OPINION:
Ben Carson represents the best of America. Whether he should be the president of the United States is another question that is not under consideration here. But his ascent to the top of the public-opinion polls tells a lot about both the man and the country he wants to lead. Focus groups and pollsters find his favorability ratings the highest of all the Republican candidates. Americans say they see honesty and temperament in his low-intensity discussion of the issues and his approach to life as a believer true to fundamental values but who does not seek to impose them on everyone else by force.
His life is the American dream, a poor child of an oppressed minority, who with the help of a loving and dedicated parent made it to a distinguished and prosperous career. He learned to practice one of the most demanding medical disciplines. He appears to hold a genuine conviction that he had an obligation to take on a political life for a country he loves in a time of the country’s sagging confidence. The Founders, who would have been astonished by Ben Carson, intended in another age that participation in government would be a part-time duty of its citizens, limiting government to a few tasks that only government could perform.
He says things in a bold way that disturbs the many who are accustomed to having others think and say correct thoughts for them, and have neither the talent nor will to listen to the point of what the man is actually saying. He compares Obamacare to slavery, making in a dramatic way the important point that the Affordable Care Act, the marketing euphemism for Obamacare, forces on Americans a conformity they have repeatedly refused to sanction. He questions whether a Muslim should be president of the United States, not an idle speculation if Islam as a political institution, demanding total obedience from its adherents, is honestly reckoned with. He suggests that if the Jews in Germany had been armed with guns they knew how to use the Nazis might have thought twice about the costs they would pay in their own blood before organizing the death camps. It’s a question none can answer, but it’s a question worthy of speculation in our own time and place. “I’m probably never going to be politically correct,” Mr. Carson said when he announced for president, “because I’m not a politician.”
Mr. Carson’s climb to the top of the polls reflects a public appreciation of the robust characteristics Americans believe he demonstrates. In an election campaign remarkable for the diversity of candidates — who could have guessed that one year out the two candidates at the top of their party’s polls would be a white woman and a black man — speculation on the ultimate outcome is just that, speculation. Many months and many speeches, many caucuses and many primaries, lie ahead. The caucuses in Iowa, where Mr. Carson has pulled ahead of the Republican pack, has never been a reliable indicator of who gets the nomination. The New Hampshire primary that follows is not much more reliable. The usual result of both caucuses and primary is reams of punditry that gets it wrong as often as it gets it right.
The third Republican debate on Wednesday night was useful, but a single debate (even if not actually a debate) will not be conclusive, either. But what Ben Carson has introduced into the campaign is a tone of rationality, of modesty, of conviviality that conforms to the expectations of virtue that is still alive, if barely, in America. We’re glad he’s in the campaign, grateful that he’s saying respectful, impolitic and incorrect things, said with the quiet dignity that ultimately survives bombast and noise.
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