The trickiest question about the Ben Carson campaign is whether or not the former surgeon is himself in on the scam. My guess is that he’s not. Ben Carson strikes me as many things — naive, befuddled, deeply weird, woefully ignorant and incurious about everything other than surgery — but I don’t think he’s particularly cunning. So I suspect he was probably just duped into being the front for this money-making enterprise without ever fully understanding that that’s all it ever was. I’d guess he hasn’t even negotiated a fair share of the take.
If that’s true, then Carson is innocent of being in on the grift, but still not entirely innocent. He’s still guilty of a staggering arrogance. You should run for president, the grifters told him, and he responded by saying, “Yes, that makes perfect sense. Who better than me?”
It takes a kind of arrogance for anyone to run for president, of course, but it’s not usually the only factor. Whether it’s Ted Cruz or Barack Obama or Rick Santorum or Bruce Babbitt, most candidates have some political agenda they want to pursue — something other than the simple thought that they would make a good president because of course they would. Carson gave a (pretty bad, actually) speech at a National Prayer Breakfast, after which a bunch of people said to him “You should be president.” And he agreed with them. He agreed with them even though he seems to have little understanding of what that means other than having the public acknowledge that he is uniquely deserving to hold the highest office.
I think the grifters sniffed that out. It’s what makes him the perfect unwitting front for a campaign racket — ensuring both that he’ll never understand what they’re up to, and that he’ll never admit that he doesn’t understand what they’re up to. And thus that he’ll never interfere with their money-making scam.
And let’s be clear about this: The Ben Carson for President campaign has functioned as a money-making scam. It has not functioned as anything like an actual campaign with any plan or goal of getting Ben Carson elected to anything. People have been writing about this since last year — usually with cagey, question-mark headlines. “Is Carson for Prez a Direct Mail Scam?” Josh Marshall asked last November. His answer: Sure seems to be. “Is Ben Carson Running for President?” Jonathan Chait asked. His answer: He does not seem to be. And here’s Jeet Heer, this month, asking “Is Ben Carson’s campaign an elaborate scam?” Well, if you’ve gotta ask …
Heer is referring to Josh Israel’s report for Think Progress, which addresses all those questions while managing not to put them in the headline: “As Ben Carson’s Campaign Tanked, Top Advisors Reaped Millions.”
Though his campaign raised more than $22 million over the final three months of 2015 — the most of any Republican hopeful — he ended the year a seemingly spent force. … But while Carson declined in the polls, a small group saw its fortunes on the rise: his campaign advisors and consultants. Already under fire for a campaign spending model that bore the marking of a direct mail scam, Carson’s newly disclosed fourth quarter spending shows huge payments to companies controlled by his current and former advisors.
The campaign spent more than $27 million over that period. $4.7 million of that went to Eleventy Marketing Group, mostly for its “digital media/web service.” The Akron, Ohio-based company president, Ken Dawson, is also the Carson campaign’s chief marketing officer. … Eleventy’s other clients include TMA Direct.
TMA Direct received $2.8 million from the Carson campaign over the same period for web services, mailings, and list rental. Mike Murray is Carson’s senior advisor for grassroots marketing and TMA’s president and CEO. His official biography also notes that he founded the American Legacy Political Action Committee and that its Save Our Healthcare program was chaired by Carson. Murray also serves as managing partner for Precision Data Management, which received an additional $217,000 from the campaign for web services.
Communication Management Source hauled in more than $1.2 million from Carson’s campaign coffers for travel expenses. The company is run by Joann Parker, wife of then-Carson finance chairman Dean Parker. His Vita Capital also received more than $138,000 for supplies, travel, and event expenses. Dean Parker was one of many Carson staffers to resign last month, amid criticism of his reported $20,000 monthly fee. …
The campaign also paid more than $2.3 million to InfoCision, a controversial company that has previously raised money for political action committees that spent the bulk of their money on overhead only.
In simpler terms: All these campaign “consultants” are Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom. Ben Carson is Franz Liebkind, and the campaign itself is “Springtime for Hitler.”
Yes, all presidential campaigns raise and spend a lot of money. And, since only one candidate can win, most of those campaigns spend that money in a losing effort. But usually all of that money is spent in pursuit of some strategy that is intended, however implausibly, to get the candidate elected. The super PACs supporting Jeb Bush have spent gazillions on advertising and campaign events. Those huge sums have failed to persuade Republican primary voters to support Jeb Bush, but it’s clear that’s what all that spending was trying to do. The super PACs supporting Ted Cruz are pouring millions into his attempt to replicate the Obama campaign’s remarkable volunteer-driven ground game (people apparently have to be well paid to do for Ted Cruz what volunteers did for Obama). All of that money, again, is clearly intended to win votes for the candidate.
But the Carson campaign has spent little of its money on actual campaigning. Much of that money has been spent, instead, on raising more money, which has then been funneled back to a small group of advisers and consultants for nebulous services that don’t seem to have anything to do with any meaningful attempt to win votes for Ben Carson.
This is a thing that can be done. It’s probably completely legal. And for those who pull it off, it’s extremely lucrative. Ben Carson for President raised $27 million and his advisers collected $27 million. Just like in The Producers, they’re not trying to put on a hit show. Being a box-office flop is part of the plan.
As long as such a money-making opportunity exists, people — perhaps even the same people — will do it again. The 2020 campaign will bring us another crop of pseudo-candidates whose semi-plausible campaigns will do little in the way of actually attempting to pursue victory while doing a great deal in the way of raising and collecting vast sums of money.
All they need to do is find another rube to serve as a front for the next go-round. Ideally, it should be someone with a bit of name recognition — a public figure already well-known, and preferably with an already established base of financial supporters. And it works best if this person has the kind of incurious arrogance that made Ben Carson such a reliable mark. It would need to be the sort of person who would say, “Yes, of course, it makes perfect sense that I’d be president.”
So I’m thinking Franklin Graham. He’s handsome, has a famous name and a built-in constituency. He’d be easy to goad into saying yes, and then unlikely to understand his hollow, peripheral role in the scheme or to interfere with what’s really going on. He’d be perfect.
You read it here first. Franklin Graham won’t really run for president in 2020 any more than Ben Carson is really running for president in 2016. But I bet Franklin Graham for President, Inc. will raise, and spend, a lot of money and line a lot of pockets.
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