Dr. Ben Carson On Presidential Bid: The Good LORD Has A Plan

by JASmius

And that plan is not to squander the moral stature he's built up over the past year-plus on a daffy quest to be 2016's version of Herman Cain (cut to the 11:00 mark):





I like and immensely respect Dr. Carson.  He's smart, wise, and courageous, and he's an accomplished physician and surgeon.  What he is not is a professional politician.  And, just to review, that phrase is not a dirty one, but is a straightforward recognition of a two-plus-century old reality that too many Tea Partiers obstinately refuse to acknowledge at their electoral peril.

I'll put it even more bluntly: Politics is a profession.  Always has been.  There has always been a "political class" as well.  Go back and study American political history in the nineteenth century.  You'll find example after example after example of pols who went from senatorships to governorships and back again and vice versa.  Hell, President John Quincy Adams returned to the House after his single presidential term.  You might even say it was a revolving door.  For every Andrew Jackson, there were a ten or a hundred normal political professionals who plied their electoral trade, and the Republic still managed to thrive.

The only real difference between the "political class" then and its modern version is the size of the government it administers.  That malignancy didn't arise from politics being a profession; it arose from men and women seeking ever greater levels of money from and power over their fellow countrymen.  To resurrect the country from the iron-fisted rule of such greedy, power-mad animals requires men and women who believe in the U.S. Constitution, liberty, freedom, traditional values, capitalism - and who are political professionals.  Brave American patriots with the resources, expertise, and know-how to win elections.  And Dr. Carson, God bless him, does not remotely have those qualifications.

Nor am I accusing him of harboring such delusions of grandeur.  Mr. Malzberg was the one who brought up the idea to Dr. Carson, after all, and the latter gave the usual answer to such a question: "I'm flattered, but....."

"As far as my running for public office, that was never my intention. I thought when I retired I was going to play golf and learn how to play an organ.

"But, obviously, the good Lord had a different plan for me. I will obviously listen, but that is not what I really had intended to do."

Seems like nobody ever has the brass to give General William T. Sherman's answer:

If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.

Or, even better:

If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

Dr. Carson is smart enough to know he's not qualified to jump into a whole new profession at the top of its latter, and that it would be arrogant presumption of Obama-esque proportions to believe he could.  That his would just be a vanity candidacy that would fragment the Tea Party vote, just like Cruz, Paul, and Rubio candidacies would do.  That he would be the Herman Cain of 2016.  That it would undercut the very ideas and cause on whose behalf he has spoken so courageously and eloquently.

But not, apparently, the TPers who are trying to draft Dr. Carson to run, on the grounds either that just because somebody agrees with them and gives a good speech, that somehow automatically qualifies them for high office - sound familiar? - or that they just flat out want their own version of Barack Obama.  Which ought to have them trouble-shooting their thought processes.

Sorry, folks, but it's the ideal of the "citizen-politician" that is the myth.  Always has been.  The priority of those who still believe the American Republic to be salvageable has to be winning elections in sufficient numbers to regain the power necessary to accomplish that end.  And that cannot happen by throwing out neophytes and amateurs to twist in the wind and get slaughtered.

As I'd like to believe you would all agree, we don't have the time for such naïve indulgences.

So say we all.