Given that it is September, when summer love fades and fall sets in, you might expect to see someone drawing even with Donald Trump. But you wouldn’t expect that person to be one of the other least-likely-to-succeed candidates in the race: retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Between a retired doctor and a debt-ridden developer, who is least qualified to be president of the United States?
While their personal styles couldn’t be more different, Ben Carson and Donald Trump hale from the same place: television. Donald Trump was a network star, but in the world of 24-hour opinions, Ben Carson has been a staple for years. He’s one of those people who you recognize but aren’t sure why until you realize that you know him “from television.”
Being from television is not the same as being from government, although it often seems the two are interchangeable. The way politics, and news in general, get covered these days — that is, in the form of “he said/he said” debates and shout-fests, with the occasional attractive woman thrown in the mix — it might seem that the required skill set is coextensive. It isn’t. Certainly, being a good communicator helps you get elected, and helps you sell your programs. But if that were all it took, Barack Obama (remember him? The guy who beat Hillary Clinton?) would still have dark hair.
Being president is hard. For that matter, even getting the nomination is hard. Neither Ben Carson nor Donald Trump nor Bernie Sanders — the three big outsiders as of now, with Carly Fiorina angling for a spot alongside them — have yet to be subject to the withering scrutiny generally reserved for those whose balloons have been fully inflated by the press, and now must in the course of things be punctured. His supporters might argue that The Donald is immune from such scrutiny, but even the most recent polls suggest otherwise: Trump’s support has pretty much flattened out, and the big news is Carson’s gains, not Trump’s.