The New York Times sent this guy to figure out whether or not Dr. Ben Carson, who is black, can appeal to black Americans:
Jonathan Martin of the New York Times
Is Jonathan Martin the right journalist for the job? Well, he grew up inside the Beltway, in Arlington, and went to college 200 miles down the road at all-male Hampton Sydney College, where the dudes look like this:
Yes, that light-skinned black guy is wearing a Brooks Brothers polo shirt.
Perhaps that's where he learned that some black people belong to Evangelical Christian churches. He ran into some of them at a Ben Carson rally. Guess what? They like it when he says stuff that is designed to appeal to Evangelical Christians!
“He has the same values that I do,” said Louise Harris, a black retiree at the West Memphis rally, citing Mr. Carson’s vision for “bringing our country back morally.”
But Ben Carson isn't even trying.
Though he raised over $20 million during the third quarter of this year and primary votes will be cast in less than three months, his campaign operation has not caught up to his standing in the race. He has, for example, yet to hire a staff member dedicated to turning out black voters.
It just might be the case that Ben Carson isn't really running for President:
There was also surprisingly little effort at the event in West Memphis, a heavily black town just across the Mississippi from the Tennessee city, to collect contact information from a mixed-race crowd of about 3,000 people who showed up from two states that will vote on March 1. There were placards to wave, but no sign of staff members asking attendees to fill out contact cards.
Let's face it. Black people are familiar with the Republican Party. They know, for example, what party this guy is voting for:
Ben Carson has said this about our first black president:
You know Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. And it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control.
Williams had said Obama looked "elegant" that night.
And Carson responded: "Like most psychopaths. That's why they're successful. That's the way they look. They all look great."
I think I would use the bully pulpit to help people realize what we have in common rather than what separates us. What it’s been used for for the last several years is to create wars: a war on women, race wars, any kind of anything involving people of two different races, income wars, always class warfare, religious wars now, age wars. You know, these are exactly the kinds of things you want to do when you want to destroy a society, not when you want to bring people together.
At the end of the day, Jonathan Martin can spend his time elsewhere, because there is no getting around the fact that black Americans quite likely think of Ben Carson like this:
