The rise of Ben Carson, a Republican more outrageous than Trump

WASHINGTON—Here are some of the headlines about Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson from a single week in October.

“Ben Carson’s Holocaust theory prompts outcry from Jewish groups.” (Carson suggested the Holocaust might not have happened if more Germans had owned guns.)

“Oregon shooting survivor offended by Ben Carson’s remarks.” (Carson said he would “not just stand there and let him shoot me” if confronted by a murderous gunman.)

“Ben Carson botches debt ceiling interview.” (Carson did not seem to understand the concept of the debt ceiling.)

“Ben Carson says Mahmoud Abbas, Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin knew each other in 1968 Moscow.” (Ludicrous.)

“Ben Carson putting campaign on hold for two weeks for … a book tour.”

After all this, NBC did a poll. Result: Donald Trump 25 per cent, Ben Carson 22 per cent. Carson was in a statistical tie for first place.

Some other year, some normal year, those seven days might have crippled his candidacy. This year, they might have helped.

In the Republicans’ upside-down 2016 nomination contest, outsiders are in, hyperbole is preferable to orthodoxy, and a shoot-from-the-lip stumble can be forgiven more easily than scripted caution. Carson, a renowned neurosurgeon who has never held political office and rails against “political correctness,” now has at least twice the support of every traditional politician in the race.

He leads Democrat Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical general election matchup. And he has money to burn. Carson raised $20 million last quarter, better than senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz combined.

“As a matter of fact,” said John Philip Sousa IV, the leader of a Carson Super PAC, “after the whole Muslim-in-the-White-House thing, Carson raised more money in 48 hours than you could shake a stick at. And it’s because, gee, someone’s talking out loud and saying what everyone believes, and it’s just so refreshing.”

The Muslim-in-the-White-House thing was the thing where Carson said no Muslim should be president. Facing intense criticism, he said he could support a Muslim who renounced the central tenets of the faith.

But he did not retract or apologize or put much effort into his openly half-hearted clarification. For Republican voters in a fighting mood, his refusal to back down under media pressure is more welcome than worrisome.

“One of the biggest knocks on him is that he’s too quiet, he would never be able to stand up to the Putins of the world, to the dictators. If he’s not even going to put up with somebody giving him an unfair interview, I think that just proves the point that he could be a more-than-capable leader when dealing with other leaders in the world and national-crisis matters,” Noah Casassa, 19, a Carson supporter at the University of New Hampshire, said in an interview.

Carson, a 64-year-old black man, rose from childhood poverty in Detroit to become director of pediatric neurosurgery at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins hospital. Long revered in the African-American community — Cuba Gooding Jr. played him in a movie based on his bestseller Gifted Hands — he was largely unknown to Republicans until he excoriated Obama, with Obama sitting beside him, in a speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast. Conservative activists immediately began asking him to run for president.

The timing is right. To a Washington-loathing Republican base, Carson’s biography is more compelling than any other candidate’s. And he has flashed sharp political instincts in between confounding claims, especially in appealing to white evangelicals suspicious of Trump’s new-found fondness for the New Testament.

When reports emerged that Oregon shooting victims refused to conceal their Christianity from the killer, Carson, a Seventh-Day Adventist, had himself photographed holding a sign reading “I am a Christian.” The photo was “liked” more than a million times on Facebook.

“He discusses religion openly in a time when it is becoming taboo,” Nicholas Homler, 24, a filmmaker and Facebook follower of Carson, said in an interview.

Establishment Republicans are competing to position themselves as the leading alternative to the bombastic Trump. For now, Carson is that alternative — even though he is arguably even more outrageous.

Trump’s arrogant persona matches his provocative words. Part of Carson’s appeal: he lobs his own grenades in a quiet, gentle voice, as if he is talking to you across a candlelit table for two.

Homler called him a “downright good-natured human being.” The Republican electorate appears to agree. Carson has by far the highest favourability rating in the field. In a Washington Post poll this week, he held big leads on trustworthiness and personality.

“He’s the opposite of Donald Trump. Ben Carson is a very humble individual,” said Rebecca DeBoer, 67, president of the Republican club in Florida’s North Hillsborough. His temperament, she said, gives her confidence he would make rational decisions with his finger on the nuclear button.

“That’s Ben Carson,” she said. “He’s a guy that wouldn’t just get all upset and not think something out.”

Carson’s critics, conversely, see a paranoid and dangerous crackpot, his early success another sign of a base gone mad. Even before the string of October controversies, Carson was given to bizarre Holocaust analogies and wild claims about contemporary politics.

His ahistorical theory that Nazi gun control paved the road to the Holocaust, for example, was not a slip of the tongue. Before he repeated it on CNN, he included it in his new book, A More Perfect Union. In a speech in 2011, he said Satan “encouraged” Charles Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution.

“Ben Carson, brain surgeon, has lost his mind,” read one September headline in Esquire. Leon Wolf, writing on the conservative website RedState, accused him in October of “baffling ignorance on basic issues.”

There is a lot of time left for Carson to fade. On this week in 2011, former pizza executive Herman Cain, now forgotten, was leading Mitt Romney.

But Cain did not have Carson’s devoted following. Sousa said the Carson team is connecting the candidate with learned policy experts. He will get “smarter and smarter,” Sousa argued, as the campaign proceeds.

“The one thing I can tell you about Dr. Carson,” he said, “is he is one of the smartest human beings walking the face of the earth.”

Related:More of Ben Carson’s incendiary quotes