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Ben Carson: Obama was ‘raised white’

'I’ve had a chance to see what real racism is,' he says in an exclusive interview for POLITICO's 'Off Message' podcast.

By Glenn Thrush

Ben Carson is the only person in the 2016 presidential field who is vying to become the country’s second African-American president.

If truth be told, however, he’s not entirely sure he wouldn’t actually be the first.

Carson, speaking during a half-hour sit-down with POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast as he waited for the results of Saturday’s South Carolina primary (he finished sixth out of six), laid out his views on racism – and his belief that his experience as poor black kid in 1960s Detroit represents the real experience of his people in way that Barack Obama could never understand.

“He’s an ‘African’ American. He was, you know, raised white,” said the world-renowned neurosurgeon, whose single mother worked three jobs – and occasionally relied on government aid – to elevate Carson and his older brother from the grinding poverty of ghetto life.

“I mean, like most Americans, I was proud that we broke the color barrier when he was elected, but … he didn’t grow up like I grew up … Many of his formative years were spent in Indonesia. So, for him to, you know, claim that, you know, he identifies with the experience of black Americans, I think, is a bit of a stretch.”

Carson also suggested that what passes for racism now – in the age of Ferguson and Freddie Gray – isn’t comparable to the overt discrimination he encountered a half-century ago as a young man.

“Remember now, I’ve been around for 64 years, you know,” he added. “I’ve had a chance to see what real racism is.”

Carson has largely, if not entirely, downplayed the role of race in his brief rise. But as he fades (and many Republicans are calling for him to drop out for the sake of stopping Donald Trump if he flops, as expected, tonight in Nevada), he’s begun to expound more on his views on the role of race in the country. Touring through South Carolina, the sword-tip of the segregation movement and one of the most racially polarized states in the country, put him in a reflective mood – and he made a point of campaigning in black neighborhoods and African-American college campuses last week.

When I pressed Carson on whether he’d experienced any racism in today’s Republican Party, though, he flatly denied it – and said the real issue was progressives who couldn’t accept the existence of a truly conservative black man. “They assume because you’re black, you have to think a certain way,” he said. “And if you don’t think that way, you’re ‘Uncle Tom,’ you’re worthy of every horrible epithet they can come up with; whereas, if I weren’t black, then I would just be a Republican.”

Yet, for a nanosecond, he admitted that he’s not exactly on the lookout for racists lurking in a party that is, by most estimates, about 90 percent white – with blacks like Carson making up just two percent of the total. “I don’t find any particular problem being an African American in the Republican Party,” he said.

But he quickly added: “Maybe I’m just very nonobservant. You know, I don’t go around looking for things, and you have to understand that whatever you think is going on is probably what you’re going to see. So, if somebody told you that you’re about to meet somebody and they’re really a mass murderer and they’re just looking for an opportunity to kill you, everything they say, you’re going to say, 'Uh‑huh, I see what he’s trying to do.' Whereas, if they told you the very same person really loves everybody and is looking for a way to enhance them and the very same thing,you say, ‘Oh, wow, yeah, that’s really good.’”

At that point, I admitted to being a little befuddled. I’ve personally witnessed racist comments at events staged for candidates in both parties – the most recent being at a Trump rally in Lowell, Massachusetts earlier this year when I witnessed two young men calling a pro-immigrant protester a “nigger.” Back in 2008, I heard a Clinton supporter in Toledo, Ohio use the same epithet to describe then-Sen. Obama.

Carson was steadfast in defending his party (this is a candidate who has said a Muslim shouldn’t run for president unless he or she renounces sharia law) and when I asked him if Trump was a racist, he replied, “I have not witnessed anything that would make me say that about him.”

But when I followed up with a question about Trump’s general tone on racial issues, he shook his head: “No, it’s not the tone that I would use. Absolutely not.”

One of the great ironies of 2016 is that Carson, a free-market conservative who rose by railing against big-government Obamacare, views race through the larger prism of class – putting him (very) roughly more on the Bernie Sanders side of the race-vs.-class argument.

When I ask him if racism played a role in the contaminated water crisis in Flint, Michigan, he says, “Let me put it this way: If that were going on in an affluent black community, it would have not gone on,” adding: “A lot of things that people classify as racism is classism, and, believe me, there's a lot of classism in our society, and if people of a certain race happen to fall into a lower class, then they get the brunt of it.”

There was a time, at the end of 2015, when Carson seemed poised to challenge Trump – but a series of setbacks, languid debate performances and the near-collapse of his campaign from mismanagement scuttled the effort. At the Embassy Suites here on election night, several of his staff and volunteers could be heard musing about what they planned to do when – not if – he dropped out. Still, Carson has a substantial war-chest and a still-functional online fundraising operation and professed to be in for the long haul, without a lot of force behind the statement.

“Well, I don't have any immediate plans of cessation,” he says.

Outside observers have suggested Carson is soldiering on through Nevada to thumb his nose at Ted Cruz, whose campaign floated the rumor that he was about to drop out of the race during the Iowa caucuses. Cruz has repeatedly apologized – and blamed his staff’s actions, dubiously, on a CNN report – and he tried his luck again in a private meeting here; Carson “wasn’t impressed,” a staffer later told me. And the candidate himself cast doubt on the Texas senator’s contrition tour.

“As a Christian, I do accept his apology, but, you know, God forgives us when we sin, but he doesn’t remove the consequences,” he says – and sure enough, a couple of days later, Cruz sacked a top aide for playing a dirty trick on Marco Rubio.

The central theme of Carson’s inspiring personal story is his triumph over a self-destructive, volcanic temper though the salvation of his Christian faith. This makes him an unusual candidate and an unusual person – with a clerical, un-Trump-like tendency towards self-reflection and admitting his own shortcomings (he says he’s stopped providing so much “lip service” – controversial comments – to reporters like me who obscure his compassionate conservative message). In person, he projects an unnerving calm, and when you sit with him a while you can see the mechanism of this reflexive self-soothing: Ask a tough or annoying question and he closes his eyelids – full stop – and opens them slowly, with a Gautama smile, rolling out an answer with deliberation and care.

“As a pediatric neurosurgeon, when you’re deep in somebody's brain and a blood vessel pops, if you panic, the patient is dead,” he explains. “You have to be very calm. You have to keep everybody else very calm, and you will generally find that neurosurgeons are calm people.”

C’mon, Dr. Carson, I want to know, don’t you ever get angry?

“I generally don’t, you know,” he replies. “If I’m, you know, working with a very obnoxious person, you know, I just say, ‘That used to be a cute little baby. I wonder what happened to them.’”