NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — A gathering of staunch conservatives is perhaps the last place President Obama might expect to find defenders of his performance as the nation’s chief executive.
But that’s what Ben Carson did Thursday at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington, D.C. As Republicans with limited governing and executive experience make their case for 2016, they’re up against one of the GOP’s most solid lines of attack: that Obama’s bad choices abroad and disastrous domestic leadership resulted from his having arrived in the Oval Office an unproven amateur who had never run anything.
But Carson, the retired Johns Hopkins brain surgeon who has exploded as a conservative favorite, said Obama has actually been quite successful in winning two terms and implanting a left-leaning agenda, even in the face of broad popular opposition to the results of his policies.
“I would say that the president has done a very good job. It’s just that what he’s doing is contrary to what most Americans want,” Carson told the Washington Examiner during a brief interview.
Carson, a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon, has polled well in early surveys gauging the interest of GOP primary voters in their party’s 2016 field. But just as Obama came to the presidency with the limited hands-on experience of a community organizer who spent but a few years in the Illinois Senate and just a few more in the U.S. Senate, Carson, if he won, would enter the White House with even less know-how.
Obama always chafed at the notion that he was an amateur executive, protesting that he had run his 2008 presidential campaign, a vast and remarkably innovative organization engaged in the highest-stakes political campaign in the world. Carson and his supporters also say Carson has portable skills, arguing that the outspoken Republican spent his career assembling teams of doctors and directing them in high pressure surgeries that demanded of him minute-to-minute decisions with life and death consequences.
“Being able to put together a team that can accomplish things that have never been done before qualifies as ‘running things,’ ” Carson said.
The Republican field of potential presidential contenders includes a spate of sitting and former governors. These candidacies satisfy a deep desire among many in the GOP, particularly within the party’s Establishment, to replace Obama with a chief executive who has governing chops and a demonstrated ability to accomplish conservative reforms.
That sale pitch has potency, forcing the senators and non-politicians like Carson to develop a case for sending another executive-politics novice to the White House. Allies of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also a likely presidential candidate, have begun whispering that the problem with Obama isn’t one of competence. In fact, achievements like the Affordable Care Act reveal extreme effectiveness. Obama’s problem, they say, is simply that he’s wrong on the issues.
Republican operatives partial to nominating a candidate with executive experience say, in effect, that that dog won’t hunt.
“That message is a pretzel,” a GOP strategist said. “It leads back onto itself. No one will buy it. One of the reasons Common Core is so unpopular is because nobody trusts [Obama] to run it.”
Following Carson’s speech to CPAC, his supporters dismissed claims that he lacked the experience to make a good president, specifically referencing his ability to organize teams of doctors the same way Democrats once made the case for Obama’s community organizing skills as a means to build coalitions and unify the country. In another echo of 2008’s Democratic excitement for Obama, supporters gushed over how smart Carson is.
Jerry Harmon, a 73-year-old Carson volunteer from Thousand Oaks, Calif, said the Republican has what it takes to be president in part because of his “tremendous intellect that’s allowed him to go beyond the knowledge of the brain, which you know has to be incredibly in depth.” Harmon, a registered Republican, said he had never volunteered for a political campaign before joining Carson’s team.
“Anyone who can put together a team of 100 surgeons, nurses and technicians to completely remove half of a child’s brain successfully is a proven leader because those sorts of things require weeks of preparation and knowledge about how to lead a team and I know that he would also choose very good people as his aides in different areas,” Harmon said.
