In case you missed the late news yesterday evening, the Carson-Yale mystery has taken a paradoxical turn in which all can apparently rejoice: new evidence both suggests the possibility that Ben Carson may be telling some version of the truth as he remembers it (good for supporters) while also showing him to be a pompous buffoon (good for opponents and consumers of comedy). As you’ll remember or as you may have heard in recent days, Carson’s autobiography tells the story of an incident during Carson’s days at Yale in which a psychology professor engineered a ruse to find the most hardworking and honest student in his class. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be Ben Carson.
One thing I’ve been very focused on with Ben Carson is his relationship with Armstrong Williams. Williams has been out of the spotlight for a while, or at least not nearly as visible as he was a decade ago. But he’s a longtime conservative columnist. And he has a very close relationship with Carson, the details of which have been a bit obscure to me. A few months ago, the Post referred to him a man “who for decades has been Carson’s business manager and gatekeeper.” He’s now the “business manager” for Carson’s campaign, which got my attention since I’ve never seen a campaign, ever, that has a “business manager.”
It’s a bit brutal to watch so many of Ben Carson’s self-glorifying stories from his biography turn out to be either wildly exaggerated, completely bogus or as in the case of this Yale exam story, as Catherine Thompson explains here, so utterly byzantine and convoluted as to defy categorization. Adding to the surreal situation is what I noted last week which is that Carson’s operation looks very much like a direct mail fundraising scam gone wrong – or actually horribly right. When I was researching this last week, I was struck that not only did Carson’s campaign seem like a fundraising scam but that his campaign had attracted a slew of nominally ‘pro-Carson’ SuperPacs trying to grab some of the tons of money off the Carson phenomenon, run a few nominal ads and pocket the rest as costs. Now one of the many ‘pro-Carson’ SuperPacs is out asking patients to come forward to say good things about him.
The Wall Street Journal just published a story with several more problems in Ben Carson’s biography. They range from stories which simply cannot be confirmed (doesn’t mean they’re false) to ones that appear more or less definitively not to have happened (i.e. made up), based on contemporary evidence, and some in between. Here’s the Journal’s piece.
Ben Carson’s defenders rallied late this afternoon, focusing in on whether Carson “fabricated” a story about his admission to West Point or simply told a story that was demonstrably false numerous times over several decades. But Carson seemed to dig himself deeper in an angry exchange with reporters this evening. This snippet from the conservative Washington Examiner, captures the moment …
A lot of conservatives are now deciding that Carson is innocent of fabricating an admission to West Point. But the basis of his exoneration is apparently that Carson is so totally ignorant of how tuition, the service academies and apparently just life in general work that he may have claimed something that is demonstrably false but not known it. Erick Erickson first wrote a post saying the Carson was toast. But he then struck that post and replaced it with another basically exonerating him. To be fair to Erickson, unlike some others, he’s not exactly exonerating Carson but saying that he has “more wiggle room on this story than the Politico suggested.”
In our rundown of conservative reaction to the Ben Carson’s false West Point story, pay particular attention to the U-turn crowd (they’re toward the bottom) for a primer in how conservative media operate.
It’s one of those things you learn when you first get a feel for politics: the things that count, that get stuck in people’s minds and affect real outcomes are not necessarily or even often the most important ones. They’re ones that resonate with basic, familiar or humorous parts of our common experience – like pyramids. I doubt very many people remember that Ben Carson also said that he believed that Satan encouraged Charles Darwin to write The Origin of Species, a claim that is at least as nuts as the pyramids comment and frankly, quite a bit more evil. But pyramids is different, even though it’s completely irrelevant to basically anything. Everybody knows about the pyramids. We know what they look like. We know pharaohs are buried in them. The very shape is elegantly simple and memorable. People wear pyramid hats sometimes to be funny. And most people know that they are basically solid stone. And you don’t need to be a genius to know that of all the places you might try to store grain, inside a rock would be one of the most challenging.
TPM Reader AS has a provocative, some might think it even offensive, look at Ben Carson’s striking level of ignorance about so many things. Though, I don’t agree with all of it, I found it quite insightful …
Good job on the Dr. Ben Carson / Egyptian pyramids nonsense. There’s another aspect: what his apparent lack of general knowledge says, pro or con, about his fitness to be President.
I happen to be the daughter of an archaeologist, and I 100% agree with your commenter who said it is so infuriating to see someone pontificate about the field in total ignorance, but I have a different point to make.
“General knowledge”–basic awareness of the mix of facts and empirical discoveries that undergird modern society– tends to correlate strongly not merely with one’s own level of formal education, but with that of the people in one’s formative circle–mainly, family–when growing up. Carson’s level of formal education is high: Yale undergrad, U. Mich M.D.
Jennifer Morgan, Global Director of the Climate Program at the World Resources Institute, will host a live chat in the Hive (sub req) next week. Jennifer has a long history of environmental activism, including stints at the Worldwide Fund for Nature and Third Generation Environmentalism. Her focus is on negotiating international climate agreements and the global response to the threat of climate change.
She’ll stop by at 12 PM Eastern on Thursday November 12th for a spirited discussion on all things related to climate change and the environment. Please drop your questions here at or before 12 PM on 11/12!