Why Dr. Ben Carson Is the Latest GOP Political Unicorn (Picture)

  s the presidential field edges toward the 2016 starting gate, partisans of both parties may be able to agree that one contender stands apart from the rest. That would be the 63-year-old neurosurgeon Ben Carson, the only African-American in the race and the only candidate with a Horatio Alger story that can accurately be described as inspirational. Some voters have already begun to notice. Carson came in second to Ted Cruz in two 2014 conservative beauty contests, the Republican Leadership Council and Value Voters straw polls. He has outperformed Jeb Bush and Chris Christie in this year’s early polling of Iowa Republicans. Carson’s political-action committee raised more cash (some $12 million) in the early going than Ready for Hillary, and his best-selling political manifesto of last year, One Nation, outsold her Hard Choices by roughly a third. (In literary quality, it’s a draw: They are equally effective as sleep aids.) In a December Gallup poll measuring “the most admired men in America,” Carson was bested only by Barack Obama, Pope Francis, Bill Clinton, Billy Graham, and George W. Bush; in a tie for sixth, he was on a par with Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Bill O’Reilly. No other presidential aspirant in either party made the top tier. 

Carson’s backstory sounds like a movie, and indeed it has already been told in a TNT-network film adaptation of his 1990 memoir, Gifted Hands, with Cuba Gooding Jr. in the starring role. Carson was born in poverty to an illiterate single mother who was one of 24 children and whose own marriage, at age 13, was to a bigamist who deserted her and her two sons for his alternative family. With only a third-grade education, Sonya Carson had to work multiple menial jobs in hardscrabble Detroit to stay afloat. Her zeal to instill higher aspirations in her son propelled him past seemingly insurmountable racial, social, economic, and educational barriers to Yale and the University of Michigan Medical School. In 1987, he pulled off a medical miracle byleading a team of surgeons that for the first time separated Siamese twins joined at the head. At 33, he became the youngest person ever to head a department, pediatric neurosurgery, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He retired in 2013 to turn his full attention to politics.

A devout Seventh Day Adventist and, in partnership with his wife, a generous philanthropist, Carson seems guilty of only a single sin: vanity. His books tend toward self-deification, and he is the star of a cheesy infomercial, “A Breath of Fresh Air,” that’s blanketed the stations owned by the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group. As soon as prominent conservatives started fawning over Carson, he became besotted by the idea that he could pull off the electoral miracle of becoming president of the United States. This will not be happening. There has not been a political novice elected president since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. Next to commanding the European theater in the battle against Hitler, even running a groundbreaking operating theater is small-bore. But Carson is undeterred. MORE HERE