A number of Republican candidates for the presidency seem more interested in becoming rich than becoming president.
Here’s a question you rarely hear asked: how interested is Dr. Ben Carson, who is currently leading polling in Iowa, in actually interested in becoming president? On one level he seems to be, after all he has announced he is running for president and does the things candidates for the White House are supposed to do like raise money and attend debates. But at the same time much of Carson’s campaign seems to be little more than an excuse to raise lots of money via online and direct mail solicitations. As Matt Yglesias pointed out last week:
Carson is currently in second place in national polls and leading in Iowa. His campaign is raising tons of money from small donors and is spending most of that money on fundraising. People are giving Carson money so that he’ll have the money to ask more people for money. It’s a form of pyramid scheme. There’s no real field operation, policy staff, or any other manifestation of the kind of campaign apparatus that could plausibly result in victory.
The existence of lucrative markets for hawkers of movement conservative oriented books, TV shows, and newsletters is of course nothing new. But there is a pretty striking difference between talking heads cashing in Sarah Palin style, and a man leading early polling in Iowa to be the Republican nominee for president doing it.
Unfortunately the problem here is bigger than one doctor with a history of hiring himself out for various scams. One of the core reasons that democracy as a system of governance tends to “work” so to speak is that it gives our leaders strong incentives not to preside over disasters. After all, if elected leaders do a poor job in office, voters can always replace them.
Thus presidents have strong incentives to make sure the economy is doing well, as presidents who preside over weak economies tend to lose reelection. But the conservative market places that Carson (and other conservative figures) are taking advantage of tend to break the incentive to govern well down. After all, if your core motivation is to get rich via direct mail schemes, who cares if your purposed policies don’t make any sense?
At the end of the day Ben Carson’s own personal motivations for running for president don’t really matter a whole lot. But the fact that lots of candidates running for the Republican nominations for the presidency seem more interested in cashing in than figuring out how to address national problems leaves their party pretty unprepared for running the country when they do get in. And that matters a lot for everyone involved.
Like The Good Men Project On Facebook
Photo by Ross D. Franklin/AP
The post Ben Carson’s Big Payday appeared first on The Good Men Project.