What Ben Carson Really Said about Mad Dogs and Syrians

In a long day in Mobile, Ala., on Thursday, Dr. Ben Carson struck all the right grace notes, creating as vivid a contrast with Donald Trump's histrionic August visit as could be imagined. Whereas Trump was all about himself, exhaustingly and boringly so, Carson maintained a relaxed and humble presence throughout the seven-event day -- winning with winsomeness rather than with boasting and bombast.

But the day was not without controversy -- even if it was entirely media-created. A midday press conference created a stir when Carson, discussing the Syrian refugee issue, stressed that Americans should first make sure that we don't allow entry to terrorists -- and used the analogy of protecting children from "rabid dogs," even if we love dogs in general. Politico ran the wildly misleading headline "Ben Carson compares Syrian refugees to dogs," and news outlets all over the country ran similar variations of the story, as if Carson were denigrating all refugees rather than singling out terrorists.

The day began quietly, with a morning visit to the remarkable Prichard Prep School -- an all-black, 94-percent school-lunch-eligible, non-denominational Christian pre-Kâ€“throughâ€“fifth-grade academy that Carson holds up as a national model. (Full disclosure: Three months after writing an early 2012 feature on the school, I was asked to join its board, and still serve on it.)

After touring the campus and visiting some classrooms, Carson briefly addressed the 154 students -- and, refreshingly for someone running for political office, never mentioned his race for president and, amazingly, almost completely avoided first-person pronouns. Perfectly calibrating his tone for his young audience, he told them that what they do at school "really determines what sort of lifestyle you will have. Each person is responsible for his own life. And your brain is the most sophisticated organ system in the universe. It processes 2 million pieces of information in one second. The more you develop it, the better you'll be. And we need at least some of you to be real leaders."

Carson then made reference to the school choir having welcomed him with the spiritual song "Oh, Happy Day."

"It makes me extraordinarily happy to hear you sing like that. And speaking of making a happy day, you can go home and ask yourself how you can make your mom or dad, or whoever is taking care of you, happy. Maybe you can go clean up your room, or help with the dishes. If you make a point of thinking how you can make other people happy, how to be a person who brings joy to another person, you can make this whole world better."

After Prichard Prep, Carson spoke to an area high school; held the aforementioned press conference; visited Mobile mayor Sandy Stimpson; and, before attending a private fundraiser, spoke at a public rally at the arena of the University of South Alabama.

At one point in the public rally, Carson doubled down on his terrorists-are-mad-dogs analogy, repeating it in almost every particular while noting (entirely correctly) that the media had already misrepresented, inexcusably, both his language and his point. Noticeably, though, he made his complaint not in high dudgeon, but with a wry shake of his head. It was Reaganesque in its the-joke's-on-them cheerfulness.

Perhaps 3,000 people attended the rally. The mood was less that of a rowdy crowd looking for entertainment than that of a friendly, happy audience looking for inspiration.

"I don't want a Kardashian for president," said a local radio account executive, Celeste Holland, speaking of Trump's faux-"reality-TV" persona. "Carson is so real. I admire him. He's the only one who seems fully respectable."

Part of that likability, it became clear once Carson took the stage, is that the good doctor seems so comfortable in his own skin. This was the third time in 30 months that I had heard Carson give a big speech in southern Alabama, and this was by far the best -- less rambling, more focused, but still far less like performance art than like a casual storytelling session around a campfire.

Yet despite Carsonâ€™s almost legendarily soft tones (in terms of volume), his speech nonetheless had plenty of zing, at various times flaying "secular progressives," "the PC police," the "dishonesty in our media" (a big applause line, right after he told the rabid-dog story) -- and, without ever mentioning the name Obama, the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

"If I were in charge of the country and trying to destroy it from within," he said, he would: Divide the country by accusing opponents of waging "wars" on women, or blacks, or the elderly, or various religious groups; pile up debt to "unsustainable levels"; "invite people in to our country" even when we don't know if they are safe for us; load huge numbers into food-stamp use; give away free phones; destroy our military (Carson cited numerous statistics); complain about how we treat veterans but without actually doing anything to fix the system; abandon the space program ("he who controls space controls the Earth"); and other assaults on common sense.

"Any resemblance to what is going on right now," he said drily, "I am sure is coincidental. . . . We must reject those people who have the agenda of trying to fundamentally transform this nation."

Carson closed with a paraphrase of lines by Thomas Jefferson -- his third Jefferson citation of the evening -- in which Jefferson worried that the government would get so big that it would, in Carsonâ€™s restatement of Jeffersonâ€™s words, "infiltrate and invade our lives, and then begin to dominate our lives. But Jefferson also said that at some point when it got so bad, the people would awaken before it was too late."

Carson paused to let those last nine words sink in. Then: "I say this is the time to do it."

And with that, he left the stage, to sustained applause.

-- Quin Hillyer, who lives in Mobile, is a longtime contributor to National Review.

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