Last week, Ben Carson formally announced his plans to seek the 2016 Republican nomination for president.
Carson’s pitch to voters comes down to this: After decades as one of the country’s top pediatric brain surgeons, a presidential campaign and even the presidency itself will be a relatively easy matter.
In a March interview with The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes, Carson bristled at the suggestion that his lack of political experience is a liability. “Just the fact that you would ask that question tells me that you don’t understand all that’s involved in becoming a neurosurgeon,” Carson said. “There’s so much more than becoming a political figure, it’s not even in the same ballpark.”
Unfortunately for Carson, there is little reason to believe that his talent and accomplishments in the surgical theater will transfer to the political theater.
Carson has written that doctors are the “most highly educated group in the nation, trained to make decisions based on facts rather than emotion. They tend to be excellent with numbers, very concerned about the welfare of others, and accustomed to hard work.”
And yes, those attributes all make Carson a better political candidate. But many qualities that are essential in politics are not useful in medicine: an ability to read the political landscape, convey humility, build consensus, communicate a message and inspire voters. Even more essential is robust knowledge of domestic and international policy.
Carson has had little time to cultivate such skills. He is an unpolished speaker with little command of policy. He’s already made a series of embarrassing mistakes that would spell doom for more serious candidates, comparing homosexuality to bestiality and calling the U.S. “much like Nazi Germany.” Last week he suggested that presidents can ignore Supreme Court rulings.
Such bluster is helpful to Carson if his goal is to sell books and build a loyal following, a la Sarah Palin. It’s unhelpful if he wants to be taken seriously as a potential leader of the free world.
Some physicians do excel in politics. As Carson likes to remind audiences and interviewers, five doctors signed the Declaration of Independence. But most former physicians understand that it takes time to learn politics. And most set their sights a little lower than the presidency at first.
Howard Dean, an internist, spent decades honing his political skills in Vermont — first as a state representative, then lieutenant governor, and finally as a six-term governor, before running for president in 2004.
Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist for 17 years, is also running for president as a Republican. But Paul is no political novice. He grew up in a political family, worked his father’s campaigns, and led a taxpayer advocacy group in Kentucky. What’s more, he won a difficult race and has served in the Senate for four years.
Bill Frist was a world-class transplant surgeon when he caught the political bug in his late thirties. In “A Heart to Serve,” his 2009 autobiography, Frist sounds like Carson in writing that he believes a medical background prepared him well for politics. But Frist was much more realistic about the timeline. He once told a friend, “Maybe I am crazy, but it’s taken me nearly twenty years to get where I am in medicine, and I’m willing to give myself another twenty to do what I want to do in politics.” It didn’t take twenty years for Frist to find success, but it did take several years and a lot of hard work. He eventually ran for the U.S. Senate, beating a three-term incumbent and ascending to Senate majority leader before fulfilling a campaign promise not to run for a third term.
Carson doesn’t seem to think he needs to spend time in the lower levels of politics, developing the skills necessary to excel at its highest levels. That’s because for all of Carson’s admirable qualities, he also exhibits a trait that is common in surgeons — a strong belief that he knows better than everyone else (as is usually true of surgeons when it comes to their own field) and that those who disagree are fools.
Like all Republican presidential hopefuls, Carson often invokes Ronald Reagan. He has said that he became a Republican in the 1980s after listening to the Gipper’s speeches. But in his unwarranted self-assurance, his wild put-downs of Obama, and his belief that success in one high-powered, competitive industry will lead to easy success in another, he sounds less like the actor-turned politician Reagan and more like Donald Trump — a businessman who will never be president.
Daniel Allott is The Washington Examiner’s Deputy Commentary Editor
