Ungodly

Ben Carson's 'ungodly' campaign

The neurosurgeon briefly eclipsed Donald Trump in polls but was undone by self-destructive impulses and an unwieldy team of advisers.

By Kyle Cheney

The architects of Ben Carson's presidential campaign turned out to be its demolitionists, too.

The retired neurosurgeon exploded onto the political stage last fall with a hopeful conservative message and a promise to restore honor to the White House as only an outsider could. He exited the race Wednesday after barely registering in 15 primary contests and presiding over a hollowed-out, underfunded campaign. But Carson's fate was sealed months earlier by his failure to constrain the self-destructive impulses of an unwieldy and free-spending team.

The premise of Carson's candidacy, as he often described it, was his ability to build teams to tackle complex issues, like he did for 30 years in a Johns Hopkins operating room. If he could coordinate dozens of experts to execute life-saving surgeries, he could do the same in the Situation Room or for the economy, he posited. His top aides were convinced they could model their effort on President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, a gold standard for insurgent candidates.

Yet time after time, his own campaign team seemed to undercut the premise — and Carson himself never seemed sure how to corral competing personalities.

Throughout 2015, Carson's campaign was exposed as a jumble of equally influential aides who agreed only on their distrust of one another. There was Terry Giles, who helped launch the campaign in the spring but departed acrimoniously in June. His departure gave way to Barry Bennett and communications director Doug Watts, veteran political operatives who resigned on New Year's Eve. There was Dean Parker, the national finance chairman whose spending decisions led to his resignation in January. The campaign finally seemed to stabilize that month under Robert Dees, the controversial ex-general who took the reins along with senior strategist Ed Brookover after Bennett and Watts resigned.

All of them, though, played second fiddle to Armstrong Williams, the conservative media maven whose voice seemed to ring a little louder in Carson's ears than the others — and whose unilateral decision-making aided Carson's unlikely rise but also led to devastating strategic blunders that contributed to the campaign's demise. Williams' disproportionate influence led to battles with other campaign leaders over press strategy, spending priorities, and policy.

They even clashed over the manner of Carson's announcement for president, what many in Carson's orbit now say should have been the first sign of the internal strife that helped sink the campaign.

Undetected symptoms

The day before the scheduled announcement on May 4, Bennett and Watts said in a joint interview, the campaign was in Detroit rehearsing. Reporters had been summoned to the city, Carson's childhood home, for an elaborate and expensive kickoff. But the night before the launch, a pre-recorded video of Carson — filmed at his Florida home — aired on Sinclair Broadcasting TV stations, preempting the official kickoff. Bennett and Watts said they had no idea it was coming until reporters starting asking about it — but they quickly discerned that Williams had scooped their own announcement.

"That was Day One," Watts lamented.

Williams confirmed the episode, describing his "long-lasting relationship" with Sinclair, the company that sold Williams his own TV stations.

"If Dr. Carson is having an announcement in Detroit, everyone with common sense knows he’s going to announce running for president. So I played favorite with someone that has been with us from the beginning," he said.

There were more signs of trouble in June, when Giles abruptly left the campaign. The affable Texan, who befriended Carson in 1994 when the pair were inducted into the Horatio Alger Association, was considered a shoo-in to manage Carson's campaign in the spring. He helped build the original campaign team that included Bennett, a longtime ally of Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, and Watts, a veteran of Ronald Reagan's 1984 campaign.

But Giles' wife Kalli O'Malley, an outspoken participant in campaign meetings and vocal supporter of same-sex marriage, bristled at some of Carson's comments on gay rights — such as his comparison of homosexuality to bestiality and suggestion that prison can turn men gay. Giles departed to run a pair of pro-Carson super PACs, but he said the decision to leave "was made a bit easier given Kalli's concerns about gay rights issues and same sex marriage. She is a strong conservative and a staunch supporter of equal rights for all individuals. It is one of the many reasons I respect and love her."

Giles now expresses disdain for the men he hired, arguing that their antics rotted the campaign from the inside. He said staffing decisions after he left ostracized Carson's true loyalists in favor of professional consultants who didn't understand the candidate's uniqueness. His topmost complaint: campaign leaders ignored his urgent plea to have Carson roll out nuanced policy plans over the summer.

"It has been you that fired or boxed out real policy people, hired pretenders, and then took a position that Ben didn’t have to prepare or get 'into the weeds' on issues since he was polling so well," Giles wrote in a scorching email to the campaign's top leadership on Dec. 22, obtained by POLITICO. "It has been you that ignored the strategy to have Ben give his major policy speeches back in August and September so that by now he would be well prepared."

Bennett called Giles a "delightful man" but said he lacked "political instincts." He pointed to Giles' decision to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a Texas-based consultant, One Fast Buffalo, to design a campaign logo that was never used.

The climb and the fall

Any divisions that existed went largely unnoticed over the summer. At that time, Carson was still a low-key presence on the campaign trail.

But he was quietly building a fundraising juggernaut that raked in small donations and helped him surge to the front of a suddenly crammed Republican field. As Donald Trump seemed to capture the anger of a restive Republican base, Carson offered evangelical voters a more subdued, godly message — an image he reinforced with tales of his improbable rise from poverty in Detroit and his spiritual redemption after violent outbursts as a teenager.

