“It’s not the work, it’s the stairs,” said the world-weary prostitute in an old joke. One suspects Dr. Ben Carson has not applied this timeless wisdom to his race for the Republican nomination for president.
Plenty of people in American life possess the skill to be president. The toughest test comes in the climb to the job. It is brutal. Anyone who acts surprised, or really is surprised, at what a turn on the griddle of a national campaign means is destined to fail.
Poor Dr. Carson. He rose from poverty to become by every account a gifted pediatric neurosurgeon. Along the route to renown beyond the operating room, Dr. Carson developed a taste for telling his story. His 1990 autobiography, “Gifted Hands,” is a tale of a hardscrabble youth who makes it to Yale and fulfills his destiny to do a remarkable amount of good as a talented surgeon.
Scrutiny is part of politics. The higher one goes, the more searing the light of examination by strangers. Dr. Carson is suddenly flying high indeed in his improbable race for president. A thick swath of Republicans is looking for an outsider. Prolonged exposure to real estate mogul and reality television personality Donald Trump’s turn in the spotlight has many looking for an alternative. Many, recent polls reveal, have stampeded to Dr. Carson.
The Detroit native’s campaign has been all about his life story to the exclusion of serious policy prescriptions for the nation’s ills. Candidates shape their campaigns in the early going and the rest of us get to start examining the details. Since Dr. Carson’s campaign seems to be that his biography is what makes him qualified to be president, his decades of self-advertisements were always going to be dissected by people who’d yet to fall under his spell.
Dr. Carson is not enjoying scrutiny of his many claims to have led what seems like an improbably virtuous life. His autobiography sets himself up as an angry, violent kid who is transformed into a young man of saintly virtue. The media have been having trouble confirming some of the incidents Dr. Carson included in his long tale of performing kind acts when flight or self-preservation was the easy choice. He sheltered white students during Detroit race riots. Only he remained in a Yale classroom when his classmates — implicitly less serious ones — left in a huffy protest.
Then there’s Carson’s novel notion that the ancient Egyptian pyramids were built to store grain rather than inter pharaohs. As an Episcopalian, I can attest to some of the struggling that comes with the Old and New Testaments in this modern age. That’s why we refer to the mystery of faith. A great gift, but I don’t want a potential president revealing too many details of his or her theories of what’s in the Bible. “Love thy neighbor” is all I need to know for political purposes.
Dr. Carson’s placid demeanor has cracked at probing questions. There’s nothing unusual about the treatment. In 1987, Democratic frontrunner Gary Hart invited the press to follow him around. A reporter from the Miami Herald did and discovered hound dog heart had a woman staying at his house who was not his long-suffering wife. A week after the Herald story, Hart was out of the race.
Vice President Joseph Biden came to grief in the same cycle when someone from rival Michael Dukakis’ campaign tipped the press that Biden was an unabashed plagiarist. Biden exited the race soon after the story was published.
On and off for more than 20 years, the public and the press have been trying to unpack Hillary Clinton’s tale of making a small fortune buying and selling cattle futures from her kitchen table. The story revealed a fundamental fact about the Clintons. They have never had enough money. Now that they have hundreds of millions, it’s still not enough and they will use their power, wherever it can be exercised, to get more.
Candidates often recoil and cry foul, but examining a candidate’s life before entering a race for the presidency is a crucial part of a vibrant democracy. Welcome to the steep staircase of a presidential campaign, Dr. Carson.
