Ben Carson is the only 2016 candidate for president who has never led a state or company or run for political office. No matter, he says. Surely someone who can perform life-or-death surgeries can run the country.
Carson challenged the medical status quo as a storied neurosurgeon — cutting out half of a child’s brain to end her seizures, separating twins joined at the head — in a three-decade career at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
“I believe in getting the best out of everybody,” Carson told The Associated Press. “In my operating room, everybody was free to speak.” He said, “I want that person who is cleaning the floor, if they see something, to say something.”
But the White House is a long way from the operating room, where the doctor with the technical skill unquestionably is the one in charge, not the best deal-maker or diplomat seeking consensus. Carson’s lack of executive experience produces deep skepticism from critics in both parties.
Yet he’s among the leaders in the Republican presidential campaign. In a new Associated Press-GfK poll, Carson has the highest positive and lowest negative rating of any Republican sized up by registered GOP voters, with 65 percent giving him a favorable rating and just 13 percent rating him unfavorably. Moreover, 62 percent of such voters think he could win the presidency if he is nominated, second only to the 71 percent who think of Donald Trump as an electable candidate.
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who ran the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government” program, says she, like many others, is in awe of neurosurgeons and other doctors who heal people.
“We love them but, hello, that doesn’t even remotely resemble what the job of president is,” she said. Conversely, “I would not want my neurosurgeon experienced in the art of negotiation.”
At least one similarity between the professions: crises at any hour.
“He was never one of those surgeons that throws things or yells and screams,” said Dr. Violette Recinos, who was trained by Carson and now directs pediatric neurosurgery at the Cleveland Clinic. As a resident at Hopkins, she often had to wake the surgeon late at night when a patient needed immediate care. “No matter what time I called him, he was never angry, he was never grouchy,” she said.
Longtime colleagues don’t know what to make of Carson’s political persona, contrasting the doctor they saw as devoted to patients of all backgrounds with his divisive comments such as a statement that a Muslim shouldn’t be president. Pediatricians were dismayed when Carson questioned whether children get too many vaccines at once, even as he disputed any link with autism. And though he opposes abortion rights, Carson has defended co-authoring a 1992 study that used fetal tissue, telling CNN there’s a difference between performing abortions and using tissue someone else already stored.
“People have asked me what his politics were like,” said Dr. Henry Brem, neurosurgery chairman at Hopkins, who joined the faculty with Carson in 1984. “There was no politics in the hospital, zero. It was never discussed.”
Brem said Carson was “very willing to think outside the box. A lot of patients came to him that other surgeons were not willing to take the risk to operate on.”
Could the political rhetoric tarnish Carson’s medical legacy?
“There’s a part of me wishes he’d never entered the political fray,” Dr. Damon Tweedy, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Duke University, said in an interview about a hero of his youth.
Tweedy recently wrote in The Washington Post about how Carson was an inspiration for him and many other black medical students, with his rise from childhood poverty to become a pediatric surgical pioneer who established scholarships for kids. So Tweedy was stunned when Carson compared President Barack Obama’s health care law to slavery.
In medicine, Carson is best known for leading a 22-hour operation in 1987 to separate German twins joined at the head — the first such attempt when both babies survived.
But Brem said Carson’s larger contribution was in reviving a radical operation that had largely been abandoned as too dangerous: He removed half the brain of a child with a rare condition inflaming the entire left hemisphere.
“There was a lot of fear in doing that,” recalled Brem, explaining that it works in children young enough for flexible remaining brain tissue to compensate.
Carson wrote in his autobiography “Gifted Hands,” that doctors in the past may have chosen inappropriate patients for the procedure or lacked the skills. Regardless, “we were at least giving this pretty little girl a chance to live,” he wrote.
It worked, and soon other desperate families were calling.
Carson said he doesn’t miss what medicine had become by the time he retired as chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Hopkins two years ago. No more simply flying in a child from, say, Guatemala for complex surgery. “Now it’s like, every penny, nickel and dime has to be counted, you go through 600 bureaucrats,” he said. “It just wasn’t exciting.”
And he dismisses criticism of his lack of political experience: “You need skill to bring in trustworthy people who understand the complete corruption of the system as it exists now,” Carson said. “You don’t have to be part of that.”
(AP)
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12 Responses
Yes, especially when this country needs a brain surgery.
