Why Dr. Ben Carson Is the Latest GOP Political Unicorn

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

25 February 15

s the presidential field edges toward the 2016 starting gate, partisans of both parties may be able to agree that one contender stands apart from the rest. That would be the 63-year-old neurosurgeon Ben Carson, the only African-American in the race and the only candidate with a Horatio Alger story that can accurately be described as inspirational. Some voters have already begun to notice. Carson came in second to Ted Cruz in two 2014 conservative beauty contests, the Republican Leadership Council and Value Voters straw polls. He has outperformed Jeb Bush and Chris Christie in this year’s early polling of Iowa Republicans. Carson’s political-action committee raised more cash (some $12 million) in the early going than Ready for Hillary, and his best-selling political manifesto of last year, One Nation, outsold her Hard Choices by roughly a third. (In literary quality, it’s a draw: They are equally effective as sleep aids.) In a December Gallup poll measuring “the most admired men in America,” Carson was bested only by Barack Obama, Pope Francis, Bill Clinton, Billy Graham, and George W. Bush; in a tie for sixth, he was on a par with Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Bill O’Reilly. No other presidential aspirant in either party made the top tier. 

Carson’s backstory sounds like a movie, and indeed it has already been told in a TNT-network film adaptation of his 1990 memoir, Gifted Hands, with Cuba Gooding Jr. in the starring role. Carson was born in poverty to an illiterate single mother who was one of 24 children and whose own marriage, at age 13, was to a bigamist who deserted her and her two sons for his alternative family. With only a third-grade education, Sonya Carson had to work multiple menial jobs in hardscrabble Detroit to stay afloat. Her zeal to instill higher aspirations in her son propelled him past seemingly insurmountable racial, social, economic, and educational barriers to Yale and the University of Michigan Medical School. In 1987, he pulled off a medical miracle by leading a team of surgeons that for the first time separated Siamese twins joined at the head. At 33, he became the youngest person ever to head a department, pediatric neurosurgery, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He retired in 2013 to turn his full attention to politics.

A devout Seventh Day Adventist and, in partnership with his wife, a generous philanthropist, Carson seems guilty of only a single sin: vanity. His books tend toward self-deification, and he is the star of a cheesy infomercial, “A Breath of Fresh Air,” that’s blanketed the stations owned by the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group. As soon as prominent conservatives started fawning over Carson, he became besotted by the idea that he could pull off the electoral miracle of becoming president of the United States. This will not be happening. There has not been a political novice elected president since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. Next to commanding the European theater in the battle against Hitler, even running a groundbreaking operating theater is small-bore. But Carson is undeterred.

He found his new vocation in February 2013, when he delivered a speech laced with right-wing prescriptions (e.g., a 10 percent flat tax inspired by tithing) at the annual White House prayer breakfast in Washington. The 27-minute oration was an implicit rebuke of President Obama, sitting on the dais a few feet away, and it soon went viral on YouTube. The spectacle of a black speaker dissing the black president to his face, and a black doctor who loathes Obama­care besides, was all it took for The Wall Street Journal to run an editorial titled “Ben Carson for President.” Once an Independent, Carson soon started saying he would not resist if God called on him to seek the White House (as a Republican, His will would have it). He consolidated his conservative cred by going on Sean Hannity’s television show to stigmatize same-sex marriage by likening homosexuality to bestiality and the pedophilia practiced by NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association. This gaffe set off protests at Hopkins that prompted him to withdraw as the medical school’s commencement speaker last year—even as he secured a far bigger forum as a regular Fox News contributor. Following the 2012 examples of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, he has now left the Murdoch payroll in preparation for his official declaration of candidacy, probably this spring. He is the first Republican candidate to claim campaign chairmen in all of Iowa’s 99 counties. “He probably has the edge right now,” the state’s party chairman told the Journal in late January.

What makes Carson most intriguing, if not most viable, in the political arena, of course, is his anomalous status as a black man who both embraces and is embraced by a nearly all-white party that was able to attract only 6 percent of the African-­American vote in the last presidential election. (That’s the same percentage it drew in 1964, when the candidacy of the Civil Rights Act opponent Barry Goldwater inspired white Dixie segregationists en masse to flee the Democrats for the GOP.) Thanks to his status as the political equivalent of a unicorn, Carson qualifies for the most elite affirmative-action program in America, albeit one paradoxically administered by a party opposed to affirmative-action programs. Simply put: If an African-American raises his hand to run for president as a Republican, he (they’ve all been men) will instantly be cheered on as a serious contender by conservative grandees, few or no questions asked. He is guaranteed editorials like the one in the Journal, accolades from powerful talk-show hosts (Carson would make “a superb president,” says Mark Levin), and credulous profiles like the one Fred Barnes contributed to The Weekly Standard last month. Barnes’s piece regurgitated spin from Carson’s political circle, typified by his neophyte campaign chief Terry Giles, a criminal litigator whose clients have included Richard Pryor, Enron’s Kenneth Lay, and an estate-seeking son of Anna Nicole Smith’s elderly final husband. “If nominated, can Carson beat Hillary Clinton or another Democrat?” Barnes asked—and then answered the question himself: “Yes, he can.” How? By winning 17 percent of the black vote in swing states—a theoretical percentage offered by a co-founder of the Draft Carson movement.

