I said this back in mid-october, when carson (leading the polls at that point) took 6 weeks off campaigning for a book tour, instead of using his $ to build iowa infrastructure. it's just like huck a while back - in it to make $ and collect names for speeches and endorsements. 240 called this. Actually RUSH did too. Repubs were too stupid to listen to it though.
Tough to argue all the points made here. Carson is keeping the $ - he's not building ANYTHING. And his team all resigning on the 1st of the year makes it look even more suspicious.
Ben Carson’s grand political experiment is just about over. He’s plummeting in the polls and he’s all but finished in the Republican presidential race. He had a good run, though. For a man with no political knowledge or experience or ideas, he fared remarkably well. At one point, Carson was considered a frontrunner, trailing only Donald Trump. Now he’s a distant fourth place, well behind Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio.
Don’t feel sorry for the good doctor, however. His campaign is only a failure if you assume his goal was to become president of the United States. But if you’ve followed Carson’s career for more than a few months, you know he’s more of an entrepreneur than a politician. And so his campaign has to be judged in that context.
ADVERTISING
As an entrepreneur, Carson has succeeded wildly. According to a new AP report, the doctor has been cashing in on the campaign trail, promoting his brand and giving paid speeches wherever he can:
“All of this is part of a well-honed enterprise that promotes Ben Carson – presidential candidate, political commentator, paid speaker, author, neurosurgeon and champion of children, reading, and God. He has folded into Carson Enterprises his presidential campaign, which has excelled at fundraising, brining in almost $32 million through the end of September …That fundraising prowess continues, even as his poll numbers decline. His campaign manager, Barry Bennett, said Thursday they raised about $20 million since the beginning of October…Speaking fees over a nearly two-year period raked in $4.3 million. And his nonprofit continues to raise money.”
It’s important not to see Carson’s private financial gains as tangential to his campaign. It’s not as though he set out to run for president and happened to profit enormously as a result. On the contrary, his campaign was itself an entrepreneurial venture. Since announcing his candidacy, Carson has paraded around the country, selling books and giving paid speeches at charity events, corporate meetings, and various other organizations.
As the AP report notes, Carson’s book tour website “links to his official campaign website…and Carson’s book sales benefit significantly from his political rise. Since he declared his candidacy, more than 52,000 copies of versions of his signature book, ‘Gifted Hands,’ have sold.”
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/29/ben_carson_doesnt_want_to_win_his_campaign_is_all_about_cashing_in_and_thats_the_problem/
