Ben Carson’s Daily Crises Continue as the Dr. Takes a Licking in Iowa
Presidential candidates do not abruptly change their travel plans to return home for a change of clothing. They have people to do that. Presidential candidates are wealthy people. (If you don’t believe that, try throwing your hat into the ring and see what happens if you are not wealthy.) Wealthy people don’t fly back to Florida from Iowa just to pick up some fresh clothes, unless they are very, very stupid. They send aides or personal assistant to carry their dirty linens home and pick up some fresh duds…and that’s what the always well-dressed retired physician should have done, but didn’t. Instead, he created a circumstance that lent credence to the rumor that he was pulling out by heading home in a private jet. A wise candidate doesn’t disrupt the entire campaign and expend the cost of flying the whole campaign – because wherever the candidate goes, so goes the campaign – halfway across the country and back again for no good reason.
So, when Ben Carson’s campaign abruptly announced that their candidate was flying back to his home in Florida after Monday’s disappointing performance in the Iowa caucuses, skeptics – including members of Ted Cruz’s campaign staff and other Cruz supporters – put two and two together and ran up red flags suggesting that Carson was going home to think about pulling out of the primary race. To them, it seemed that flying back to Florida for some haberdashery was just another sign of a seriously dysfunctional campaign heading down the drain, part of a dismal pattern of ineptitude.
Yesterday, Carson held a press conference during which he rambled on for several minutes with some semi-mystical observations about how to evaluate political candidates, saying “Today, however, what we need to be able to is look at a person’s life, look at the way a person does things, look at the way a person treats other people, make a judgment…..” without explaining precisely how those judgments should be made. He went on to assert that his Iowa caucus results were adversely affected by the false rumor spread by Cruz’s people, saying that, “if Ted Cruz doesn’t know about this, then he clearly needs to very quickly get rid of some people in his organization and, if he does know about it, isn’t this the exact kind of thing that the American people are tired of..and why, why would we want to continue with that kind of, you know, shenanigans.”
Today, Carson – appearing on the O’Reilly Factor – said that Cruz had called to apologise, saying that he had no knowledge of the actions of his staffers. In subsequent statements, however, Cruz said that no one would be fired as a result of the incident. Bill O’Reilly himself raised questions about who was responsible for the dirty trick, the Cruz campaign for sending out emails alleging that Carson was pulling out of the race, or CNN for reporting the rumor.
(If you watch this clip through, you will see Bill O’Reilly, while castigating CNN for publishing reports that Carson was dropping out of the race, committing exactly the same blunder he accuses CNN of committing. The blunder, in both cases, is reporting stories without substantiation. CNN did not verify the story that Carson was pulling out with the Carson campaign itself but merely reported what their reporters were being told…but that is exactly what reporters are supposed to do: report breaking news as it happens. O’Reilly, in the meantime, has not done his homework either, because CNN had verifiable sources for their story. The fact that their sources were wrong, doesn’t exonerate CNN, but it doesn’t convict them either. CNN was trying to scoop the competition by putting out the Carson quitting story before they had both oars in the water, but the fault really lies with the sources of the misinformation. O’Reilly reports that CNN had referenced sources for their story but then goes on to assert that CNN shouldn’t rely on its sources. If we all did that, there would be news at all. )
Nevertheless, it was also announced today that the Carson campaign was slashing its work force by 50 percent, dismissing some 50 workers in a cost cutting measure, according to a report in The Washington Post, which obtained a purloined internal memo describing the cuts. Reports also suggested that Carson was going to stop flying around the country in a private aircraft and would begin flying on scheduled commercial flights (presumably, however, in first class. He is, after all, a world-famous physician, isn’t he?) These austerity measures, however, may be too little and too late to salvage the stumbling big-spending Carson juggernaut, but these are merely the latest in a series of stumbles for the retired neurosurgeon.
On January 1, Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, who was responsible for Carson’s early surge, quit, along with 20 other campaign staffers, citing differences with another campaign advisor, conservative Republican columnist and talk show host Armstrong Williams, who also happens to be Carson’s business manager.
On January 11, the entire five-person crew of a New Hampshire based pro-Carson 2016 Committee super pac turned in their keys and went to work for Ted Cruz instead. Boston. Com reported that the group’s spokesperson, Jerry Sickles, told Manchester, New Hampshire’s WMUR-TV that the group revered Carson, but felt that Ted Cruz was the more viable candidate. The former head of the 2016 Committee, Sam Pimm, who resigned earlier this year, also announced that he was switching teams and going with Cruz because he did not believe that Carson was electable, according to the Boston. Com report.
In the midst of the brouhaha between Carson and Cruz, Donald Trump has stepped into the ring (according to the New York Times) to assert that Cruz’s dirty tricks enabled Cruz to pick up enough Carson votes to put him over the top in Iowa, suggesting that, if Rep. Steven King (R-Iowa) had not posted his false report that Carson was quitting, then Cruz would not have gotten those votes. Despite the questionable logic of why Trump would assume that Carson winning more votes would have improved his performance or weakened Cruz’s, it now appears that the mudslinging among the Republican candidates is now approaching a fevered pitch.
The bottom line here, for Republicans, is that this year’s crop of candidates seem to have forgotten Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of thy fellow Republicans.” The bottom line for the rest of the country – the people who think that issues actually matter – is that we seem to have some very silly people running for president of the United States and, since we might actually end up with one of them, that could be very bad news for the country and the world.
