“He Doesn’t Realize What He Doesn’t Know”: Ben Carson Has Weird Ideas And Makes Stuff Up. What Kind Of President Would He Be?
Ben Carson is having a very bad news day today. Politico is reporting that Carson has now admitted that a story he told in his autobiography “Gifted Hands” and again in his book “You Have a Brain” was false in one major detail. He wrote that as an excellent ROTC student in high school he met General William Westmoreland, and later, presumably because he had so impressed Westmoreland, “I was offered a full scholarship to West Point.”
After being confronted with the fact that no record exists of him applying to West Point, Carson’s campaign admitted that he made up that part of the story.
Before we proceed, I want to point out what someone should have told Carson about this a long time ago: There is no such thing as a “full scholarship” to West Point, because the young men and women who go to West Point pay no tuition, nor do they pay room and board. In any case, I’m going to argue that this particular fabrication isn’t all that important to assessing Carson’s fitness for the presidency.
The reason this is happening now is obvious: Carson is reaping the reward of his success, which is an uncomfortable trip to the campaign microscope, courtesy of both the press and his opponents. More reporters are coming to his events, the questions are getting tougher and more insistent, his past writings and statements are being carefully examined, everyone who knew him since he was a babe in arms is getting interviewed, and from where he sits the whole thing probably seems terribly unfair.
But it isn’t. Not only is it just what every seriously contending candidate gets, when it comes to Ben Carson we almost have no choice but to focus on his life story and the colorful things he says and believes. So even before the West Point story, coverage of Carson was already consumed with questions about whether he stabbed a guy when he was 14, his theory about the pyramids, and his wildly inaccurate beliefs about things like Medicare fraud.
I’m a longtime critic of the personality coverage that takes up so much of the campaign, not because we don’t want to know who the “real” person is behind the persona of a presidential candidate, but because we in the media so often ask the wrong questions when we take on this task. The problem is that the moment we set out on this voyage of discovery, we forget the whole point of the exercise, which is to get the best understanding we can of what this person would be like if they were to become president.
For instance, let’s take the stabbing story. Carson wrote in his autobiography that before he found God as a teenager he was an angry and violent teen, as evidenced by the fact that he once tried to stab someone, whom he now says was a relative. CNN did a story interviewing a number of people who knew him as a youth, and they say that he wasn’t the hellion he describes, but was actually a perfectly nice kid. Carson is angrily denying the allegation that he was not in fact a danger to those around him.
It should be noted that among the evangelical Christians who form the base of Carson’s support, redemption narratives are extremely powerful — the lower down you were the better, before God raised you up. The depth of the hole you had to climb out of is yet more evidence of God’s power. But the question about this is, who cares? Let’s imagine the worst, that Carson made this whole thing up. What exactly would that tell us about what sort of president he might be? The answer is, basically nothing.
Don’t tell me, “It matters because it speaks to his honesty.” Honesty does matter, but the way you figure out whether a president will be honest about the things he does as president is to see what he’s saying about the things he’d do as president. When he was a candidate, we learned that Bill Clinton had affairs and covered them up, and what did that teach us? That as president, he’d have an affair and cover it up — not that he’d lie about other things. George W. Bush presented himself as brimming with personal integrity, all while telling one lie after another about his record in Texas and the policies he was proposing (while the press was poring over his opponent’s every word with Talmudic care to see if they could catch him in a misstatement). Lo and behold, as president he was faithful to his wife, but deceived the country about all kinds of important policy matters.
So yes, it now appears that Carson embellished his life story a bit to make his autobiography a more compelling read. Saying that he’s hardly the first prominent figure to have done that is not to forgive him, but there are more important things to consider.
Now stay with me while I argue that Ben Carson’s views on the provenance of the pyramids actually do matter. Carson maintains that unlike “all the archeologists” who say that the pyramids were built by the pharaohs to be their tombs, he believes that the biblical figure Joseph built the pyramids to store grain. There is precisely zero evidence for this belief.
This is hardly the only matter about which Carson says all the scientists are wrong. He thinks that the theory of evolution was born when Satan encouraged Charles Darwin to devise it; all the copious evidence for evolution is meaningless. Carson also says that he once stumped a “well-known physicist” by asking him how the organization of the solar system could be compatible with the second law of thermodynamics, which states that systems tend to move toward entropy. Carson is either lying about this or wildly misinterpreted the conversation he had, because there’s no contradiction between the two, and there isn’t a physicist on earth who would tell you that the solar system proves that God’s hand was at work. But people who learn only a tiny bit about certain scientific ideas often become convinced that they’ve happened upon a striking new revelation that all the so-called experts have never considered before.
