Ben Carson, admirable man with a mistaken philosophy (Cynthia Tucker)
Like giddy teenagers, Republican activists have fallen for another charming, personable and accomplished black conservative. Dr. Ben Carson is the newest object of their crush, which was born of a desperate need to attract more black men and women as high-profile standard-bearers.
You can't blame Republican loyalists for swooning over the doc, a renowned surgeon who rose from poverty to head pediatric neurosurgery at Baltimore's famed Johns Hopkins Hospital. If wooing voters of color were simply a matter of finding an attractive black face with an inspiring personal story and an impressive resume, Carson would be hard to beat.
But black voters tend to be more discerning than that. They have shown an unerring instinct for rejecting condescension and dismissing tokenism. There are many black Americans who admire Carson for his professional accomplishments (I'm one of them), but that admiration is unlikely to translate into votes.
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Talking to The New York Times recently about his conservative views, Carson described himself as a "flaming liberal" in college who later became disaffected with the Democratic Party. "One thing I always believed strongly in was personal responsibility and hard work," he said. "I found the Democrat Party leaving me behind on that particular issue."
That notion -- fallacious though it is -- is at least as popular among black conservatives as among white ones. I've been hearing it from black Republicans for at least two decades. Several years ago, I interviewed a black conservative running a doomed campaign for a suburban Atlanta congressional district. She had no prior political experience, no policies to advance, no program to sell. Her platform consisted of her belief in hard work, which she contrasted, at least implicitly, with black Democrats' supposed preference for sloth.
That view is as puzzling as it is infuriating. It may charm those white conservatives who hold stereotypical views of black Americans, but it bears little resemblance to the realities that inform their choices at the ballot box.
In his memoir, "Gifted Hands," and in his motivational speeches, Carson talks about his impoverished childhood and his remarkable semiliterate mother. Married at 13 only to later divorce her philandering husband, she enforced high academic standards for Carson and his brother while working two or three jobs as a maid or nanny -- and battling debilitating depression.
Carson eventually got into Yale and became, at 33, the youngest person to head a department at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is famous for separating conjoined twins.
That's a compelling and powerful tale. But it differs from those of other hardworking black people I know only in the degree of success that Carson attained as a result, not in the measures of ambition, industriousness, discipline and self-respect his mother instilled in her children.
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To be helpful to the GOP, Carson would have to remind them of the caprice of capitalism and the generational reach of racism's barriers. Instead, he sounds like the standard-issue Ayn Rand acolyte, no different from Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan. He opposes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and supports a flat tax. For good measure, he's also a religious conservative who disputes evolution.
full: http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/26/opinion/tucker-ben-carson/index.html
Wow. This guy is a doctor yet talks like college dropout Rush Limbaugh "Democrat Party" and is a creationist????
And just don't read the comments section.
= new reply since forum marked as read
folks (especially Black folks) say Black folks voted for President Obama BECAUSE he is Black. Ms. Tucker, correctly pointed out the Black/Democratic voting history; but she neglected the knock-out punch for that flawed line of thought ... she didn't mention that Candidate Obama trailed Candidate HRC among the Black electorate until very late their primary race. Because the candidates' policy positions were virtually indistinguishable, this would suggest that the Black electorate was more leery of candidate Obama (possibly, because of his Blackness ... we have been known to believe that "the white man's ice is colder"
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