Ben Carson, false idol

AMERICA is having a Ben Carson moment. In July half of all Republicans told pollsters they had no clear sense of Dr Carson, a 64-year-old retired brain surgeon. Now he has surged to the front of the field of Republican presidential hopefuls. A recent poll put him within a percentage point of Donald Trump, the raucous property magnate who dominated politics all summer.

Dr Carson is not raucous. Softly-spoken, even drowsy, he shares Mr Trump’s disdain for conventional politics and his impatience with the detail of policy. Like his rival he presents himself as a providential outsider, entering the arena to save a great nation in peril. But whereas Mr Trump specialises in finger-jabbing, red-faced theatrics, Dr Carson offers a surgeon’s lofty calm.

Both men’s campaigns are built around striking life stories. Mr Trump, born into wealth and obsessed with success, promises to turn ordinary folk into “winners”. Dr Carson was brought up by a black single mother in Detroit. Hot-headed as well as poor, he nearly killed a teenage rival before finding God and his medical calling. He has long been hailed in schools and inner-city churches as a role model for black youth. His memoirs, entitled “Gifted Hands” and recording such triumphs as the first successful separation of Siamese twins joined at the back of the head, are a staple of Christian homeschool curriculums.

Asked about his success in an interview aboard his campaign bus this week, Dr Carson talked of an “awakening”, as Americans start to “think for themselves”. His bus is decorated with the slogan “Heal, Inspire, Revive”, as well as the names of thousands of children in tiny letters, each representing a $50 donation (children’s names paid for the whole bus in three days). If such language carries echoes of earlier, religious Great Awakenings, that is no accident. Recalling his decision to run for the presidency, Dr Carson described a moment of prayer: “I said to God: ‘All the pundits say it is impossible’.” Nonetheless, if his Creator proved the pundits wrong and opened all doors in his path, then he would walk through them, he promised. Now, he said, those doors “appear to be flying open. So I am going to keep walking.”

Dr Carson has collected $20m in mostly small donations in the past three months. Aides boast of his 4m followers on Facebook—a group whose most impassioned members are devout white women over 40. As a black Republican he offers white conservatives something unique in the 2016 field: ferocious criticism of Barack Obama that cannot be called racist.

The doctor is not one for back-slapping bonhomie. Campaign staff arranged for his bus to stop at a well-loved barbecue restaurant in Lexington, North Carolina. Leaving his bus, Dr Carson was asked by a news agency reporter if he liked barbecue. “No,” replied the candidate, who as a Seventh-Day Adventist is a vegetarian. The mood was polite but not effusive as he greeted diners at their tables. It took the arrival of a family of openly ardent Christians to generate real warmth. Nelson Citta brought his wife and two young daughters to meet Dr Carson after driving past and seeing his parked campaign bus. “Excellent, excellent,” said Dr Carson, waggling his fists happily upon learning that the Citta girls are educated at home by their parents.

The world of Christian philanthropy is Dr Carson’s home turf. It is often an admirable place. He and his wife founded a scholarship programme for children from poor schools. He beamed as he toured a camp for sick and disabled children, built in North Carolina by a former NASCAR racing champion, Richard Petty. Dr Carson admired a theatre, bowling alley, car-racing museum and doughnut counter, each bearing a corporate sponsor’s logo. A proper role for government is to facilitate private-sector philanthropy, he enthused. Praising Mr Petty’s generosity, he added: “If we all took that attitude, we could take care of all our people.”

Back on his bus, Dr Carson extolled America’s traditions of voluntary assistance, praising pioneer settlements in which neighbours would bring in the crops of a farmer injured during harvest season, as “the expected thing to do”. He has a talent for using parables to tell conservatives that they can have something they already want—a radically smaller government—and that, with “smart people” in charge, there will be no trade-offs, and indeed benefits for the poor. Thus when he calls for a 15% flat tax on income—a proposal that would offer high-earners huge tax cuts—he presents it as a biblically inspired “tithe” that would not harm public finances, in part because he would impose a three- or four-year hiring ban across the federal government and across-the-board spending cuts. As his bus rumbled along, Dr Carson grumbled about the “myth” that he would abolish government safety nets. Not at all, he said. When private charity grows, public safety nets will simply become “considerably less relevant”.

Pious populism

Aides have dubbed Dr Carson’s bus the “Healer Hauler”. Alas, he brings little real healing to the country’s unending culture wars. His murmuring tone often delivers hard-edged claims: that America is living in a “Gestapo age” of government bullying and political correctness, that Mr Obama lies like a “psychopath”, or that abortion clinics cluster in black neighbourhoods to “control that population”. Dr Carson recently saw campaign donations surge after he said he would not advocate that a Muslim-American could be president, unless that Muslim declared loyalty to the constitution above Islamic law—a disavowal that he suggested would make such a Muslim a heretic. When criticism followed, he declared that “dangerous forces” threaten the country.

Dr Carson, an accomplished man, has spent years in a cocoon of adulation. Now he is having his moment on a larger, more harshly lit stage. His fans are rallying round: “Our family is praying for you constantly,” a young mother told him on a Carolina roadside. But his appeal is too narrow to win him the nomination. His moment will peak, then pass.