Dr. Benjamin Carson is a brain surgeon. Not just your run-of-the-mill brain surgeon, either. He's the brain surgeon to whom some of the world's most desperate parents have turned when their children's lives have hung in the balance or - to cite one of his most famous surgeries - when their children have been born joined at the head. It feels odd questioning a brain surgeon's smarts, but what choice has Carson left us, after he took the podium at a conservative convention last week and compared the Affordable Care Act to slavery?
"You know Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery," Carson, said. "And it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government."
Slavery and the Affordable Care Act. When listing American-sponsored atrocities, why don't we label them 1 and 1a? Violent extraction, the Middle Passage, forced labor, sexual subjugation, the auction block, the forced separation of parents and children, soul-crushing oppression and death. And, oh yeah, a nominal penalty for not purchasing health insurance. The similarities just jump out at you.
Carson burst onto the political scene in February when he used a typically nonpartisan prayer breakfast in Washington to criticize the health care law while President Barack Obama was seated next to him. Carson's polemic was such a departure from protocol that Cal Thomas, a thoroughly reliable conservative columnist, cried foul.
After describing Carson's criticism of Obama as an "ambush," Thomas said, "Carson should publicly apologize and stop going on TV doing 'victory laps' and proclaiming that reaction to his speech was overwhelmingly positive. That's not the point. While many might agree with his positions (and many others don't as shown by the November election results), voicing them at the National Prayer Breakfast in front of the president was the wrong venue."
I was much less troubled by Carson's presentation than Thomas was, but I don't doubt that Thomas is more of an authority on what's proper at that annual gathering. I was more interested in seeing if Carson could be the kind of prominent black member that has often eluded the GOP, one who manages to become a darling of the party without using the platform to lob insults at the rest of black America. One who doesn't describe the Democratic Party as a plantation or describe himself as being lynched when people rightly call him a plumb fool.
Could Carson, whose inspiring rise from the Detroit ghetto to head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University, inspire more black people to follow join the G.O.P.? For people considering joining the party, could Carson help make being black and Republican feel more natural and less like an internal conflict?
No. Apparently he cannot. His Friday remarks at the Value Voters Summit in Washington demonstrate that, as exceptional as he has been in his professional life, he is content with making the same racially offensive remarks that have long contributed to the GOP's reputation as black people's repellant.
The irony, of course, is that black Americans are so often told to forget the brutal past: slavery, the plantation, lynching. But there are many Republicans who keep those words in circulation - not in reverence to the pain that was inflicted upon so many - but in a petty gambit to win an argument. There is nothing comparable to slavery. There is nothing comparable to lynching. They are not metaphors to express one's displeasure with the opposition's policies or to decry the opposition's criticism. But it seems that in order to count as the great black hope for the GOP, such analogies are required.
In the opening monologue of Richard Pryor's 1977 NBC variety show we see the infamously blue comic on stage insisting that he hasn't compromised, hasn't given up anything to get the TV gig. Then the camera pans out and we see that Pryor is naked and is as smooth as a Ken doll.
The GOP seems to demand that its black members relinquish some vital part of themselves to belong. The most common sacrifice is the brain. How else to explain otherwise intelligent black Republicans, a neurosurgeon even, saying the most ignorant things?
Linking health care reform to some aspect of slavery seems to have become a thing for conservative politicians and pundits. Let's chat about that strategy and the party's ongoing struggle to diversify its ranks Tuesday at noon.