Campaign meltdown

Inside the Carson campaign meltdown

Behind the candidate with an inspirational life story is a campaign riven by disputes and backbiting.

By Kyle Cheney

On Thanksgiving night, Ben Carson sat in a chartered plane on a Baltimore airport tarmac surrounded by his wife and campaign advisers. The destination: Jordan.

A secret mission to the Middle East, his team hoped, would help reestablish the retired neurosurgeon’s credibility amid searing questions about his shaky grasp of foreign policy. The trip would be kept under wraps until Carson appeared on the Sunday news shows from the location — partly a security measure, partly a political play.

But as Carson and his team awaited takeoff, they were blindsided when The New York Times posted a story outlining the entire plan. Rattled staffers worried the story could tip militants to Carson's location. Yet they instinctively knew where the story came from: Armstrong Williams.

Williams, a longtime conservative media force who calls himself Carson's "business manager," has no formal role in the campaign. But his outsized influence on its inner workings proved to be a highly divisive issue within the campaign, one that ultimately led to the departures of much of Carson’s senior staff.

To those who left the campaign, the tarmac episode was emblematic of a campaign in freefall, a bitterly divided operation trapped in a cycle of dysfunction that helped drag Carson from the top of the polls in late October to the middle of the pack by January.

On one side was Williams, a Carson friend for decades who had been the candidate's closest adviser since he launched his presidential bid last May. On the other was spokesman Doug Watts and veteran GOP operative Barry Bennett, the campaign manager who routinely found himself at odds with Williams over messaging and strategy — and often in an embarrassingly public way.

Bennett, Watts and several other senior staffers ultimately left the campaign on New Year's Eve, citing sharp differences with Williams. Since then, Bennett has predicted Donald Trump will win the GOP nomination.

In a wide-ranging interview Wednesday after a talk at Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service, Bennett and Watts said they were disillusioned with Carson, the politician, and his refusal to hold Williams accountable in any way for the campaign’s predicament — including the pivotal moment they point to as the beginning of the end.

In their eyes, the Carson campaign was on a trajectory for victory in Iowa until Nov. 17, the day another New York Times story stunned the campaign: an interview with Duane Clarridge, an octogenarian former CIA operative whom Williams described as one of Carson's top foreign policy advisers.

The interview, arranged by Williams, was meant to shore up faith in Carson's foreign policy credentials in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris and questions about his readiness to be commander in chief. Instead, the story delivered a bombshell from his own adviser's mouth: Carson had been struggling to learn the basics of world affairs.

Within days, fundraising all but stopped.

"Financial problems for the campaign started on the 20th of November when we hit the cliff," Watts said.

The campaign, which had expected to collect $40 million in the final three months of the year, ended the quarter collecting $23 million — an amount that was largely sapped by expenses. A formidable list-building effort that Bennett said was on track to amass 4 million small donors plateaued at 3 million. Carson's Facebook following, which had surged over the year to surpass 5 million, suddenly slowed as well.

"I’ve got this dashboard on my computer where I can see up to the minute how the money’s flowing, and it just stopped, full brake," Bennett said, though he added the campaign had plenty of money on Jan. 1 to sustain operations through the early-state primaries and caucuses in February.

Bennett noted that Carson had been getting a crash course in foreign affairs, just not from Clarridge.

"We were having lunch with Henry Kissinger, he was talking to Bud McFarlane. Rupert Murdoch was introducing him to all his foreign policy friends," Bennett said. "He was learning a lot."

Williams acknowledged the error of connecting the reporter with Clarridge without Bennett or Watts' knowledge.

"That was bad judgment on my part. There’s no question about that," he said in an interview.

Carson campaign spokesman Larry Ross, who succeeded Watts earlier this month, said the campaign was not interested in responding to — or even hearing — specific details offered and assertions made by Williams and former top campaign officials. But he issued a statement emphasizing that Williams is not an official staffer.

"Armstrong Williams remains a close, longtime friend of Dr. Carson, who cares deeply about him and his success in this election; but he does not have an official role in the campaign, nor does he speak for Dr. Carson or his team," Ross said. "Dr. Carson's campaign is moving forward in a positive direction and not looking backwards. He is encouraged by the increased momentum and energetic, overflow crowds in Iowa and everywhere he goes. They are enthusiastically responding to his values-driven message, forward-leaning policies and common-sense leadership."

