Dr. Ben Carson is still skating around the question of whether he'll seek the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, but the rising conservative star says he's greatly encouraged by the sweeping Republican victories in the midterm elections.
"I can tell you, I'm very, very proud of my fellow Americans for coming out and expressing themselves," Carson, the former chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, said Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
"But we still have work to do to get the others out and there are a lot of people who are discouraged, just pretty much given up on our system.
"They think everybody's a liar and a crook and a cheat and they have good reason for believing that, but it's not true and we need to make sure that we manifest that."
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Carson — author of
"One Vote: Make Your Voice Heard,'' written with Candy Carson and published by Tyndale House Publishers — has been dropping hints over the past year that he may throw his hat in the ring.
And he has said that the results of the midterms would be a major factor in his decision. But asked several times by Steve Malzberg if he's planning a White House run, Carson revealed it's is still up in the air.
"No, I haven’t thrown in the ring, but I'm a surgeon, I have a surgical personality. I always look carefully before I leave and I want to be pretty close to 100 percent sure that running is something that my fellow citizens truly want me to do," he said.
"It's not something that anybody who's all that sane would really want to do when you consider the turmoil, the havoc that it's going to wreak on your life and the life of your family. It's a sacrifice."
When Malzberg pressed Carson to give him a sense of how close he is to running on a scale of one to ten, the physician joked, "The square root of 77.7."
Carson said Americans are beginning to see through the biases of the liberal media.
"A lot of people are beginning to see the folly of the media. The media likes to distort things to manipulate people and the assumption is that people are stupid," he said.
"The assumption is that people can be easily manipulated and controlled and I believe that maybe that may have been the case, but I believe they're waking up in droves."
He said that officials in the Obama administration have been "encouraged to carry out these shenanigans" because they don't worry about consequences.
"When something like Benghazi happened and it's obvious that there's cover-up going on … they just say, 'Oh, no, no, it's all okay,'" Carson said.
"All the computers crashing with the IRS, 'Ah, it's okay, don't be paranoid.' People are just not quite that gullible and it's good, but Republicans have a real task on their hand right now.
"They've inherited a significant mantle of leadership. What are they going to do with it? They have to do something with it now."
One of those tasks should be to reach out to disenfranchised Democrats, according to Carson.
"This is a wonderful opportunity to make some inroads into many of the groups that traditionally have voted Democrat who've now been shown that they're just being played and they're just being cultivated for their votes," he said.
"Let's make sure that they know that there are those who value them and really want to have a system that works for everybody."