From the Times: 26 January 2015 A BLACK surgeon from a single parent family in Detroit was the unexpected star of the first public gathering of potential Republican presidential nominations in the key state of Iowa. Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon with no political experience, had the crowd on its feet as he spoke of scrapping President Obama’s health insurance reforms and a plan to seal the Mexican border by 2017. It was Dr Carson, 63, who won plaudits from more than 1,000 grassroots supporters as he entwined a political message with his personal story of growing up with an illiterate mother who drove him to read two books a week, and his rise to become a renowned brain surgeon. Dr Carson, speaking without notes, told the audience yesterday (Sunday) how he was brought up by a mother who was one of 24 children. She had left school at 13, and married a man who she discovered was a bigamist. “I’ll tell you an interesting thing about my mother, she never became a victim. She never felt sorry for herself — and that’s a good thing. The problem is she never felt sorry for us either. There was never any excuse we could give that was good enough. She would always say, ‘Do you have a brain?’ And if the answer was yes, then you could have thought your way out of it. “And you know what, I ask that same question of us today in America, ‘Do we have a brain? Do we have the ability to think logically to solve the multiple problems that we have?” His populist attacks on political correctness make him an attractive figure — and the almost entirely white audience warmed to him. He came to prominence in 2013 after elegantly dismantling President Obama’s health reforms at an event where they shared the same stage.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 04:22:23 +0000
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