Dr. Ben Carson said Sunday he was prepared to make changes that his campaign manager couldn’t live with, leading to the departure of three top aides last week.
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Carson explained his campaign shake up by saying more decisive leadership was needed.
“You have to have the ability to execute a plan, and we didn’t really have that,” Carson said.
Barry Bennett, Carson’s former campaign manager, and some 20 other staff members quit the campaign on Dec. 31, a little more than a month before the Iowa caucuses, according to a Reuters report. The Carson campaign said Sunday those numbers were incorrect and only five staff members have left.
Many have questioned whether the campaign shakeup will be enough to save a candidate who has been tanking in the polls during the last six weeks.
Carson said his campaign staff was not originally built to run a competitive campaign. He said no one expected him to be at or near the top of the polls, as he has been for much of the last few months, and new leadership was needed to run a more viable campaign.
“Now, we’re in a different ballgame and we need the ability to execute and we need to have good ideas,” he said.
Retired Army Gen. Bob Dees is now running Carson’s campaign. Carson said Dees would come in to make tough choices and execute the plan Carson wants to run.
How that will mesh with Carson’s network of informal advisors, such as his friend Armstrong Williams, remains to be seen. Carson said Williams, whom Bennett faulted for exercising undue influence over the candidate, would remain a part of his future.
“He’s made some bad judgments, there’s no question about it,” Carson said. “But, he’s a friend and I think he’s a valuable individual, but we can’t have people working at cross purposes and that’s one of the things that’s being fixed, and is fixed.”
The brain surgeon said one of his main focuses in the month leading up to Iowa would be to get his policies out into the public realm. Lately, much of the discussion of Carson’s campaign revolved around staffing drama and gaffes the candidate has made on foreign policy.
“It was very difficult to execute plans, for instance getting our policies out,” he said. “We talk and talk and talk and talk and they don’t seem to get them out and I want them out. I want people to talk about them and analyze them.”
