It is not exactly common for a celebrated conservative to warm up for a speech to Republicans by waxing eloquent about a 1960s Democrat. But then, not much about Dr. Benjamin Carson is common besides his sense.
If Carson’s name doesn’t ring a bell, get thee to YouTube. He’s the “prayer breakfast doctor,” the decorated neurosurgeon who extolled the proportionality of the tithe over a soak-the-rich approach to taxes — while an unamused Barack Obama looked on just two seats away — at the National Prayer Breakfast in February.
Ever since, Carson has been in high demand on political talk shows and the chicken-dinner circuit. The latter brought him to Buckhead on Thursday night to address the Fulton County GOP.
“What I really want to do is use the platform that I have to talk about things that make sense, and to try to encourage civil discourse instead of political correctness in our society,” he said in an interview beforehand.
“People need to be able to disagree and discuss things rather than just get into corners and lob hand grenades at each other. This is so infantile, and it’s not leading to anything productive in our nation.”
To illustrate the kind of presidential leadership he meant — “leadership that draws people together, that creates a vision” — he skipped right past perennial conservative favorite Ronald Reagan to Democrat John F. Kennedy.
“When the Russians got ahead of us in the space race,” Carson said, “he used his bully pulpit. He said, within 10 years we’re going to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely. It galvanized academia, industry and business, everybody, behind a goal. And that got rid of a lot of the sniping that was going on.”
One gets the sense Carson was not beating up his ideological opponents by brandishing one of their dead icons. Rather, the scientific focus of the moon shot and Kennedy’s “methodical” approach — Carson’s word — seemed to genuinely appeal to Carson the neurosurgeon.
“He had the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights movement, the Russians ahead of us, the economy was tanking, unemployment — and he had methodical solutions for everything,” Carson said. “Put his brother Bobby in charge of civil rights — great move. He faced the Russians down with a blockade, at the brink of World War III.
“He … even bucked his own party. They were saying, we need to raise more revenue. He said, no, just the opposite. We need to decrease tax [rates]. And it had an incredible effect on the economy.”
Ultimately, the self-described independent acknowledged he’d have to “choose one side or the other” if he were to run for elected office. Between “today’s Democratic Party and today’s Republican Party,” he said, he gravitates toward the GOP for its emphasis on self-reliance rather than “government reliance.”
Here again, though, Carson hearkened back to the early 1960s.
“That’s not where it always was,” he said. “When JFK was president, what did he say? Ask not what your government can do for you, or what the country can do for you. Now, can you imagine if he gave that speech at last year’s Democratic convention? They would have run him out of town.”
For now, Carson is a true independent — in that his wisdom would benefit whichever party chose to listen to him.
