except that my cows are more skeptical than the average Huckabee reader.
Alas, much of the GOP electorate has reached that sublime point of self-deception where they refuse to acknowledge any reality they don’t wish to believe. In consequence, the saner sorts of conservatives are bailing out. CNBC’s Harwood brought up former Bush-appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s statement that “the know-nothingism of the far right” had driven him out of the Republican Party.
That merely showed his “arrogance,” said Sen. Rand Paul of the man who arguably saved the nation’s financial system post-2008.
Bruce Bartlett, the one-time Reagan Treasury official who thinks the GOP has gone badly astray, mocked Cruz’s crybaby rhetoric. “We’ve just seen Hillary Clinton go through 11 hours of questioning, and these guys can’t go a couple minutes of questioning,” he said.
Pressed about his own save-the-billionaires tax scheme, Sen Marco Rubio went off on CNBC’s Harwood.
“Democrats have the ultimate super PAC,” he whined. “It’s called the mainstream media.”
Boo-hoo hoo.
So would you like to hear Anderson Cooper’s first softball question to perennial press favorite Hillary Clinton during the recent CNN Democratic debate?
It was this: “Will you say anything to get elected?”
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, November 4, 2015
“The Poor Are Bad And Irresponsible People”: The Grotesque Moral Atrocity Of Blaming The Poor For Being Poor
The Republican Party has long struggled with how to package its blatantly pro-rich policy portfolio of top-heavy tax cuts and deregulation. Such things are deeply unpopular — even self-identified Republicans are divided on whether the rich pay their fair share of taxes — but the GOP’s wealthy donor class demands them.
Thus far in the 2016 presidential race, candidates have basically landed on the George W. Bush formula: Sweeten your handouts to the wealthy with far smaller ones for the rest of Americans, and sell it with utterly preposterous promises of 50 zillion percent growth. Jeb Bush promises a growth rate not achieved since FDR started his term at the very bottom of the Great Depression and ended it at the peak of World War II mega-spending. Donald Trump promises half again as much as that.
Marco Rubio has one small change from the usual formula. Sure, he’s got the typical titanic handouts for the rich — incredibly, including the total abolishment of the capital gains tax. But he’s also got new welfare spending for middle-class families. However, in a sad demonstration of the conservative mindset, the poor are deliberately excluded from Rubio’s plan.
Here’s how Rubio’s new welfare benefit works: It’s a non-refundable tax credit of up to $2,500 for people with children — meaning unlike the Earned Income Tax Credit, it gives nothing to people who already have no federal tax liability. This means that the average lower-middle-class family — as Matt Bruenig calculates, ironically including households like the one Rubio grew up in — would receive nothing whatsoever from the credit.
Cutting out the poor is surely intentional, and the reason is obvious: Many conservatives basically think the poor are bad and irresponsible people who have made stupid, disgusting choices — particularly having kids outside of marriage — that put them in the place they are today. Hence, giving the poor welfare will merely short-circuit the process of bourgeois norm-formation at the root of their actual problems. Government handouts will just turn the poor into shiftless parasites.
If you spend much time in conservative comment sections, or among the #tcot crowd, then this idea will be extremely familiar. But even high-minded policy elites will own up to it on occasion. Robert Stein, the original creator of Rubio’s tax credit, told me it is “not designed to encourage fertility in the poor over and above what we already do.” W. Bradford Wilcox, another conservative thinker, wrote that he made a similar tax credit proposal non-refundable to “reduce the possibility that an expanded [child tax credit] might encourage single-parenthood.” Charles Murray has written several books wholly premised on poor-blaming, the most influential of which was probably 1984’s Losing Ground, which argued for abolishing welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, housing subsidies, and disability insurance (a tiny fraction of which might be replaced).
Indeed, until fairly recently, poor-blaming was mainstream Democratic Party thinking, too. Murray’s book was hugely influential on the right, but Democrats embraced it as well. In 1993, President Bill Clinton said in an interview that Murray’s analysis was “essentially correct,” recounting how a classroom of children once agreed with the idea that welfare would increase single parenthood. (I should note that while he pummeled the very poor, to his credit President Clinton also passed a sizable expansion of the EITC, which boosted benefits for poor people a bit higher on the income ladder.) Until the early 2000s, Hillary Clinton would routinely say similar things, boasting about how after welfare reform, recipients were “no longer deadbeats,” or that they had transitioned “from dependency to dignity,” as Buzzfeed News reports.
Now to be fair, Bill Clinton noted that while he agreed with Murray’s prediction about policy mechanics, whether it would be morally correct to starve people out of single motherhood was the more important question. But it turns out Murray was wrong about both points, as he was about just about everything else in his book. Welfare reform did nothing to halt the long decline of marriage, which has been steadily eroding for decades, nor did it decrease the rate of single motherhood. On the contrary, as is seen in many other developed nations, a big fraction of children are now born to cohabiting couples who are neither married nor poor.
Welfare reform, in fact, didn’t do much but snatch money from very poor families with children, increasing the fraction of people living in extreme poverty by 150 percent.
Many conservatives and ’90s-vintage Clintonites imagine that most poor people are an unchanging core of working-age adults who are too busy having constant unprotected sex to go out and get jobs, but in reality, over 80 percent of them are either children, disabled, students, or involuntarily unemployed, constantly churning in and out of poverty. These people are poor because they generally can’t work. In a purely capitalist economic system, such people will always fall through the cracks. Neither work requirements for cash benefits nor Paul Ryan’s goofy “life plan” paternalism will conjure up jobs for 5-year-olds or the seriously mentally ill.
