“What Ben Carson’s Rise Says About America”: We’ve Reached The Point Where Ignorance Really Is Bliss
So it’s Ben Carson’s moment. He’s overtaken Donald Trump in a CBS/New York Times national poll and he’s ahead in Iowa now with the caucuses just three months away. The Times is writing nice profiles of him full of polite euphemisms like “lack of governing experience.” First we all got used to the idea that it wasn’t insane to think that Donald Trump could be the GOP nominee. And now we have to acclimate ourselves to the idea it could be Carson, too.
The only actual interesting thing about Carson is that he raises a question we rarely get the chance to contemplate: How can a man who is so obviously distinguished and brilliant in one field be such an across-the-board nincompoop in another? Because usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity, then that person will also be a pretty solid human being across the board. He or she might be right wing or left wing, and he or he might have a weakness for French New Wave cinema or for Rock Hudson-Doris Day movies; but s/he won’t be an idiot.
But Carson is a political idiot. And it’s not all the Nazi and slavery talk, although those are certainly stupid and crude comparisons that can only be invoked by people who are dumb enough—and, I should add, insensitive enough—never to have given serious thought to the grisly particulars of what Nazism and slavery entailed. Whatever you think of Obamacare, you actually have to be a ghastly human being to compare it to practice in which horrors like this happened all the time, to many millions of people.
And these rants of his against political correctness! We’re getting to be like (again) Nazi Germany? Is he serious? Yes, he is. Imagine how ignorant of history a person has to be to think that today’s pc police, annoying as they sometimes are, can be compared to the SA or the SS? It’s insulting even to have to hear it.
So all that is plenty bad, but even more, I mean nearly everything else that comes out of this mouth. Just Google “Ben Carson ignorance” and you’ll see quickly enough that on subjects ranging from science to foreign policy to the Constitution to virtually any political or historical or policy topic on which he chooses to speak, he says something that has no basis in real-world fact.
How does a man who is (presumably, anyway) in his chosen realm a man of science and empirical knowledge and testing of hypotheses enter this other realm and become someone who just spends his time scouring the most lunatic right-wing websites there are and repeating back everything he reads there as if it’s true? That’s where that madness about how armed Jews could have prevented the Holocaust comes from—it started about 20 years ago, and there is nothing about it that’s true. But the notion lives a healthy life on right-wing and pro-gun websites and chat boards. Great weight is given in those circles to a supposed quote from Hitler extolling gun control. But as Alex Seitz-Wald showed in this Salon piece in which he quotes leading scholars, Hitler almost certainly never said it.
Now, none of this is shocking to you, if you follow these things at all. There are all kinds of matters on which conservatives have their own version of reality. I remember being astonished back when we were all first getting to know a certain half-term Alaska governor to learn, via some dodgy and weird creationistic answer she gave to some question, that there’s this excavation site in, predictably enough, Texas, called the Taylor Trail, where there exists “evidence” that man and dinosaur walked together. So this kind of thing goes on all the time out there in this big country of ours.
But what doesn’t go on all the time is that a man who gets his ideas about the world from conspiracy-theory websites is a leading presidential candidate—or that his idiot comments not only don’t hurt him but help him. I’d reckon some of you saw that poll last week asking Iowa Republicans whether X statement about Carson raised or lowered their esteem of him. His comparison of Obamacare to slavery was considered “attractive” by 81 percent of those polled, and gave just 16 percent the willies.
It’s one of the great cons of the year that Carson gets to be called “mild-mannered.” How many people who think that getting health insurance is worse than being held in bondage get to be called mild-mannered? And how arrogant a man must Carson be—what made him think he should be the president of the United States in the first place? There are lots of distinguished surgeons out there. So why him?
And now we have this debate coming up Wednesday. Carson did pretty badly in the first couple debates—he was unfocused and off-point and spoke in the kind of generalities that left you wondering what he really meant. But did it hurt? No, it helped him! Now, Trump and maybe some of the others are going to come after him. So we’ll see how he holds up.
But it hardly matters. If he misstates some facts, no one’s going to care. And if he pulls a big whopper—locating a country on the wrong continent, not knowing some obvious point of history—that too will just help him, because to the Carson people it will just be the liberal media piling on the poor man. We’ve reached the point where ignorance really is bliss.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 27, 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
“Career Politicians Need Not Apply”: Scott Walker’s 2016 Bid Floundered Because He’s Done Little In Life But Run For Office
A Google news search for Scott Walker this week scoops up endless pundit theories about why he didn’t quite make it as a presidential candidate – from his “boring” personality to his various gaffes or lack of foreign policy expertise. Each theory misses the larger point: Scott Walker is a career politician. And Republican voters’ job description for presidential candidates is pretty clear at this point: Career politicians need not apply.
