Carson's "emergence as a conservative hero and unabashed critic of the United States’ first black president has been jarring."

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COMMENTS:
*  The article's saying that Carson's alliance with a right-wing coalition hostile to African-American interests is disappointing to those who once found him a role model.
*  No, the article is saying that it is hardly surprising that someone who was once highly respected in the African-American community would lose that respect when he does things like claim that Obamacare is "worse than slavery" or call the first black president a "psychopath."  That kind of thing may be considered a way to popularity in tea party and other far right circles. But Carson has gone so far in his endless vitriol directed at Obama that he has marginalized himself at the fringes of political discussion.   If Carson ever hoped to try to have a conversation in the black community about conservatism, he has permanently ended that possibility by pandering to the further shores of far right ideological extremists.
*  Carson as president makes as much sense as a president deciding he can be a surgeon.
*  Why anyone would think someone who is good at one thing -- say brain surgery -- is automatically good at *everything*? All honor to Dr. Carson as a doctor. But as a politician...he's got a lot to learn.
*  On Meet The Press with Chuck Todd, Carson said: "I find a very good measure of correlation between my religious beliefs and my scientific beliefs."  Scientific beliefs! Like Creationism and the world was created 6000 years ago. Not all of us are ready for him. We need to reach senility first.
*  I am glad that Carson was able to inspire people, but that was yesterday. Today he is just one more rider on the clown train and Obama is going to be remembered in history as a president who accomplished many good and progressive things in spite of the most hateful political obstruction ever directed against any president.
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As Ben Carson bashes Obama, many blacks see a hero’s legacy fade
By Robert Samuels, May 2, 2015

The black man courting crowds of white conservatives doesn’t seem like the same guy that H. Westley Phillips once idolized. Phillips still relishes the day he heard Ben Carson inspire minority students at Yale University with his story of persistence. He can still feel the nervous anticipation he had while waiting in line to shake Carson’s hand.

After the speech, Phillips followed Carson’s path and began to study neurosurgery.

“I had come from a public school in Tulsa and came from a single-parent household and thought I was the admissions mistake,” said Phillips, now 27. “But he gave me the comfort to know that if I did struggle — and I thought I would — that I wouldn’t have been the first, and there are ways to handle it. The message he gave was this backup artillery when times were hard.”

For many young African Americans who grew up seeing Carson as the embodiment of black achievement — a poor inner-city boy who became one of the world’s most accomplished neurosurgeons — his emergence as a conservative hero and unabashed critic of the United States’ first black president has been jarring.

Carson has been a black icon since 1987, when he became the first person to successfully separate twins conjoined at the backs of their heads. He was a rare and much-desired role model: a black man who became known for his intellect, not for telling jokes or shooting basketballs.

Posters of Carson hung on bulletin boards in classrooms. Reading “Gifted Hands,” his 1992 autobiography, was practically a rite of passage.

But now retired from his medical career, Carson, 63, has become known more widely since using his speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast to offer a conservative critique of U.S. health-care and spending policies, while standing a few feet from President Obama.

In the ensuing months and years, Carson’s attacks grew sharper — deriding Obama’s signature health-care law as the “worst thing to have happened in this nation since slavery” and, in the pages of GQ, likening Obama to a “psychopath.” Carson’s 2014 book, “One Nation,” assails a decline of moral values in America and its government.

As Carson prepares to announce his candidacy for president on Monday in his home town of Detroit, his political base is now whiter and more rural.

Carson’s personal accomplishments — and the work he has done to help black communities — still garner respect and pride among African Americans. Yet, while he has been a conservative for as long as he has been famous, many worry that he risks eroding his legacy in their community and transforming himself into a fringe political figure.

Some black pastors who were Carson’s biggest promoters have stopped recommending his book. Members of minority medical organizations that long boasted of their affiliations with him say he is called an “embarrassment” on private online discussion groups.

“Has he lost his sense of who he is?” said the Rev. Jamal Bryant, a prominent black pastor in Baltimore, where Carson lived for decades when he was director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. “He does not see he is the next Herman Cain.”

Mark Terrelonge, 26, who is in his final year at Stanford University School of Medicine, said he feels his heart sink every time another clip of Carson shows up on his Facebook feed.

Reading “Gifted Hands” as a teenager, Terrelonge said he saw Carson’s story as an affirmation of his own ambitions to become a doctor. Never before had he heard of a black man in the upper echelons of medicine. But Terrelonge, who is gay, was stung when he heard Carson say that homosexuality was a choice.

“I don’t know how to say it exactly,” Terrelonge said. “I don’t want to attack him because he’s done great things in medicine, but the role-model aspect of him has kind of diminished in my life.”

Carson, too, is trying to fully understand his new place in black America. He spoke recently at the National Action Network, the civil rights group headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton, who once ran for president as a Democrat. Carson also issued a statement criticizing Baltimore demonstrators protesting after the death of Freddie Gray — urging parents to “please take control of your children and do not allow them to be exposed to the dangers of uncontrolled agitators on the streets.”

In an interview, Carson said he laments that many in the black community “drank the Kool-Aid and think I have forsaken them.”

“People write things. They say things. It saddens me,” Carson said. “There are forces in this country that really like to foster division and conflict, particularly in the black community, because they don’t want the synergy of them working together. Because that would advance them.”

The admiration many blacks have long felt for Carson differentiates him from past black conservative presidential candidates such as Cain, the former pizza executive who briefly rose in the polls during the 2012 primary season, Carson’s political supporters say. He has won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by Republican President George W. Bush, and the Spingarn Medal, the top honor given by the traditionally liberal NAACP.

His stature, Carson supporters say, helps him combat the perception that the far right is exclusive and out of touch. Critics, these supporters say, underestimate Carson’s potential impact on the race at their own peril.

“I would be elated if the left felt this too shall pass and he is just the chocolate flavor of the election cycle,” said Vernon Robinson, a fellow black conservative and chairman of the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee. So far, Robinson said, the group has raised $16 million.

“Despite everything so far,” Robinson said, “he still has a reservoir of residual admiration.”

[Major snippage]
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