It’s also important to note that traditional welfare was a small program targeted at the very poor — the rest of the welfare state, notably Social Security (by far the largest anti-poverty program), Medicare, and Medicaid, has survived largely intact. So while welfare reform was a grotesque moral atrocity, it didn’t much affect the ongoing war on poverty, which has been a big, if incomplete, success.
But welfare reform does make a good test case. We can predict what will happen if Rubio gets to fulfill his desire to “reform” the rest of the welfare state along Clintonesque lines: The number of people in poverty will explode. And after that, conservative policy hacks will construct convoluted theories about how a decline in traditional marriage norms or something is to blame. The point, always, is to justify and deepen the existing social hierarchy.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, November 3, 2015
“The Wrong Lessons Are Being Learned”: Stop Calling Them ‘Debates’. They’re Game Shows
After the bloody mess made by holding nearly two dozen debates in the 2012 election cycle, RNC chair Reince Priebus made reforming the Republican debate process one of his top priorities for 2016. It hasn’t worked. Why? Because these events are not debates at all. They’re game shows.
In 2011-12, attention-hungry candidates jumped at the chance to hold more and more debates, thinking the spotlight would help their candidacies. Instead, all those debates gave the media extra opportunities to find gotcha sound bites that damaged the party’s chances of winning against Barack Obama. Priebus pledged to keep that from happening this time around, by taking control of the debates, limiting their number, and pushing campaigns out of the strategy loop.
That didn’t work out so well.
Wednesday’s debacle on CNBC has infuriated the GOP’s 2016 presidential candidates, and has the RNC backpedaling. But the wrong lessons are being learned — and the candidates seemed poised once again to open the door to another 2012-style free-for-all.
Most observers agree that the CNBC debate was a disaster from start to finish. Seasoned journalists without a partisan ax to grind expressed their amazement and disgust at the spectacle. “Biggest loser of this debate isn’t JEB,” Ron Fournier tweeted during the debate. “It’s MSM. We’ve earned this bashing.” Even former DNC chair (and current governor of Virginia) Terry McAuliffe called the CNBC debate “an absolute farce … a joke … an embarrassment to our country.”
And so Republican candidates gathered this weekend to find a way to change the trajectory of the debates — and ended up making the problem even worse. The Ben Carson campaign argued that the debates needed to be severed from their network “sponsors.” A number of other campaigns didn’t want changes made to the format at all. The result was a series of “tweaks,” as Byron York put it, to be implemented after the upcoming Fox Business Channel debate on Nov. 10, which was deemed too close to change.
Even that modest outcome didn’t last a day. By Monday afternoon, the tenuous confederation of Republican candidates blew apart as frontrunner Donald Trump repudiated the agreement. Instead of coordinating between campaigns and broadcasters, Trump declared that he’d negotiate his own terms with the “sponsors,” and that the other candidates could either follow along or not. That threatens to return the GOP back to the 2012 dynamic, where candidates jumped at the chance to appear on television and dragged the other FOMO-plagued candidates through a gauntlet of televised debates.
The candidate confederation failed because all of these campaigns are competing with each other. The reason the RNC stepped into this role was to prevent exactly what Trump and his team want to do, which is to have 14 free agents negotiating with broadcasters.
But the reason the RNC’s original reforms failed is this: The RNC attempted to reform the wrong part of the process. The issue isn’t really how many debates take place, but the nature of the debates themselves, and the risk any one of them poses to the GOP.
These events are not debates in any substantive sense. The game-show format and the number of candidates on stage make substantive debate all but impossible. These are sound bite and gaffe contests, not a forum for sharp, honest arguments about the future of our country and party.
Nothing of substantive value emerged from two hours of wasted air time in the CNBC debate; indeed, all we have learned in nearly 14 hours of debate is how well the candidates can launch zingers. That might be valuable if we were electing the next Borscht Belt headliner, but hardly useful for choosing the next leader of the free world.
This is a failure of imagination more than a deficit of competence. We need to truly rethink debates themselves, and not just squabble over a hopelessly broken process. The RNC needs to put an end to both network sponsorship and the game-show format. If 14 candidates make the grade for a debate, then use a format that allows all 14 to make arguments for their policy choices. Offer a set of identical questions on a policy area to every candidate individually and give them each 15 minutes to answer, providing equal time for every candidate. That would require three and a half hours. Sounds like a lot, right? Well, it’s still shorter than the undercard + main event of each of the three previous debates.
When the field comes down to a manageable number — say, six or fewer — then a two-hour debate has a chance to offer substantive discussions that can frame Republican and conservative policy in an attractive manner.
If networks don’t like that format, they can cover the forums from the sidelines. In fact, with the proliferation of broadband internet, the media partnership model should be an anachronism, not a tradition. Carson’s campaign is absolutely correct about the need to cut the network strings. Presidential forums will get plenty of coverage regardless of whether they get broadcast by an alphabet-named media outlet; filing rooms fill up with reporters from all media organizations for every debate. By taking ownership of the entire event, the RNC can select moderators who display objectivity in their reporting, or even better yet, choose media figures who know the Republican voters that candidates need to reach in the primaries. Priebus deserves credit for pushing the envelope already by involving media groups on the right (including my employer, Salem Media Group, as a partner in the CNN debates), but the reform needs to go all the way toward self-sufficiency.
The Republican Party learned a hard lesson last week about the game-show format and the ability of media figures to exploit it, especially in a crowded primary. Until they change the debate format itself and replace it with a format that rewards depth and substance, they will continue to get caught with their pants down — even if the RNC or the campaigns delude themselves into thinking they’re in control.
By: Ed Morrissey, The Week, November 4, 2015
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