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After a dreadful Super Tuesday performance, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson on Friday suspended his campaign, saying he couldn’t see a path forward. He was the only Black candidate in the race.
“There’s a lot of people who love me, they just won’t vote for me,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), reports CBS News. Carson decided to leave the race after reviewing the current delegate count and realized it “simply realized it wasn’t going to happen.”
Perhaps the writing was on the wall when the mild-mannered retired neurosurgeon began having trouble convincing his opponents and media pundits that he was tough, you know, able to stand toe-to-toe with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
So, over the holidays he began trotting out stories about his violent childhood growing up on the rough-and-tumble streets of Detroit. His campaign went downhill from there.
He left the race to become national chairman of My Faith Votes, a group focused on getting out the Christian vote in November.
“Nothing is more important to me than my personal faith, and it is my faith that motivated me to be involved in the political process to begin with,” Carson said in a statement. “I believe Christians in this country can easily determine the next president of the United States and all other national and local leaders, should they simply show up at the polls.”
But the writing was already on the wall that the campaign was in trouble. Her are six times Carson stumbled on the campaign trail:
Self-Inflicted Wounds
Carson’s problems began when he started recounting questionable stories about a childhood of violence that ended when he found religion. But the Black conservative suddenly became a boogeyman to his White counterparts.
After the statements, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump expressed concern about Carson’s mental health.
“He wrote a book and in the book, he said terrible things about himself,” Trump said, according to NBC. “He said. that he’s pathological and he’s got basically pathological disease … I don’t want a person that’s got pathological disease.“
No Muslims For President
“I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that,” he told NBC.
Hummus Attack
In December, Carson tried to demonstrate his foreign policy skills while addressing a large group of prominent Republican Jews in Washington, D.C. But he gained attention for mispronouncing Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic organization that is on the U.S.’s list of terrorist organizations, as hummus, a Middle Eastern dish.
Earlier, Trump mocked Carson’s inability to discuss foreign policy issues.
“If you read the front page of The New York Times today, they said about Ben Carson that he’s unable to understand foreign policy,” Trump said at a Worcester, Massachusetts, rally. “It was a devastating story. It’s all over the place.”
“Who Is The Worst Student?”
While speaking to a fifth-grade class in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he asked the class “Who’s the worst student?” Nearly everyone pointed to the same child, embarrassing the 10-year-old child.
“Shoot Me”
In a weak defense of gun laws, he essentially blamed victims of a mass shooting last year in Oregon at Umpqua Community College massacre.
“I would not just stand there and let him shoot me,” he said. “I would say: ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’”
Black Lives Matter “Alienating A Lot Of People Who Are Not Black”
During an appearance on NewsOne Now with Roland Martin in September, Carson argued that the Black Lives Matter movement is “alienating a lot of people who are not black.”
He went on to tell Martin that the movement needs to be “all-encompassing” in its approach to problems facing Black communities.
Bye, Ben. Good luck in your next endeavor.
SOURCE: CBS News, NBC | PHOTO CREDIT: Getty
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Report: Ben Carson Sees No “Path Forward” To GOP Presidential Nomination
6 Gaffes That Signaled The End Of Ben Carson’s Presidential Campaign was originally published on newsone.com