So what does this have to do with what Carson might be like as president? When George W. Bush said he was “the decider,” he was describing accurately a large part of the job. Every day, the president’s aides bring him decisions he has to make, decisions that are often complex and uncertain. He has to weigh different kinds of evidence and make predictions about the future. People who know more than him about a particular topic — the economics of the labor market, the internal politics of Iran, the health effects of power-plant emissions — will offer him their advice based on their expertise, and he’ll have to integrate their perspective with other considerations that might come into play in a particular policy decision.
Ben Carson’s ideas about things like the pyramids, combined with what he has said about other more immediate topics, suggest not only that his beliefs are impervious to evidence but also an alarming lack of what we might call epistemological modesty. It isn’t what he doesn’t know that’s the problem, it’s what he doesn’t realize that he doesn’t know. He thinks that all the archeologists who have examined the pyramids just don’t know what they’re talking about, because Joseph had to put all that grain somewhere. He thinks that after reading something about the second law of thermodynamics, he knows more about the solar system than the world’s physicists do. He thinks that after hearing a Glenn Beck rant about the evils of Islam, he knows as much about a 1,400-year-old religion as any theologian and can confidently say why no Muslim who doesn’t renounce his faith could be president.
So what happens when President Carson gets what he thinks is a great idea, and a bunch of “experts” tell him it would actually be a disaster? What’s he going to do?
This is a more acute question with Carson than with any other candidate, because he has no political record we can examine to see how he might perform. The policy ideas he has put forward range between the impossibly vague and the utterly outlandish. Even more so than Donald Trump, who has at least managed a large organization, Carson offers only himself — his heart, his spirit, his soul — as the reason why America should elect him president. In assessing him we have no choice but to look at the man, because there’s nothing else. Some parts of his personal story are irrelevant to that assessment, but some parts aren’t. And it’s those that should really give us pause.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, November 6, 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
“Deathwatch Coverage”: Why The Media Are Digging Jeb Bush’s Grave
Why hasn’t Jeb Bush started complaining about the liberal media yet? Maybe it’s because he knows that at this critical moment for his campaign, it’s important to look sunny and optimistic. But he’d have a much better case to make than his primary opponents, who are all whining about how CNBC was mean to them at their last debate. The coverage of Jeb’s campaign right now is unremittingly negative, in ways that are, if understandable, not exactly fair. The Jeb Bush Deathwatch has begun, and it’s going to be awfully difficult for him to get past it.
Back in 1983, scholars Michael Robinson and Margaret Sheehan first wrote about “deathwatch coverage” in their book about the media’s role in the 1980 presidential campaign, Over the Wire and on TV. “The deathwatch generally begins with a reference to the candidate’s low standing in the polls,” they wrote, “moves on to mention financial or scheduling problems, and ends with coverage of the final press conference, in which the candidate withdraws.” Even before it gets to that terminal point, however, the press can decide as one that you’re circling the drain, and the result will be a wave of intensely negative coverage.
Let’s take a little tour of the articles about Jeb in the media just from one day, last Friday. “Can Jeb Bush Come Back?” (Washington Post). “Jeb Bush’s Existential Crisis” (CNN). “All the Money In the World May Not Save Jeb Bush’s Campaign” (Los Angeles Times). “Jeb Bush Campaign Faces Criticism, Skepticism Following Debate” (USA Today). “Jeb Bush Seeks to Recover Momentum After Debate” (Wall Street Journal). “Jeb Bush: Campaign ‘Is Not on Life Support'” (NBC News).
The headlines only partly convey how brutal things are getting for Bush. All the questions he now faces are about process—not “How would your tax plan work?” but “Why aren’t you doing better?” They’re questions about the campaign itself, not about what he wants to do if he becomes president. Reporters have also taken to asking Jeb whether he’s having fun on the campaign trail, which has a whiff of cruelty about it. He plainly isn’t, but what is he supposed to say? It’s almost as though they just want to see how he’s going to squirm. They might explain that they’re asking him this question because in January 2014 he said he intended to campaign “joyfully,” and there’s not much joy in Jebville right now. But that’s an excuse, not a justification.
So the frame of almost every story about Bush is how he’s floundering, struggling, and sinking. When you’re operating within that frame, it determines the kinds of questions you ask, not just of Bush himself when you get the chance, but of the other people you interview, and of yourself as you’re writing your story. Those questions will be things like: What’s he doing wrong? Why don’t people like him? What mistakes has he made?
When you set out to answer those questions, everything you produce will reflect poorly on Bush. That doesn’t mean there’s anything inaccurate about the coverage, just that it focuses on one particular aspect of reality and not others.
