Why Ben Carson entered politics

Neurosurgeon resisted entering political ‘slime pool’

Neurosurgeon had resisted political ‘slime pool.’

In early 2013, Ben Carson was 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, includ- ing many high school students who were assigned the book.

That life story began to change dramatically Feb. 7, 2013, when Carson took on President Obama during a National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. While Obama sat 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.”

Carson, who was set to 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 edito- rial 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. 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 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, 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 in- credibly impressive to me,” Sousa said.

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.

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. Carson runs consistently in second place in the polls behind New York businessman Donald Trump.

Carson told USA TODAY’s Capital Download last week that 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.”