Walker first ran for public office when he was 22 years old. He first won a race for the state legislature at the age of 25; he has held elective office ever since.
The political establishment sees this type of professional history as a good resume. Regular people see it as a little weird.
It reminds me of something my father used to say when he was a state legislator (in the Vermont House, for two, two-year terms) – he always derisively called his legislative paycheck “my welfare check.” As a bedrock conservative, he was fairly uncomfortable being paid by Vermont’s taxpayers. After all, one of the reasons he ran for office in the first place was his desire to lower taxes and reduce the size of government. Being part of the government made him a little squirmy. I think that’s a good thing.
I recall my father easing his discomfort during the legislative session by refusing to draw a paycheck from the small business he owned and operated, even though he was almost certainly putting 40 hours (or more) a week into his business (at night and on the weekends) while he served the people of his district during the week.
This approach is what’s known as being a citizen legislator. It’s what the founders envisioned and it’s what many voters are so ready to return to in 2016.
The near-entirety of Walker’s adult income has been courtesy of the taxpayers of Wisconsin. There is something inherently not-very-conservative about that. Similarly, making a case for limited government is less believable when a candidate also lists one of his greatest accomplishments as getting re-elected.
In last week’s debate, when describing why professional politicians don’t seem to grasp the voters’ anger and frustration with the ongoing dysfunction of government and politics, Carly Fiorina pointedly said: “A fish swims in water; it doesn’t know it’s water.” This season’s anti-establishment voters love that kind of talk. Walker is a fish, and a critical mass of Republican voters knew it and/or sensed it. (His poll-tested, focus-grouped, GOP-talking-points style of rhetoric was a pretty good indication that the guy hadn’t spent much time out of the water.)
Walker’s more dynamic, bright peer on the presidential stage has also been a bit of a fish: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. I like Rubio very much, but worry that his time swimming in government water will also hold him back in this early Republican season of anti-professional-politician sentiment. Watch for critiques from the professional political class about Rubio’s age. For frustrated Republican voters right now, age isn’t the issue. It’s the raw percentage of one’s adult life that has been spent in the waters of politics and government.
Poor Jeb Bush has it the worst, as his heritage means he’s been in politics since he first drew breath. This is at the core of why Jeb is struggling in Republican contest polls.
Even on the Democratic side, there is a similar anti-professional-politician sentiment, which helps explain Hillary Clinton’s sagging poll numbers; people are just tired of the same old, same old from the Clinton political machine.
The job of the pundit class is to dissect political failure and accomplishment, but at some point this cycle, they will have to dissect their own perspective and get in closer touch with what so many voters are thinking and feeling at this pivotal moment in our history. Let’s start with this fact, made crystal clear by Walker’s failed bid: A net worth made of taxpayer dollars is not a qualification, but instead may be a black mark on a presidential job application. Fish need not apply.
By: Jean Care, Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, Septemer 24, 2015
“Not What The People Want”: Scott Walker Failed Because He Followed The Republican Party’s Playbook
On Monday evening, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced that he was dropping out of the 2016 presidential race. “Today, I believe that I am being called to lead by helping to clear the field in this race so that a positive conservative message can rise to the top of the field,” he said. He claimed his decision was motivated by a desire to help voters “focus on a limited number of candidates who can offer a positive conservative alternative to the current front-runner,” a reference to Donald Trump.
That Walker would leave on that note is only natural: No candidate has suffered more, or more directly, from Trump’s insurgent 2016 run. Eight months ago, Walker, a deeply red governor in a traditionally blue state, was a favorite to win his party’s nomination. He had garnered a national reputation among conservatives, including the wealthy donor class, thanks to victories in dogged local fights over budget austerity and labor issues. His environmental agenda was as dangerous as any we are likely to see this campaign season. With a folksy, Cheez Whiz sort of charm, and a proven record of conservative achievements, he seemed the perfect vessel through which to unite the increasingly powerless Republican establishment with its increasingly volatile fringe.
This was supposed to be the model for the Republican Party’s success in 2016 and beyond, as outlined in the GOP’s autopsy report following the 2012 election. “Republican governors, conservatives at their core, have campaigned and governed in a manner that is inclusive and appealing,” the report stated. “They point the way forward.”