Now let’s compare that to Marco Rubio, whom most knowledgeable people have now concluded is the most likely Republican nominee. If you wanted, you could ask similarly uncomplimentary questions about him. Why has this guy who was once hailed as the savior of the Republican Party been unable to get more than 10 percent or so of the vote in national polls? Why is he stuck in fourth place in Iowa and sixth place in New Hampshire? How come he’s being beaten in fundraising by the likes of Ben Carson and Ted Cruz?
Those are perfectly legitimate questions, but if the focus of your story about Rubio is how he’s on the rise, they’re the kinds of things you’ll either leave out completely or deal with quickly (in the inevitable “To be sure…” paragraph).
Now for my own “To be sure…” paragraph: To be sure, there are perfectly good reasons why a reporter would describe Jeb’s campaign the way it’s being described and ask the questions he’s being asked. Expectations for him were very high. He was supposed to be this year’s version of the well-established, middle-aged white guy the GOP always nominates, and his super PAC quickly raised a staggering $100 million. For a time, he was indeed the frontrunner (though he never averaged more than 15 percent in the polls), so the fact that he’s now in fourth place or so is a significant fall. And Jeb hasn’t been particularly compelling on the stump, to say the least. He has struggled with things like trying to figure out whether the Iraq War was a mistake, and he seems flummoxed by the competition he’s gotten from other candidates, particularly Donald Trump.
But let’s not forget that no one has actually voted for president yet. The Iowa caucuses are still three months away. Super Tuesday isn’t until a month after that. The voters of California, our most populous state, don’t vote until June, a full seven months from now. A heck of a lot is going to happen just between now and Iowa.
Not only that, while Jeb’s place in the polls is certainly nothing to be proud of, other candidates getting much more positive attention aren’t doing much better. In the Huffpost Pollster average, Jeb is at 7.5 percent, admittedly no great shakes. But Rubio, who is now luxuriating in an invigorating bath of positive press coverage, is at a whopping 8.5 percent. Everyone seems to think Rubio is probably going to be the nominee, but the voters themselves don’t seem to be aware of it yet. Ted Cruz, whom insiders think has shrewdly positioned himself to be a strong contender as the race winnows? He’s at 5.5 percent.
One of the attractions of the deathwatch story for reporters always looking for a new angle on the presidential race is that it’s novel and, in its way, rather dramatic. And like much of what the press does, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Say that a candidate is toast often enough, and before long donors won’t want to contribute to him and voters won’t bother to support him. But we’re still far enough away from the primaries that another new story, the exciting Jeb Comeback, is still a possibility. He might even earn that exclamation point after his name. Is it likely? Maybe not. But you never know.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, November 2, 2015
“Waiting For The Media’s Benghazi Mea Culpa”: The Press Sponsored The GOP Charade For Years
Talk about a wild pendulum swing.
After relentlessly attacking and mocking presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for much of 2015, often depicting her as a hapless and phony pol, the Beltway press wrecking ball dramatically reversed direction last week when pundits and reporters announced the Democratic frontrunner had performed valiantly in front the Benghazi Select Committee.
I’ve been watching Clinton press coverage, on and off, for close to two decades, and I honestly cannot remember a time when the Beltway press corps — so often suspicious and openly critical of Hillary Clinton — was so united in its praise for her and so contemptuous of her partisan pursuers:
Benghazi Has Become A Political Trap From Which Republicans Cannot Escape [Vox]
The Benghazi Hearings Sham [Slate]
The Benghazi Hearing Farce [Time]
Hillary Had A Lovely Benghazi Day [Daily Beast]
Benghazi Bust [Washington Examiner]
The GOP’s Unfortunate Benghazi Hearing [Washington Post]
Benghazi Committee Gives Hillary Clinton Presidential Platform [ABC News]
Trey Gowdy Just Elected Hillary Clinton President [Rolling Stone]
On and on and on it went, as the rave reviews for Clinton poured in and the Republican catcalls mounted. (Committee chairman Trey Gowdy must be seeing those headlines in his sleep by now.)
I’m in heated agreement with virtually all of the analysis that found fault with the Benghazi witch hunt. (“What, exactly, is the point of this committee?”) Indeed, much of the biting commentary echoes Benghazi points Media Matters has been making for three years. But my question now is this: What took the press so long, and when will the press pause and reflect on the central role it played in producing the GOP witch hunt?
I don’t want to punish good behavior by criticizing the press for now accurately portraying the Benghazi pursuit as a fraud. (That’s why I recently urged the media to break up with the Benghazi committee.) But it might be nice amidst the avalanche of Benghazi Is Bogus pronouncements if folks in the press took time to admit the media’s part in the unfortunate charade.
To hear many pundits and observers describe the Benghazi collapse, Republicans — and Republicans only — are to blame, and they’re the ones who overplayed the pseudoscandal and tried to hype it as a blockbuster.
