Ben Carson’s Insurgency The Real Conservative Outsider has Been Staging a Quiet Rise…..See note please
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ben-carsons-insurgency-1441407758
See the movie “Gifted Hands- The Ben Carson Story”- the remarkable biography of a remarkable and decent man……rsk
Republican voters have been expressing in every way they can that they’re fed up with Washington and the political class. But as angry as they are about the Obama era of governance, that doesn’t mean they’ll want an angry presidential nominee—or accept brashness as a substitute for conservative reform. Witness the rise of Ben Carson.
While the media have been recording every utterance from Donald Trump, the soft-spoken Mr. Carson has been surging in Iowa and across the country. A recent Monmouth poll in Iowa has him in a dead heat with Mr. Trump atop the Republican field and he’s only five points back in a Des Moines Register poll.
The website FiveThirtyEight uses data from Google and finds that over a recent three-week period Mr. Trump received 60 times more media coverage than Mr. Carson. Yet voters have still moved toward the retired pediatric neurosurgeon.
That may have something to do with Mr. Carson’s calm demeanor and apparent modesty. Raised in poverty in Detroit, he has had one of the great medical careers of the past 50 years and helped build the pediatric neurosurgery center at Johns Hopkins. Yet he doesn’t boast about his brains. At last month’s Fox News debate, he deftly turned his record of separating conjoined twins at the head into a joke about dysfunction in Washington.
Opinion Journal Video
The Carson surge may also reflect that voters want to know what they’re getting philosophically. Mr. Trump has been all over the map and has lately been eliding 1930s-style trade policy with 1920s-style immigration policy—a pitch for more Washington control over the flow of people, goods and services.
Mr. Carson isn’t trying to persuade conservatives to abandon their natural distaste for overactive government. “Government will bankrupt itself if it considers itself a savior,” he said on a visit to the Journal last winter. His opposition to ObamaCare and support for health-savings accounts flow naturally from his medical experience, his opposition to abortion is longstanding, and he wants to reform the tax code by cutting taxes, not raising them.
He often likens a flat tax to the biblical tradition of tithing. “We don’t necessarily have to do 10% but it’s the principle,” Mr. Carson says. “You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in one. Of course you’ve got to get rid of the loopholes. Some people say, ‘Well that’s not fair because it doesn’t hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made 10.’ Where does it say you have to hurt the guy?” While Mr. Carson will have to work out the reform details, this instinct is right on the policy merits and useful as a way to rebut liberal class warfare.
Like anyone who wants to make the Presidency his first political job, Mr. Carson will have to overcome doubts about his experience and avoid gaffes as when he compared homosexuality to bestiality. He’ll have to show he has paid attention to foreign policy and defense. And he’ll have to demonstrate in Iowa, New Hampshire and beyond that he can raise enough money and motivate enough volunteers to be able to defeat Hillary Clinton.
When Americans have elected non-politicians as President, they have been generals like Eisenhower. The odds are still long, but Mr. Carson’s rise means that he is going to get an extensive and welcome audition.
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