Can We Stop Pretending That Ben Carson Is Running for President?

As he quietly suspends his campaign to hawk books, one has to wonder: Is this guy serious?


BY: JASON JOHNSON

There was a time when running for president was actually a money-losing venture.

In fact, over the last 30 or so years, most presidential candidates (including some who actually won) ended up with tremendous debts after the campaign. Being in the red during and after a campaign was so common that paying off a former opponent’s campaign debt was seen as a benevolent form of political stunting. (Thanks, Obama!) But all of that has changed since Citizens United in 2010. Thanks to super PACs and enforcement mechanisms flimsier than tissue paper, running for president can now become a ridiculous money grab if you’re willing to put in the time.

So can we please start to differentiate between those people running for president and those out to get a quick buck and some inflated speaking fees? And we can start with one of the most egregious perpetrators of this new political fraud: Ben Carson.

Very quietly, about two weeks ago, Carson actually suspended his campaign for president. I know that most people probably didn’t notice because they were reeling from a week of Carson lecturing on how to survive a volcano, high-fiving the Confederate flag and dropping dimes on wealthy Popeye’s chicken cashiers, but this did actually occur. There is some nuance to this; essentially, Carson just dropped a new book, A More Perfect Union: What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties, and will go on tour to promote it. To avoid violating campaign-finance rules, Carson, ABC initially reported, was suspending his campaign activities until the next televised debate on CNBC Oct. 28.

Whether this amounts to his stopping his campaign entirely (unlikely) or scaling back campaign activities to promote a book (much more likely), it speaks to the same problem: How seriously can you take a candidate for president of the United States who takes time out of a campaign to hock books? How could any job, or responsibility, outside of your family and health be important enough for you to scale back your efforts to become leader of the free world? Either you don’t know what this job really entails or you’re not serious about the job, and my guess is the latter.

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