“2016’s Premier Novelty Act”

Phil Mattingly covers Carson’s budding presidential campaign:

[S]upporters launched the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee. It raised more than $7 million in less than a year of existence. It has deployed staff members to Iowa and South Carolina and purchased tables at Republican events throughout the country. The group, according to Federal Election Commission filings, is gathering reams of supporter, fundraising and digital data that could be purchased and utilized by Carson’s campaign should he decide to give the green light. It’s a little like Ready for Hillary, the outside group pushing for the former secretary of State to jump into the 2016 race.

Except the Carson group actually outraised Ready for Hillary last quarter.

Francis Wilkinson remarks that Carson’s candidacy “promises to be a (traditional) marriage of Michele Bachmann’s personal loopiness and Herman Cain’s professional ignorance of public policy”:

In his book, Carson called the Affordable Care Act “the biggest governmental program in the history of the United States.” (So much for Social Security, Medicare, the Pentagon.) And if he can’t be bothered to learn much about government, he has an all-purpose rationale: “I would choose common sense over knowledge in almost every circumstance,” he wrote. It’s just too much to ask for both.

Carson, who is poised to be 2016’s premier novelty act, is already following the script from Cain’s 2012 Republican presidential run. He is a successful black man who tells conservative white audiences that there are no meaningful structural impediments to success: There are only character failings. That should be enough to keep him on the stage, at least until the Iowa caucuses.

Update from a reader:

Loopiness?  Professional Ignorance?  Premier Novelty Act? REALLY? I’d expect better from the Dish. For many of your readers, who may not even know who Ben Carson is, how about being fair, rather than simply trashing him? His resume is second to none:

  • Raised by a single mom in Inner City Detroit.
  • Director of Pediactric NeuroSurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital at age of 33.
  • In 2001, CNN and Time magazine named Ben Carson as one of the nation’s 20 foremost physicians and scientists.
  • In 2001, the Library of Congress selected him as one of 89 “Living Legends.”
  • In 2006, he received the Spingarn Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the NAACP.
  • In February 2008, President Bush awarded Carson the Ford’s Theater Lincoln Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. highest civilian honors.
  • In 2009, actor Cuba Gooding, Jr. portrayed Carson in the TNN television production Gifted Hands.
  • Because of his unflagging dedication to children and his many medical breakthroughs, Carson has received more than 50 honorary doctorate degrees and is a member of the Alpha Honor Medical Society, the Horatio Alger Society of Distinguished Americans and sits on the boards of numerous business and education boards.

Find me 10 Americans alive today that are more admired, successful and accomplished. Yet you lead with Novelty Act, Loopy and Professional Ignorance.

Carson is clearly an incredible physician and humanitarian. But politician? On the Dish alone, we’ve seen Carson call Obamacare “the worst thing since slavery“, champion creationism, and compare homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia.