Crowd for Ben Carson presidential announcement currently hearing a choir sing Eminem’s “Lose Yourself." pic.twitter.com/BHHxbgkkme
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) May 4, 2015
I usually take glee in the antics of every new candidate added to the GOP clown car, but today’s announcement in Detroit just makes me cringe. Dr. Carson is a genuinely gifted pediatric neurosurgeon, and his story has been an inspiration to a great many young people — “a Black man who became known for his intellect, not for telling jokes or shooting basketballs.” It’s not that he doesn’t “deserve” to run, or to be considered as a respectable candidate; it’s just that I can’t understand why the game is worth the candle to him. It’s not a career step up (insert old Pearly Gates joke ‘on the weekends, God entertains himself up by pretending he’s a neurosurgeon’), he doesn’t need the money or the social validation, he doesn’t have to prove himself against a family legacy of wealth and power. He doesn’t even have a book to sell — if anything, this campaign has already damaged his public standing:
… Some black pastors who were Carson’s biggest promoters have stopped recommending his book. Members of minority medical organizations that long boasted of their affiliations with him say he is called an “embarrassment” on private online discussion groups.
“Has he lost his sense of who he is?” said the Rev. Jamal Bryant, a prominent black pastor in Baltimore, where Carson lived for decades when he was director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. “He does not see he is the next Herman Cain.”…
Time calls him “The GOP’s Accidental Candidate for President“:
… Candidates often profess ambivalence about seeking the presidency as a way to mask their ambition. It seems reasonable to take Carson at his word.
Running for office, Carson told TIME early last year, “has never been something that I have a desire to do.” In the months since, he’s been repeating this disclaimer to anyone who asks, even as he crept closer and closer to jumping in. “It continues to be something that I don’t want to do,” he told Newsmax last spring. Asked a few weeks back how he’d feel if his campaign failed, Carson told the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons: “Actually, I would say ‘Whew!’, because it’s not something I ever really wanted to do, and the only reason I’d consider it is because there’s so many people across the nation clamoring for me to do it.”