Carson on Obama

That's Ben Carson, though Johnny would've been much funnier, in a Politico article by Glenn Thrush:

Ben Carson is the only person in the 2016 presidential field who is vying to become the country’s second African-American president. Truth be told, however, he’s not entirely sure he wouldn’t actually be the first.
Carson, speaking during a half-hour sit-down with Politico’s podcast, Off Message, as he waited for the results of Saturday’s South Carolina primary (where he finished sixth out of six), laid out his views on racism and his belief that his experience as poor black kid in 1960s Detroit, Michigan represents the real experience of his people in way that Barack Obama could never understand.
“He’s an ‘African’ American. He was, you know, raised white,” said the world-renowned neurosurgeon, whose single mother worked three jobs and occasionally relied on government aid to elevate Carson and his older brother from the grinding poverty of ghetto life. “I mean, like most Americans, I was proud that we broke the color barrier when he was elected, but he didn’t grow up like I grew up. Many of his formative years were spent in Indonesia. So, for him to claim that he identifies with the experience of black Americans is, I think, a bit of a stretch.”
Carson also suggested that what passes for racism now, in the age of Ferguson and Freddie Gray, is not comparable to the overt discrimination he encountered a half-century ago as a young man. “Remember, I’ve been around for 64 years, you know,” he added. “I’ve had a chance to see what real racism is.”
Carson has largely, if not entirely, downplayed the role of race in his brief rise. But as he fades (and many Republicans are calling for him to drop out for the sake of stopping Donald Trump if he flops, as he did, in Nevada), he’s begun to expound more on his views on the role of race in the country. Touring through South Carolina, the sword-tip of the segregation movement and one of the most racially polarized states in the country, put him in a reflective mood and he made a point of campaigning in black neighborhoods and African-American college campuses last week.
Carson was steadfast in defending his party (this is a candidate who has said a Muslim shouldn’t run for president unless he or she renounces shari'a law) and when I asked him if Trump was a racist, he replied: “I have not witnessed anything that would make me say that about him.” But when I followed up with a question about Trump’s general tone on racial issues, he shook his head: “No, it’s not the tone that I would use. Absolutely not.”
One of the great ironies of 2016 is that Carson, a free-market conservative who rose by railing against big-government Obamacare, views race through the larger prism of class, putting him (very) roughly more on the Bernie Sanders side of the race-versus-class argument.
When I ask him if racism played a role in the contaminated water crisis in Flint, Michigan, he said: “Let me put it this way: if that were going on in an affluent black community, it would not have gone on,” adding: “A lot of things that people classify as racism is classism, and, believe me, there's a lot of classism in our society, and if people of a certain race happen to fall into a lower class, then they get the brunt of it.”
There was a time, at the end of 2015, when Carson seemed poised to challenge Trump, but a series of setbacks, languid debate performances, and the near-collapse of his campaign from mismanagement scuttled the effort. At the Embassy Suites here on election night, several of his staff and volunteers could be heard musing about what they planned to do when, not if, he dropped out. Still, Carson has a substantial war-chest and a still-functional online fundraising operation, and professed to be in for the long haul, without a lot of force behind the statement. “Well, I don't have any immediate plans of cessation,” he says.
Outside observers have suggested Carson is soldiering on through Nevada to thumb his nose at Ted Cruz, whose campaign floated the rumor that he was about to drop out of the race during the Iowa caucuses. Cruz has repeatedly apologized and blamed his staff’s actions, dubiously, on a CNN report, and he tried his luck again in a private meeting here; Carson “wasn’t impressed,” a staffer later told me. The candidate himself cast doubt on the Texas senator’s contrition tour. “As a Christian, I accept his apology, but, you know, God forgives us when we sin, but he doesn’t remove the consequences,” he says and sure enough, a couple of days later, Cruz sacked a top aide for playing a dirty trick on Marco Rubio.
The central theme of Carson’s inspiring personal story is his triumph over a self-destructive, volcanic temper though the salvation of his Christian faith. This makes him an unusual candidate and an unusual person, with a clerical, un-Trump-like tendency towards self-reflection and admitting his own shortcomings, and he says he’s stopped providing so much “lip service” of controversial comments to reporters like me who obscure his compassionate conservative message. In person, he projects an unnerving calm and, when you sit with him a while you can see the mechanism of this reflexive self-soothing: ask a tough or annoying question and he closes his eyelids and opens them slowly, with a Gautama-esque smile, rolling out an answer with deliberation and care.
“As a pediatric neurosurgeon, when you’re deep in somebody's brain and a blood vessel pops, if you panic, the patient is dead,” he explains. “You have to be very calm. You have to keep everybody else very calm, and you will generally find that neurosurgeons are calm people.”
C’mon, Dr. Carson, I want to know, don’t you ever get angry?
“I generally don’t, you know,” he replies. “If I’m, you know, working with a very obnoxious person, I just say: ‘That used to be a cute little baby. I wonder what happened to them.’”

Rico says that, if it comes to a choice in November between Hillary and The Donald, he may have to write in Carson...