Carson’s media attack won’t work

By Dan K. THOMASSON

Tribune News Service

WASHINGTON

Ben Carson doesn’t get it.

When you’re the front runner for a presidential nomination, nothing in this era of uber communication is off limits, especially things you have written and said in the past. The slightest change will be noted, and not always to your advantage.

If you want to lead the band, you had better learn to deal with it in a hurry. Picking a fight with the media is not the best policy despite the low rating its members receive. Relentless is the word you should understand. It used to be barrels of ink but now it is a fierce electronic jungle of scrutiny.

The unflappable Dr. Carson has shown a side that should worry some who find him an attractive alternative to Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican field for the nomination. Behind that facade of soft-spoken reasonableness may lurk something far more menacing – a deep resentment that once provoked what he admits was a youthful tendency to violence – the instincts he says he has long left behind him.

There is something else here. It’s the “pig in the poke” aspects of Carson more so than Trump, who is far more “what you see is what you get” than the good doctor. There is a familiarity about the real estate mogul and reality show bamboozler that isn’t there with Carson. Trump isn’t hard to figure out. Vote for him at your own peril.

Carson did manage to leave his Detroit ghetto and become a leading neurosurgeon, admittedly no small accomplishment. But beyond that there is a lack of transparency. So far we have only him to define his real strengths and weaknesses. The press has only his own memoir to understand him.

Prying open cracks

So when he seems to be straying from the script of an earlier day, there is a crack, albeit a small one, that is open for exploitation by journalists who are always curious and determined to pry cracks open, as they should be. It simply is the nature of the job. Everyone pads his or her resume. A suggestion that one might want to apply to the U.S. Military Academy becomes a solid offer for “a full scholarship to West Point.” Carson’s lack of understanding how that process works catches him in one of those “stretching the truth” incidents most of us have engaged in.

That’s not so bad, but we aren’t running for president.

Most disturbing, it seems to me, is his counter attack that the press is delving into irrelevant aspects of his life, that it is more interested in gotcha questions than pursuing the important issues. While there is some truth to that, it is part of the vetting process necessary for the nation’s most important position. For his part, of course, a good offense is the best defense. Disingenuousness on the other hand is not a great quality for someone who wants to occupy the oval office although it admittedly isn’t unusual.

Qualifications

What are Carson’s qualifications other than spouting solutions to social issues that appeal to those in the GOP base but in reality have little or no chance of adoption in modern society? What does he know about global economic problems or foreign policy or military needs or a hundred other problems every president must deal with in a given day? To have risen to his stature in one of the more difficult disciplines in medicine, he must have had little time to prepare for the necessities of such an arduous task as the presidency.

If Carson hangs on to the GOP lead, he can expect an even more critical examination not unlike one he would give a patient before operating. It’s absolutely necessary.

Dan Thomasson is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service and a former vice president of Scripps Howard Newspapers. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC