America’s evangelical Christians, that group with an outsized influence in the early stages of the US presidential race, love a story of personal redemption and Dr Ben Carson’s journey from poor, troubled youth to one of America’s most gifted brain surgeons to Republican presidential candidate is hard to beat.
His tale of overcoming a blind "pathological anger" by finding God while being locked in a bathroom for three hours in his teens is part of a narrative that has catapulted the acclaimed medical doctor, the only African-American candidate in the 2016 race, to joint Republican frontrunner with Donald Trump.
The two men have excelled as anti-establishment outsiders at a time when career politicians are deeply unpopular – the Yale-educated Carson (64), the calm, soft-spoken alternative to the swaggering, abrasive Trump (69).
Two polls in as many weeks put Carson ahead of Trump nationally – by four points in a CBS/New York Times poll last month and six points in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll a week later. Some local polls put Carson at an even bigger lead over Trump in Iowa, the first state to pick candidates in the February 1st caucuses – where evangelical voters play a pivotal role.
Some polls come with a strong caveat. The CBS/New York Times poll found that 80 per cent of Carson's supporters said it was too early to say whether they would support him as the eventual Republican presidential nominee. So there is everything to fight for and Carson is fighting hard, for now to defend himself against media reports questioning the accuracy of past accounts of his life. He has claimed they amount to "a witch hunt" by the mainstream media.
Sections of the US media have scrutinised his personal back story, questioning episodes on his journey from inner-city Detroit to his appointment as director of paediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital at the age of 33. The material in the spotlight is Carson's 1990 autobiography Gifted Hands.
On Thursday, CNN reported that it could not confirm accounts of violence from his youth in that book after speaking to childhood friends. Carson wrote that when he was 14 he tried to stab his friend “Bob” with a knife after he dismissed his taste in music and had the cheek to turn the dial on the radio.
The young Carson’s knife hit Bob’s belt buckle, snapped and dropped to the ground. “I stared at the broken blade and went weak,” Carson wrote. “I had almost killed him. I had almost killed my friend.”
Showing that this wasn’t just a once-off act of violence, Carson also wrote about how he punched someone while holding a lock leaving a bloody three-inch gash in their forehead and how he tried to hit his mother with a hammer. Nine friends, classmates and neighbours, who grew up with the Detroit native, told CNN they had no memory of the anger or violence he has written about. They didn’t contest the stories but said this was not the Carson they knew.
Carson told reporters that CNN didn’t go to the right school or talk to the right people and that the names he used in the stabbing story were “fictitious names because I don’t want to bring people into something like this because I know what you guys do to their lives”. In an interview with Fox News on Thursday night, Carson said “Bob” was in fact “a close relative”.
On Friday, political news website Politico reported that, contrary to Carson's claim in his book that he was offered a scholarship to West Point, he never applied nor was granted permission to the storied US military academy. Politico later softened its headline, dropping the word "fabricated".
West Point has noted that it doesn't technically offer a "full scholarship", although it has been found to have used the terms in literature on admissions and advertisements. In his book, Carson recalled as a 17-year-old meeting Gen William Westmoreland, commander of US forces during the Vietnam War, at a dinner while the teenager was enrolled in a programme that provides preliminary officer training.
“Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point,” he wrote. Carson’s campaign team clarified that he never applied to nor was never admitted to West Point but that he had had conversations where he was told he could get an appointment to the academy based on his grades and performances in the programme – still far short of being offered “a full scholarship”.
Late on Friday, the Wall Street Journal questioned the authenticity of another story from Gifted Hands. He said in the book that he took an exam in a psychology course entitled "Perceptions 301" and was later told by the professor shortly after the exam that all the papers had been "inadvertently burned".
When the students sat the tougher repeat exam, all the students except Carson walked out; he stayed to focus on the paper. The professor later entered the classroom with a photographer from the Yale Daily News and declared the new test "a hoax" to find "the most honest student in the class". Carson wrote that the professor gave him a $10 note.
The Wall Street Journal reported that it could find no photo of Carson in the Yale Daily News archives and no stories mentioning the particular episode. The retired doctor defended himself over the weekend on Facebook, posting an article from the Yale Daily News in January 1970 describing the fake test and asking the Wall Street Journal for an apology.
An opponent of politically correct culture, Carson frequently flirts with controversy. He once called homosexuality a choice, pointing to how inmates go into prison straight and emerge gay. He later apologised for the remark. More recently he likened women seeking abortions to slave-owners and appeared to lay some blame on the victims of the recent mass shooting at an Oregon community college, saying that he would “not just stand there and let him shoot me”.
Speaking out against gun controls, he said the Holocaust would not have happened if the Jewish people had been armed. He also drew fire for saying that he would not support a Muslim being president. These comments didn’t hurt him in the polls; they had the opposite effect in fact, as Republican primary voters warmed to his outspokenness.
Carson has sought to play the recent scrutiny over his autobiography to his advantage. He thanked a “biased media” on Saturday for helping to raise $3.5 million (€3.25 million) in political funds over the previous week and he has cast himself as a victim, while Trump has goaded his rival on Twitter.
On a Sunday political talk show, Carson said no other candidate had been scrutinised quite so intensely. "Not like this, not even close," he said, when asked about President Barack Obama being quizzed in 2012 about whether he was actually born in Hawaii.
The interest in Carson coincides with his ascent in the polls and will likely to lead to questions at the next Republican debate, which takes place tonight. All eyes will be on the retired doctor to see whether he can keep his characteristically cool head in what should be another heated debate.