Across the board, however, the aversion to established Republican leaders is making its presence felt in the 2016 race. Of the nine governors to enter the field, only one, Jeb Bush, is currently polling within the top five, according to a CNN poll released on Sunday. Rick Perry and now Walker have dropped out, and three more—Bobby Jindal, George Pataki, and Jim Gilmore—may not be far behind. In the end, Walker’s demonstrable accomplishments paled in comparison to Trump’s bluster.
Trump certainly isn’t the only reason for the Walker campaign’s collapse. Liz Mair, a former Walker strategist, offered up a lengthy autopsy on Twitter, with likely causes ranging from poor staffing decisions to the candidate’s confusion as to his “real identity as a political leader.” Others have pointed to Walker’s seeming ignorance of foreign policy issues and his campaign’s myopic focus on Iowa. In what turned out to be a prescient dissection of his campaign last week, The Washington Post quoted one “major” Walker donor as speculating that “something’s missing in the demeanor” of the candidate. Last week, Walker himself, following his second consecutive debate-night disappearing act, was quick to blame the media.
Yet, in a race that has already discarded one of the other key premises of the GOP’s post-2012 assessment—the need to reach out to Hispanic voters—perhaps it was only a matter of time before governors, too, were brought crashing down. If there’s anything to be learned from Walker’s exit, it’s that being thought of as a promising candidate may be the kiss of death in the 2016 Republican primary. As Doug Gross, a Des Moines, Iowa, lawyer and Republican activist, told Bloomberg shortly before Walker bowed out of the race, the Wisconsin governor “looks and acts and talks like a politician and that’s not what people want.”
By: Steven Cohen, The New Republic, September 21, 2015
“Organization Has Just One Member”: ‘Veterans For A Strong America’ Draws Scrutiny
Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump hasn’t offered much in the way of policy speeches since launching his campaign, so it was of great interest this week when Team Trump announced plans for a major foreign-policy speech, delivered from a decommissioned battleship. If you’ve watched the show this week, however, you know the speech didn’t quite live up to its billing.
Right off the bat, Trump’s speech on matters of national security had very little to do with national security. There weren’t even any references to ISIS. Military Times published a report noting that the remarks “featured few new ideas for military policy or Veterans Affairs reform but plenty of promises to crack down on illegal immigration and ‘make our country great again.’”
The GOP frontrunner did, however, vow to “come out with some plans in a very short time,” which struck an odd note given that this was supposed to be a speech about Trump’s plans.
And while all of this matters – presidential candidates with vague platforms who promise to deliver a major address on foreign policy should keep that promise – it’s not the most interesting part of the story.
As it turns out, the event aboard the USS Iowa was less of a campaign speech and more of a fundraiser for a group called “Veterans for a Strong America” – an organization that Trump claims represents “hundreds of thousands of veterans.”
As best as we can tell, Veterans for a Strong America does not, however, have a sizable membership base. In fact, as Rachel noted on the show on Wednesday, the group does not appear to have any members at all.
What’s more, the organization staff itself appears to consist of just one individual: Joel Arends of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
And Joel Arends of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has quite a political background.
In the 2014 election cycle, he worked with a Republican U.S. Senate candidate who was recently convicted on election-related crimes – which the candidate blames on advice she received from Joel Arends.
Arends’ group has also been under investigation by two Arizona agencies for alleged election irregularities. Arends is also facing allegations in Texas of being involved in a super PAC scam.
And just in case that weren’t quite enough, the Associated Press published this report Wednesday:
The Internal Revenue Service revoked the nonprofit status of the veterans benefit organization that hosted and sold tickets to a foreign policy speech by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump aboard a retired U.S. battleship, The Associated Press has learned. The group’s endorsement of Trump at the event also could raise legal problems under campaign finance laws.
So, taken together, this story raises some questions that deserve answers. A political operative facing some legal scrutiny appears to be the sole official at a group, Veterans for a Strong America, which, according to the IRS, has lost its nonprofit status for failing to file tax returns. And yet, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination headlined a fundraiser for the group this week – the organization sold tickets to Trump’s event for up to $1,000 a piece – and repeated a claim about the group’s dubious membership. How did this happen, exactly?
As Rachel concluded, it now seems as if the Trump campaign “is either in on some kind of scheme with this group that is not a non-profit, or Donald Trump and his campaign got duped and taken for a ride by a guy who, you could suss out pretty easily, with literally one page of Googling and 30 spare seconds. In either instance, that is the kind of base-level failure in a presidential campaign that doesn’t bode well for the long-term viability of that candidate – just in terms of the basic functions of what it takes to run.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 18, 2015
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