Dr. Ben Carson Announces He's Running For President

Dr. Ben Carson Joins 2016 Presidential Race

Uncle Ruckus is running for President. Not really but he might as well be. Dr. Ben Carson has jumped into the race for the Republican nomination. Do you hope he’ll get it?

Via NY Times reports:

Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who has never held elective office, said on Sunday that he would seek the 2016 Republican nomination for president, joining the party’s fast-growing field.

Mr. Carson, who appeared on the political scene just two years ago and gained attention among conservatives for a speech highly critical of President Obama, planned a formal announcement of his candidacy on Monday in his native Detroit. He began his rise from poverty there to the heights of medicine — a path that shaped his rejection of liberal social policies in favor of self-reliance.

On Sunday evening, Mr. Carson said in an interview with a Washington television station that he was entering the race. “I’m announcing my candidacy for president of the United States,” he told WJLA.

Ben Carson last month, when one poll of Republican voters showed him statistically tied for first place with Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.

He draws an aggressive contrast with Democrats over antipoverty issues, and in speeches has told of how his mother, a cleaning woman, struggled to stay off welfare because everyone she knew who took government aid never escaped it.

In an interview before his announcement, he said that “personal responsibility, hard work and compassion for our fellow human beings” were the keys of climbing out of poverty. Mr. Obama, by contrast, he said, “seems to believe more in a utopian view of cradle-to-grave care.”

Mr. Carson’s biography will feature prominently in his campaign. His mother, Sonya Carson, had only a third-grade education, but he went on to graduate from Yale and the University of Michigan Medical School, and at age 33 was named chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, becoming the youngest person, and the first black doctor, to hold the title.

He burst onto the political scene in 2013 with a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast that denounced the country’s “moral decay” and Mr. Obama’s health care law. The Wall Street Journal followed with an editorial, “Ben Carson for President.”

Mr. Carson must devise a coherent policy message and convince voters that he is fit for political leadership with no governing experience. He spent five hours at the conservative Heritage Foundation recently taking tutorials on domestic and foreign policy.

He has also undergone media training to round the edges off his incendiary language. In 2013, Mr. Carson was forced to withdraw as a commencement speaker at Johns Hopkins after linking same-sex marriage to pedophilia. He has pronounced the president’s health care law the worst thing to happen in American “since slavery.” And in March, he issued an apology after declaring that the experience of men in prison proved that homosexuality was a choice.

“I’ve come to recognize that when you use certain terms, people can no longer hear anything else you say,” Mr. Carson said in the interview before his announcement. “As you’ll notice in the last several weeks, I’ve been able to get my points across without inflammatory language.”

We’ll see how long it takes him to say something ignorant. We’ll give him about a day.