In early 2013, Ben Carson was largely known as a best-selling author, a celebrated pediatric neurosurgeon and subject of a television movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr.
It was a compelling narrative: a boy brought up in poverty on the southwest side of Detroit by a single mother; a lousy student with a bad temper who turned it around to graduate from Yale, get a medical degree from the University of Michigan and become the youngest doctor, at the age of 33, to head a surgical division at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Gifted Hands, the book and movie about his transformation from young punk to neurosurgeon, sold 614,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, a business that tracks print book sales, and introduced him to a large swath of Americans, including many high school students who were assigned the book in classes.
But that life story began to change dramatically on Feb. 7, 2013, when Carson took onPresident Obama during a National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. While Obama sat just a few feet away, Carson gently, but forcefully, criticized the country’s tax and health care policies.
“We need good health care for everybody. It’s the most important thing that a person can have,” he said. “But we’ve got to figure out efficient ways to do it. We spend a lot of money on health care — twice as much per capita as anybody else in the world — and yet, we’re not very efficient.”
A conservative rock star
Carson, who was set to retire a month later and return to his home in West Palm Beach, Fla., with his wife, Candy, became a conservative rock star.
His speech got more than 2 million views on YouTube in the weeks after the breakfast.The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial headlined “Ben Carson for President,” and proclaimed: “The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon may not be politically correct, but he’s closer to correct than we’ve heard in years.”
Sales of his book, America the Beautiful, which was published in 2012, spiked and the political tome jumped to the top of The New York Times best-seller list.
But Carson was still wary of running for office, telling conservative media host Glenn Beck in March 2013, “It is not my intention to run for office, because I would be a terrible candidate. There is no way I would get into that slime pool with all the special interest groups.”
Supporters, though, began to organize a concerted effort to get the doctor to officially switch from medicine to politics.
“I suppose it was the National Prayer Breakfast speech that first attracted me,” said John Philip Sousa IV, the great grandson of the famous composer and founder of the “Run Ben Run” super PAC in 2013 that has since transformed into “Win Ben Win!”
“His strength and his courage and what he had to say, and the forum he elected to use, was incredibly impressive to me,” Sousa said.
Campaign materializes after reluctance
When Carson told the media he wasn’t particularly interested in running for president but might change his mind if people clamored for his candidacy, Sousa began circulating petitions.
“Every week, I sent him a personal note with about 5,000 to 6,000 signatures that we had gathered,” he said.
Carson was still reluctant in mid-summer of 2014, as he started the book tour for One Nation, which also leapt to the top of the best-seller list.
He told CNN in June 2014 that a run for president, “Is certainly not what I desire to do. You have to be a little bit nutty to want to do a position like that. But I do recognize that sometimes we’re placed in a positions that are not of our choosing, so I’m keeping my eyes and ears open.”
Carson was sending signals that a campaign might materialize. His book tour took him to Iowa in August, and he said he was waiting for the results of the 2014 midterm elections to see how that might affect the leadership in the Senate.
The super PAC responded by running radio ads in Louisiana and North Carolina with the goal of defeating Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu and Kay Hagan. Both lost their re-election bids, and Republicans regained a majority in the Senate.
“We invested a lot of money in those races,” Sousa said. “We were solely focused on what’s going to cause this guy to run.”
‘Maybe we were on to something’
Along the way, they got some encouragement from Carson himself, who told an interviewer that he knew of the group that had mailed out 75,000 mailers to conservative voters in the fall of 2013 and wouldn’t interfere or try to stop them.
“That gave us a hint that maybe we were on to something,” said Sousa, who has only met Carson once but has field organizations operating in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and a stable of 35,000 volunteers.
Those efforts certainly had an impact on Carson, said his communications director, Doug Watts.
“They did a very good job of organizing in several states and getting public supporters out. They’re impossible to miss at a lot of these public events, with their signs and T-shirts,” he said. “Even though we have zero to do with them, he recognizes that they’ve been exceptionally helpful in the launching of our campaign and the sustained level of our campaign.”
$14 million in fundraising erases doubt
By December 2014, the super PAC had raised $14 million, and by the following March, Carson had formed a presidential exploratory committee, officially announcing his candidacy May 3 in Detroit.
And now, more than five months after entering the race, Carson is running consistently in second place in the polls behind New York businessman Donald Trump.
It’s part of a trend of Republicans abandoning the more polished politicians in the race for outsiders. The Pew Research Center found that sentiment in a recent poll that showed 65% of the Republicans surveyed said it’s more important for a candidate to have new ideas than political experience and a proven record.
A few stumbles but no apologies
The transformation of Carson from doctor to candidate has hit a few stumbles. He’s been widely criticized for recent comments about Muslims and guns and flubbed an answer on what he’d do as president when a hurricane hits. “I don’t know,” he said.
But Carson is unapologetic, saying his remarks have been taken out of context, and besides, he doesn’t believe in being politically correct.
“He does dig his heels in when he thinks he’s being managed or cajoled to give the politically correct, politically balanced answer, sometimes to a fault,” Watts said. “It’s a long-term adjustment for him. We have assiduously avoided managing or handling him because it’s part of his appeal.”
As for Carson, he told USA Today’s Capital Download newsmaker series last week, that at first, he thought all the fuss about a possible presidential campaign “was kind of ridiculous.”
“But it didn’t go away. It just kept building. And that’s when I started thinking, should I be listening to these people?” he said. “The pundits said it was impossible. But if you open the door, I’ll walk through it.”
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