But he’s now risking this previously unassailable legacy in national politics, where reputations are broken as often as made. He’s making a series of sharp-edged statements that undermine his previously universal appeal, particularly in communities he once sought to set an example for. He has traded one kind of national stature for another one, hotter but also faster burning.
“If you’re white and you oppose a progressive black person, you’re a racist,” Carson told the audience gathered for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday. “If you’re black and you oppose the progressive agenda, you’re crazy.”
Carson has already seen elements of his legend fall away. In one of the most painful, in March 2013, he was forced to withdraw as the commencement speaker at Hopkins after comparing same-sex marriage to bestiality and pedophilia, setting off a round of protests at a place where he’d worked, with much distinction, over five decades. This was a new turn for those who have long known Carson as famously soft-spoken at the hospital and fiercely protective of his privacy and time with family away from it. His former colleagues — to a person — bemoan his loss to the field of neurosurgery.
“He has never pushed anybody, never told anybody else what to do,” said Dr. Henry Brem, director of Hopkins’ neurosurgery department and a friend of Carson’s who joined the hospital’s staff with him on the same day in 1984. “And then there he is telling people how to fix the country. I realized, when he’s out there giving these public speeches, it’s a very different side of his personality.”
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