Much of the press is presenting a view from above: Here’s what Republicans did and here’s why it failed. Missing from the analysis is, ‘Here’s how the press helped facilitate the Republican failure for many, many years.’ The media want to pretend they haven’t been players in this drama.
Sorry, that’s not quite right. For years, Republicans often found willing partners in the Beltway press who were also eager and willing to overplay Benghazi and play it as a blockbuster scandal. The press cannot, and should not, simply whitewash the very important role it played, even though that muddles the media’s preferred storyline of How Republicans Botched Benghazi.
I realize that immediately examining the media’s role in this story might not be a priority for editors and producers. But I also realize what’s likely to happen is this window of opportunity for self-reflection will soon close and the press will once again fail to hold itself accountable for its often reckless behavior in marketing a bogus Republican-fueled “scandal.”
Here’s a concrete example: Lara Logan and her completely flawed Benghazi report that aired on 60 Minutes in 2013. Preparing the unsound report, Logan reportedly met behind the scenes with one of the GOP’s most vociferous Benghazi crusaders, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) According to a report in New York magazine, Graham helped shape the CBS Benghazi story. When the 60 Minutes segment aired, he immediately cheered it on, calling it a “death blow” to the White House and announced he’d block every White House appointee until he got more answers about Benghazi.
Then when huge holes began to appear in the story, as one of Logan sources was revealed as a fraud, “Logan called Graham and asked for help,” New York reported. (Note to reporters: When your sources have to make stuff up about Benghazi, it’s a pretty good indication the ‘scandal’ is lacking.)
It’s true that Logan’s example was an extreme one. But the press is kidding itself if it’s going to pretend Republicans didn’t recruit lots and lots of journalists to help tell the GOP’s preferred Benghazi ‘scandal’ story over the last three years.
Thankfully, some prominent journalists have recently shone a spotlighting on the press’ Benghazi failings. “The real losers here are the reporters and centrist pundits who let themselves be played, month after month, by Trey Gowdy and company,” wrote The New York Times’Paul Krugman.
Today, there’s broad media consensus that the Benghazi Select Committee is wasteful and unnecessary. But that was utterly predictable last year when the eighth investigation was formed. At the time, many in the press brushed aside Democratic objections. (Try to imagine the media response if Democrats had demanded eight separate 9/11 commissions under President George W. Bush.)
Why the nonchalance? Because the press, I’m guessing, liked the idea of a standing Congressional committee to chase Clinton, to possibly wreak havoc on her campaign, and to leak gotcha stories to eager reporters.
By raising so few doubts about the absurdity of creating yet another Benghazi inquisition last year, the press helped fuel the charade that unfolded last week. It’s time to own up to the unpleasant truth.
By: Eric Boelert, Senior Fellow, Media Matters for America, October 26, 2015
“Freedom Of The Press Is No Longer Free”: GOP Wants Press To Pay Up For Good Convention Seats
The Republican Party wants reporters to pay up for the pleasure of their company at their 2016 presidential convention. And reporters, obviously, are not pleased.
On Monday, news broke that reporters would have to pay $150 each for a seat in the press risers overlooking the convention floor. For that, they get a chair, space at a table, and access to power outlets. Fancy!
Outlets that don’t want to shell out for space can send their reporters to the nosebleed section of the Quicken Loans arena, where they won’t have electricity and won’t be able to see what’s going on on the floor—in other words, where they won’t be able to do their jobs properly.
“I’ve been to every national convention since ‘84, and this is the first time we’re being asked to pay for a space in the arena,” said Jonathan Salant, who chairs the press gallery’s Standing Committee of Correspondents.
He and Heather Rothman, who chairs the Executive Committee of Periodical Correspondents, aired their complaints in a terse statement.
“The convention committee said reporters who don’t pay still will be allowed into the arena,” they wrote. “But the vantage points they will be given will not allow them to follow convention proceedings, gain access to the convention floor to interview public officials, nor file stories on the event. We are concerned that the proposed fee smacks of forcing the press to pay for news gathering.”
Sean Spicer, the communications director for the RNC, didn’t respond to an email seeking further comment on fee. Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for the RNC, told Roll Call that it isn’t actually an access fee.
“There is no access fee,” she said. “For custom built work stations, there will be a minimal charge at a fraction of the actual cost.”
It’s still a very big first.
Representatives from the Democratic Party didn’t promise their party wouldn’t follow suit.
“Obviously, this is a different year in terms of funding but it’s too early in our planning to make any definitive determinations,” emailed April Mellody, who is helping put together the Democrats’ convention.
That said, one person with knowledge of the Democrats’ plans said it’s extremely unlikely they will charge reporters to use press writing stands.
“It’s the precedent of charging for access and that’s what bothers us,” Salant said.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, October 20, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 