The Clarridge debacle was the most flagrant of many spats that defined the relationship between Williams and the staffers running the Carson campaign. There was a dispute over an unexpected $22,000 tab from Williams' private security consultant, who often ferried Carson around Washington and staffed him during his trips to the capital. Williams’ decision to hire a well-known music producer, Khao Cates, to produce an official campaign song — after the campaign had already paid hip-hop producer Alexi von Guggenberg to do the same — only increased tension. Another interview gone wrong — again arranged by Williams — about Carson's faith and his unorthodox views of heaven and hell became opposition fodder in evangelical-rich Iowa.

Williams said he bears no bitterness toward Bennett and Watts but regrets that "they are airing the laundry, which is sad."

"This is part of their manipulation,” he said. “They’re spinning it to try and make me look like the bad guy and the scapegoat.”

One thing the parties can agree on: Nothing was the same after the Jordan trip.

Watts referred to the Thanksgiving tarmac episode as the night he "checked out of the campaign."

When the story appeared, Carson — who gave the Times an interview for the story — told his campaign leaders that it wasn't supposed to have run for a few more days. Bennett and Watts were still incensed he'd hidden the interview from them.

"When I realized that Ben was conscious of the error, was conscious of the secreting of this information and in this case, it involved the safety of Ben, his wife, Barry, and this other young woman who was traveling with him, I was appalled," Watts said. "And Ben was complicit. So for me, there weren’t any more questions to ask after that."

Williams contends Bennett and Watts were actually aware that Carson had done the pre-Jordan trip interview. They just didn’t realize the story would publish before the plane took off.

"Barry sent me the most explosive and threatening email you can imagine," Williams said. "This is where Barry and Doug and I rarely spoke again."

Williams said the dispute, like many others with the campaign, was rooted in a fundamental disagreement about how to handle media relations. Williams said the campaign seemed content to only let Carson appear in conservative-leaning news outlets and on Fox News, while he felt it was important for the candidate to give interviews to mainstream media outlets that could reach a broader audience.

"I like to make sure that if Dr. Carson is going to Jordan that major media in New York and Europe pick up on the story," he said.

As the campaign's conflicts flared publicly, Carson repeatedly said Williams doesn’t speak for him or the campaign. And Williams himself would often emphasize that he has no official role on Carson's campaign.

"Which is complete and utter bullsh--," Bennett said.

Asked why Carson would often downplay his relationship with Williams, Bennett added, "I don’t know. I think he’s just living in an alternative universe."

Bennett and Watts say Carson’s refusal to rein in Williams undercut the entire premise of Carson's campaign: accountability. Another premise, they agreed, was Carson's self-proclaimed ability to build a world-class team. The campaign, they said, seemed to be a living refutation of that idea.

"It defies imagination that Ben would see, recognize, acknowledge these issues, these hurdles, these problems, these potholes and allow them to continue. The only thing that I’ve been able to come up with is that Armstrong was his entrée to public affairs in Washington, and he’s become his comfort food, his mac ‘n cheese," Watts said.

Bennett said he reached his boiling point with Williams on Dec. 23. On a day marked for filming policy videos at Carson's home, Williams arranged interviews between Carson and several reporters with a clear purpose: to signal a coming campaign shakeup and last-ditch attempt to rebound.

"I mean, if you wanted me to quit, all you had to do was just call me and say, 'Hey, why don’t you go do something else?'" Bennett said. "I would’ve just kind of slowly disappeared."

Instead, those stories took an awkward turn when Carson walked back his call for a shake-up, releasing a statement that had been approved by Watts expressing full confidence in his campaign leadership.

By then, Bennett had already decided he was leaving the campaign, and on New Year's Eve, after a morning call to inform Carson he'd once again topped the field in fundraising, Bennett resigned, followed shortly by Watts and several other senior campaign officials.

Bennett says the smartest move would be for Carson to drop out immediately and endorse Donald Trump, helping him clinch victory in Iowa and carry momentum through the rest of the primaries.

"I don’t think he’ll do that," Bennett added. "I think he’ll wait too long."

Williams attributes the suggestion, and Bennett’s prediction of a Trump nomination, to ulterior motives.

"What some of us have concluded — and we could be wrong — is that either Barry is being paid by the Trump campaign, or he’s trying to get a job with the Trump campaign," he said. (Bennett insists he has no intention to work for another presidential candidate this cycle.)

Asked whether he deserves a share of the blame for the campaign's decline in the polls, Williams said he accepts a share of credit for building the campaign up, as well as blame for its crash.

"In life, as in campaigns, as in business ... even the president of the United States, you take credit when everything is good and you take credit when everything is bad. The two are inseparable," he said.

"The season changed" after terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Williams observed.

"Who do you blame for that? They could blame me, I could blame them. I’m not going to do that. It’s just like a force of nature. Something came along that none of us could foresee."