The Internet is in a tizzy over allegations that Republican frontrunner Dr. Ben Carson fabricated details of a troubled, hostile youth for political gain. CNN interviewed nine of Carson’s childhood friends, classmates, and neighbors about the claims in the surgeon’s 25-year-old memoir Gifted Hands (which he later repeated on the stump) of violent, even homicidal episodes, but none could recall any.
The youth described in the memoir, the network reported, “is unrecognizable to those whom CNN interviewed, who knew him during those formative years. All of the people interviewed expressed surprise about the incidents Carson has described.” In fact, Carson was remembered as “quiet, bookish, and nerdy.”
The media has (correctly) portrayed Carson’s unverified claims of redemption from a delinquent childhood as tailor-made for the Evangelical audience whose votes are crucial in the Iowa caucuses and beyond.
Here’s how the Washington Post’s “The Fix” column put it:
Carson and his team have to protect and vigorously defend the once-violent-and-poor, now-delivered-and-rich story — hard. They have to because the details and the transformation are a central part of what makes some people hold him in high esteem.
But President Obama concocted a similar tale of redemption from a youth of law-breaking in his 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father – a theme he, too, repeated on the stump. Though the holes in his tale were exposed as early as 2008, the media has never explored possible motivations for this deception and what it signifies about the man running our country.
In describing Obama’s youth, Dreams contains several references to smoking “reefer” in “the dorm room of some brother”; getting “a little blow” (cocaine) – but only “when you could afford it”; and getting scared when someone tried to initiate him into heroin use. Then there’s this:
Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn’t been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then anyway. I got just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.
Both Carson and Obama have used their stories of redemption from a squandered youth to connect with an important part of their party’s coalition. Yes, for Carson it’s Evangelicals; but for Obama it’s an even larger social contingent: the Baby Boomers who dabbled in drugs themselves and thus can identify with his story. He opts for slang like blow, reefer, and junkie because more clinical language would not further his invented self-image of a redeemed politician who is nevertheless anything but a square.
Well, parallel to CNN’s Carson expose last week, in early 2008 The New York Times fact-checked Obama’s story, interviewing more than three dozen of the people who knew Obama during his supposed drug phase. If Druggie Barack ever existed, nobody seems to have ever encountered him. His friends, the paper reported, “recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed only to dabble with marijuana.”
The article in the Times was actually a boost for Obama, whose campaign had been damaged the previous month when the rival Clinton camp warned his past drug use would leave him vulnerable in the fall. I could find no voices on the Web criticizing Obama’s lies about his drug history.
By contrast, the entire conversation about Carson’s possible exaggerations or fibs has been whether he has misrepresented his story for political gain.
Of course, it’s no coincidence that both of the black presidential frontrunners in American history have described their youth in modes that are part Horatio Alger, part Saul of Tarsus. Americans love to cheer the underdog, and particularly to believe that even the most deprived urban blacks can emerge unscathed if they try hard enough. Tales of black teens with literal pocket protectors who live in homes with pool tables and unlocked doors (as CNN described Carson) and “jogging in the morning, playing pickup basketball at the gym, hitting the books and socializing” (as the Times described Obama) just don’t fit the bill.
Presidential candidates cannot be faulted for highlighting details that paint inspiring bios. Still, both Carson and Obama appear to have crossed a line from “enhanced fact” to outright fiction. But why have reports of one candidate’s invented past become a media scandal while those of the other helped send him to the Oval Office?
Hmmm….
David Benkof is Senior Political Analyst at the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter (@DavidBenkof) or E-mail him at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.