He compared Obamacare to slavery, claimed that gun control was the reason for the holocaust, and doesn’t seem to understand that the US Constitution forbids any religious test for any public office. As the result he is not regarded as a target for jokes. Which is ok because he clearly is more interested in selling his books than in being President — he actually suspended his campaign to concentrate on his book tour. The joke is on the people who take him seriously.
Since the early sixties americans lost their innocence and being a “politician”has negative implications. It is refreshing to see a new face on the horizon. Perhaps he can restore that idealism that we’ve lost -especially because he did not come up through tte political machine.
Ofcourse all the other factors such as his convictions, leadership capability and ability to push legislation etc. must be evaluated……
Carson is unquestionably a top surgeon and has a good moral compass. But he’s made a number of comments on various issues where he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Carson is not qualified to be president.
The use of the phrase “lead the nation” in the headline shows the problem. In the USA, under our constitution, the President is not the “Fueher” (one who leads). He does not “run” the country (the word the article used). The president can set a tone for the government, and appoints people who run agencies – but is not supposed to be the chief micromanager making legislation and ignoring laws at will (like Obama, and most of the presidents of both parties for most of the last century).
In America, the powers of the federal government limited, with most powers reserved to the people and the states. Carson is a conservative who respects the constitution, unlike most Democrats who see it as an obstacle to getting their way.
Well we had a “community organizer” for the past 7 years, you can’t get any worse than that
And anyways he would be great at surgical strikes
Why is a doctor any less qualified than a lawyer – and many of our presidents have never had any serious gainful employment other than as lawyers. Under the constitution, the president doesn’t run the judicial branch, and law often works in ways that are totally irrelevant to public policy. Several presidents’ sole credential was military service – as if the president commands troops in battle. Two presidents were experienced engineers (Hoover and Carter). One was a haberdasher. If we wanted someone with experience to be president, we’ld attempt to look at people with experience running small countries such as Cameron or Putin or even Netanyahu.
To Charlie Hall:
The idea of Obamacare is to deny people the ability to control their own healthcare and make them totally dependent on the will and whims of their betters – good analogy to slavery if you ask me. Both are about those in control telling those who are ruled what to do.
Abortion, like Slavery, were based on the (bad) science of the time. In the 1850s Blacks were considered sub-human, and in the 1970s, a fetus was considered to be inanimate tissue. Both were about denying rights to subset of humanity. Good analogy there.
Carson didn’t say that Jews lacking guns caused the holocaust. He said that if we were well armed (an impossibility as Europe has always had strict gun control), we would have been better able to resist. In fact, has Europe had American style gun policy, the Nazis would have faced a far more serious resistance. Note that the one country with something resembling America’s gun culture is Switzerland, and Hitler was afraid to invade (and all its Jews survived the war).
He didn’t say the a Muslim can’t be president, he said that one shouldn’t. Given that most Muslims believe they have a duty to inflict shariah law on the rest of the world, that seems a reasonable issue. When there is a Muslim running for president, he should make a Kennedy-like speech making clear that shariah will not govern his actions as president.
Going on a “book tour” to discuss his book on the constitution was brilliant. He gets to campaign without campaigning. His book is a popular book putting forth the standard conservative, limited government, rights-oriented, viewd of the constitution.
The joke is on the people who like to quote him out of context and to misquote him. It’s been almost a lifetime since we have a president who wasn’t a bombastic fool, and the change would be refreshing.
Charlie, with all due respect, if you want to nit pick and find controversial things candidates have said, you could do it with any of them. You’ve long since established yourself as someone who will criticize whatever you can about any Republican. You should at least fain objectivity to be taken seriously.
Remember, his people were oppressed by the Nazis as well. We aren’t the only people allowed to talk about the Holocaust. I agree that his facts are wrong in asserting that gun ownership could have made any difference, but I don’t think the statement warrants the extreme reaction it’s getting. When the ADL criticizes such statements as anti-Semitic, it just shows that they see the Holocaust as an exclusively Jewish affair, which it was not.
Again, I mean no disrespect to you, Charlie. You know a lot more than I.
Charlie:
You are a RACIST! You’re only saying these mean spirited things about Dr. Carson because he is black! You would NEVER say these things about your guy, the white elitist Hillary Clinton!
+1 to akuperma and not getting involved
Conventional wisdom taught us that there would never be a black president. But with the help of the black vote, the minority vote, the liberal vote, and the Jewish vote Obama won. Unfortunately for Carson, none of those will vote for him, so unfortunately for this once great nation, lyin’ Hillary will be the next commander in chief.