There’s no reason that a small-government black conservative Republican couldn’t be elected president—a proposition that might have been tested by Colin Powell and no doubt will be by other black Republicans one day. But not today. There have been three Great Black Presidential Hopes in the GOP’s entire history, Carson included—all of them in the past two decades. None has had a chance of victory in a national election, not least because none of the three ever won any elective office. None can be classified as presidential timber without a herculean suspension of disbelief. Indeed, the two Great Hopes before Carson were a buffoon with congenital financial woes and a two-time settler of sexual-harassment suits. But they, too, were praised to the skies by their Republican cheering section up until—and sometimes past—their inevitable implosions. And not without reason. There is a political method to this madness that reaches its culmination with Carson.

In an era when the GOP is trying to counter its pending demographic crisis by limiting ballot-box access to blacks and Hispanics, his ascent could not be more opportunely timed. Carson not only gives cover to the GOP’s campaign for restrictive new voting laws but actively supports it. The results of the 2014 midterms left the Republicans with a total of 31 governorships, a near record for the modern era, and in control of a record 68 of the states’ 98 partisan legislative chambers. The epidemic of new state voting laws in recent years is already being compounded. The longer the GOP can keep Carson in the game, the more he can do for the cause. What he gets out of this transaction is a riddle, though his susceptibility to flattery and celebrity surely cannot be underestimated.

To appreciate the cynical nature of the relationship between the Republican Party and the black presidential candidates it fast-tracks to center stage, it’s worth revisiting the template established by Carson’s two predecessors, Alan Keyes and Herman Cain. Neither of them had a résumé that remotely matches Carson’s, yet both got the same royal welcome from the GOP and both contributed to the political Ur-text that is being rebooted for 2016.

Keyes, who in 1995 became the first known African-American Republican to declare for the presidency, was a bombastic radio-talk-show host and anti-abortion absolutist who, unlike Carson, had at least tried to win an election for a less lofty office before seeking the grand prize: He had twice lost Senate bids in Maryland by huge margins, his share of the vote falling from 38 percent in 1988 to 29 percent in 1992 as familiarity apparently bred contempt with that state’s voters. In his second race, he was caught paying himself an inappropriate if not illegal monthly stipend (a senatorial salary, by his reckoning) of $8,500 out of campaign funds. But his boosters were happy to look past that and other financial red flags once he set his sights on the presidency. William Kristol, who had roomed with Keyes when he was a Harvard doctoral student and managed his maiden Senate campaign, declared in 1995 that Keyes had “a grand vision of America and his role in it.” A year later, Rush Limbaugh marveled that he was “a tsunami waiting to happen.” Keyes was a tsunami all right. His savagely moralistic diatribes at the primary-season debates made his white opponents visibly uncomfortable; when he was excluded from an Atlanta debate that was limited to the top four presidential contenders, he stormed the gates and was taken away in handcuffs (briefly) by the police. That incident, emanating from the South no less, was not ideal optics for a GOP aspiring to shake its white country-club image. No Republican leader dared risk sending him to the back of the campaign scrum again.

Keyes ended up with a single delegate at the ’96 convention. But this didn’t deter him from another presidential run in 2000. This time, he came in second in eight primaries and third in Iowa, where he famously jumped into the caucus’s mosh pit during a Rage Against the Machine song, a stunt broadcast by Michael Moore on a television magazine show. Keyes was suited up yet again four years later by Illinois Republican leaders, who reached all the way to Maryland to draft him to run for Senate against Barack Obama after the party’s original candidate was felled by a marital scandal. Again, it was an affirmative-action move: The only other finalist the Illinois GOP considered for this human sacrifice was another ­African-American, a Bush-administration bureaucrat, who also hadn’t been living in the state. “It’s an attempt by the Republican Party to appeal to African-American voters,” Glenn Hodas, a Republican strategist, explained at the time to the Chicago Tribune. “How successful it will be is another matter.” In his landslide victory, Obama took 91 percent of the black vote.

Despite his historical standing as the first black Republican presidential candidate, Keyes has not proved loyal to the political party that continued to promote him no matter how poor his electoral performance, how slippery his finances, or how rebellious some of his rhetoric. (He not only attacked a fellow Republican, Pat Buchanan, but called him a racist.) He left the party in 2008 and now uses a subscription website and Twitter to rant against the GOP’s “quisling leaders” and call for the ouster of John Boehner.