In a textbook case of damning with faint praise, the Washington Monthly's Ed Kilgore asserted on Thursday that of all the "dramatically underqualified people" who may run for president in 2016, Ben Carson is the frontrunner.
Kilgore opines that since Carson is black, his popularity with white conservatives "absolve[s] them of any racist motives when they complain about those people on welfare, and indeed accuse white liberals of being the real bigots." (Italics in original.) He adds that should Carson run, "it seems likely he [would] be even more overtly than [Herman] Cain a pure instrument for conservative resentment and—if you will forgive the unavoidable term—whitewashing."
From Kilgore's post, with no memory of Al Sharpton for President 2004 (emphasis added):
The bar for a “viable” presidential candidate was most dramatically lowered in 2012, when pizza entrepreneur and radio gabber Herman Cain briefly led the polls for the Republican nomination to become Leader of the Free World...
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There’s no telling how many dramatically underqualified people will run for president in 2016 and ascend from the anonymous ranks of cranks and perennial candidates whose campaigns toil in perpetual obscurity. Some, like former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, may even have minimal on-paper credentials and thereby muscle his way onto debate platforms. But the candidate of that nature most likely to make a splash is Dr. Ben Carson, a distinguished neurosurgeon and philanthropist (and also a conservative Christian motivational speaker and writer) who’s become the Latest Big Thing on the conservative defying-the-left circuit...
Now that reliable expositor of the conservative CW, the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes, reports that Carson is getting serious about a presidential run, which he describes more or less as a trip down the road to Golgotha:
“It’s a daunting thing,” he told me. “I know how vehemently the left will come after you, try to destroy you, try to destroy your family. But at the same time I recognize that people like Nathan Hale - he said, ‘My only regret is I have but one life to give to my country’ … And if everybody runs for the hills because they’re afraid that somebody is going to attack them or their family, then [the left] will have won.”
