(Photo: AP/John Locher)
A remarkable thing happened to a leading Republican presidential candidate in the pages of the The New York Times on Tuesday: People described as top advisers to Ben Carson, the celebrated neurosurgeon, told reporter Trip Gabriel that when it comes to foreign policy, Carson just doesn't get it. And worse than that, he doesn't seem to be able to grasp the nuances of situations as described to him.
From the Times:
"Nobody has been able to sit down with him and get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East," Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security said in an interview.
(Leave aside, for the moment, what it says about Carson's judgment that one of his top foreign policy advisers was convicted-and later pardoned-of lying to Congress in the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra scandal.)
Adding insult injury was commentator Armstrong Williams, described as one of Carson's closest friends, who tried to explain to Gabriel why Carson struggled, in a recent Fox News Sunday interview, to name which countries he would form an alliance with to counter ISIS. "He's been briefed on it so many times," Williams said. "I guess he just froze."
Freezing may have been the lesson Carson learned after he made a false assertion during the last debate that Chinese forces are fighting alongside Russia in Syria.
(Um, they are not.) Better to freeze than say the wrong thing.
For Carson's purposes, it's hard to tell. According to the Times, the Carson campaign-on its Facebook page, where its organizing strength lies-has doubled down on the candidate's placement of the Chinese military in the Syrian conflict, promoting video that points to China-made war machines in use there, if not actual Chinese soldiers.
To the people whom Carson is organizing for the Iowa caucuses, and in other states where right-wing evangelical Christians form his base, that kind of obfuscation may do just fine. This is a population among which conspiracy theories of all kinds-especially those that point fingers at a non-Christian nation, such as China-traffic well.
But where Carson is at greater risk amid his evangelical base is in the comments he recently made about the involvement of the government in the 2005 case of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman determined to be in a "persistent vegetative state" who was kept on life support over the objection of her husband (her legal guardian), while the courts haggled over her parents' and brother's attempt to prevent the removal of her feeding tube. Then-Governor Jeb Bush, who is also running for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, tried to intervene on behalf of Schiavo's parents. When that effort failed, Congress got involved, passing a bill signed by President George W. Bush that was later struck down by the courts.
Carson's strength among his evangelical base is due to many factors, though none stronger than his positioning as a so-called "pro-life" candidate.
Indeed, he is stalwart in his opposition to abortion.
But today, the anti-choice movement demands more that that: Its leaders require candidates who seek their approval to adopt the position taken by the Roman Catholic Church, which also forbids the removal of nutrition and hydration from even brain-dead people.
While campaigning in Florida on Saturday, Carson was asked by a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times if Congress should have involved itself, as it did, in the Schiavo case, when Republicans led by then-Senator Rick Santorum-a distant rival of Carson's in the GOP presidential contest-sought to intervene to prevent the removal of Schiavo's nutrition tube. "I don't think it needed to get to that level," Carson said. "I think it was much ado about nothing."
To his credit, Carson spoke to the Florida paper with his physician's hat on, showing compassion for the dying. "[Y]ou have to recognize that people that are in that condition do have a series of medical problems that occur that will take them out," he told Adam C. Smith, the paper's political editor. "Your job [as a doctor] is to keep them comfortable throughout the process and not to treat everything that comes up."
Alarm bells rang. The right-wing LifeNews.com sent out an email blast with Carson's "much ado" remarks in the headline. The article to which it linked quoted one Tom Shakely, executive director of the Life and Hope Network, saying, "Dr. Carson's remarks raise serious questions about the moral character of his allegedly pro-life candidacy."
Santorum, who won the Iowa Caucuses in 2012, but whose campaign for the 2016 nomination has floundered, pounced-at the invitation of LifeNews, which sought his response to the Carson remarks. "All life deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. That was the message that persuaded every member of the Senate to agree to a federal court review before Terri was starved to death," Santorum said.
Other right-leaning sites, including the Christian Post, LiveAction News, and Catholicism.org picked up the story.
Which brings us back to The New York Times story about Carson's foreign-policy problem, and his advisers' willingness to all but call their candidate a dufus on the topic.
What's going on here? An attempt to deflect the national media's attention from Carson's riled base? A way for Carson aides to distance themselves from a campaign they see as doomed after the candidate gave the WrongAnswer™ on end-of-life issues?
I don't pretend to know the answer to those questions. What I do know, though, is that Ben Carson's campaign is in a heap of trouble.