Carson also had a penchant for delivering incendiary statements at a low volume.

In September he said that a Muslim shouldn't be president and suggested German Jews might have fared better against the Nazis if they had guns. He argued that victims of a mass shooting in Oregon should have rushed the killer, and he defended it by recalling his own run-in with a gunman at a Baltimore Popeye's in the 1980s, an account that police couldn't verify.

Each comment stirred controversy yet seemed to deepen his support among conservatives. He began a steady climb in polls, eventually taking a national lead and passing Donald Trump in all-important Iowa.

That's when sustained, public turbulence hit for the first time. A series of news reports in early November questioned Carson's personal narrative, whether he truly had violent tendencies as a teenager, whether he'd really been dubbed the "most honest" student at Yale by a professor, whether he'd ever received a formal scholarship offer from West Point, as he claimed in his 1991 book, "Gifted Hands." In a defiant press conference, Carson ripped reporters for scrutinizing his life story, and his campaign claimed fundraising had surged amid the media attention.

Then, with the campaign feeling bullish about its prospects, terrorists struck in Paris.

Suddenly, the Republican presidential conversation became singularly focused on national security, and the doctor appeared out of his depth. Carson struggled to articulate his foreign policy view in interviews. Even his own adviser said he appeared to struggle with the substance in an embarrassing New York Times interview arranged by Williams.

Suddenly, the campaign's fundraising —which led the Republican field for most of 2016 — cratered and Carson tumbled out of first place in the polls, beginning a downward trajectory that culminated in Wednesday's withdrawal.

Carson appeared to find his voice on foreign policy in January, and his team helmed by Dees seemed to stabilize in the New Year. But it was too late. Carson finished fourth or worse in the first 15 primary contests before he decided to quit.

Shortly before he pulled out of the race, Carson told an audience of students in Orangeburg, S.C., that he’d make one big change if he could start over.

“I regret a lot of the inflammatory language that I’ve used,” he said.

The Williams factor

Williams has argued that Carson's campaign team — the iteration helmed by Bennett and Watts — has tried to scapegoat him for the campaign's dysfunction. Rather, he said, the national dialogue seemed to conspire against Carson.

"If Donald Trump was not in the race, it could be a different scenario, but when you have someone like a Trump who sounds like an authoritarian — people just want to know that in times of fear and uncertainty that they have strength. Unfortunately, Dr. Carson’s soft-spokenness, where he did not rise to the level of a Cruz and Trump, people interpreted in a way that they decided to take a look at another candidate. They could blame me, I could blame them. I’m not going to do that."

It was no accident that Williams exercised outsize influence on Carson. The two met 25 years ago over a shared interest in the pitched 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. Williams says he can't remember precisely how they first connected, but it coincided with Carson's skyrocketing fame for his groundbreaking separation of German Siamese twins.

A friendship blossomed. The Williams and Carson families visited each other's homes and vacationed together. All three of the Carson sons lived or worked with Williams — and in 2007, when Williams went to Alaska for a one-hour interview with then-Gov. Sarah Palin, two Carson sons went along as producers. Eventually, Williams said, he began to help the Carsons on real estate and "how to make his money grow." He advised on home renovations and, more recently, helped Carson oversee business matters related to his books.

Because of this closeness, Williams said, it's tempting to ascribe the campaign's failings to him. But he insists his role has been overstated, that he largely facilitated Carson's media appearances. "I’ve never seen the headquarters. I’ve never been there. I may have met only 12 or 15 people of the 125 they had on payroll," he said.

But he also acknowledged being a driving force early in the campaign. He helped assemble the first team meeting at Giles' Houston home.

"Dr. Carson and I are friends first," Williams said. "I have never told Dr. Carson an untruth ... To build trust takes a lot of time. Dr. Carson knows many people. There are very few that he’ll ever trust. That’s just his personality."

Asked whether he believes he served Carson well, Williams said, "I don’t have regrets. I just think we’re a band of brothers and sisters that came together for an incredible moment … Some of us began to believe that he could take that all the way to the White House. What we saw was just a Pyrrhic victory at the time."

The Obama model

Carson's withdrawal from the race brought to an unceremonious end a campaign that was built, at the outset, to resemble the effort of the man Carson hoped to succeed: Barack Obama.

"I became a student of the Obama effort in 2007. I followed it religiously," said Watts, the former communications director, who along with Bennett helped build the campaign's infrastructure last summer.

"We all read all the books about the Obama campaign," added Bennett, who said mirroring that campaign's emphasis on "engagement" helped them build a 5 million-strong Facebook following and a devoted army of small donors.

But Obama's campaign also minimized internal drama, they noted, avoiding the sniping and crosscurrents that became Carson's undoing. It's that lingering aftertaste that still sticks with the campaign's former inner circle: they had a chance, and they blew it.

"Ben likes to say that God will dictate this race," Giles wrote in his email to the campaign, "Well, we now know what God does to a campaign when Ben is surrounded with ungodly men."