Ben Carson Is Not Running For President In Any Meaningful Sense

Some candidates in Republican presidential primaries, even really bad ones, are actually running for president. Other candidates are running grifts. I agree it’s pretty clear that Ben Carson is squarely in the grift category:

Carson is doing a lot of things that seem puzzling for a presidential campaign, but quite logical for a brand-building exercise. He is taking weeks off the campaign trail to go on a book tour. His campaign itself is structured much more like a scamming venture than a political one. An astronomical 69 percent of his fund-raising totals are spent on more fund-raising. (Bernie Sanders, by contrast, spends just 4 percent of his intake on fund-raising.) In addition to direct mail, Carson seems to have undertaken a massive phone-spamming operation. Spending most of your money to raise more money is not a good way to get elected president, but it is a good way to build a massive list of supporters that can later be monetized. Perhaps it is a giveaway that the official title for Armstrong Williams, the figure running the Carson “campaign,” is “business manager,” as opposed to “campaign manager.” It does suggests that Carson is engaged in a for-profit venture.

Carson’s combination of flamboyantly reactionary statements and subdued (to the point of appearing medicated) persona lend him an aura of trust and honesty. Carson’s supporters see him as a brave truth-teller; his critics think he’s genuinely nuts. Even those concerned with his methods grant him the presumption of innocence — right-wing commentator Erick Erickson, running down Carson’s astronomical fund-raising costs, frets, “I suspect there are some who see Carson as a cash cow.” But it is a fallacy to imagine that a kook cannot also be a scammer. There is a long tradition of cult leaders, televangelists, and other snake-oil salesmen who were both.

We can argue about whether an actual politician will be the Republican nominee. But one thing I am very confident of is that Ben Carson has no chance of being the nominee. The fact that he spends 70% of his fundraising to raise more money — which makes sense if you’re running a long con with an extensive list of Glengarry leads but not if you’re actually trying to win primaries — is dispositive. Even if, like Gingrich, he starts off running a grift and then decides to actually quasi-contest the nomination at the last minute, he’s not going to have the resources or organization to compete with Rubio or Trump. His support will be as evanescent as that of the tomato can poll leaders in 2008.