Ben Carson Learns About His ‘Place’

A black candidate for president learns the hard way that the media culture expects him to know a black man’s place, and stay there. That place has to be in the Democratic Party.

The moving finger writes, and having stuck that finger sharply in the eye of the black candidate, moves on, and neither the ample piety nor the stunted wit on the other end of that finger can retrieve a single line.

This is the lesson Ben Carson is learning in the weird race for the Republican nomination for president. This is his Herman Cain moment, reminiscent in a superficial but telling way of the black phenomenon of 2012.

Herman Cain, the godfather of pizza, left behind him a distinguished business career — rescuer of stumbling companies, president of the National Restaurant Association, vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City — when he caught the itch to run for president in 2012.

He led in the polls for several weeks, even besting President Obama in one match-up, until the media found a woman who said she had been having a 13-year affair with him. He had sexually harassed her, she said, though it was never clear why it took her 13 years to find out what had been going on between the sheets. Such a story of lust gone astray, even if true, would hardly rate a beep on the Clinton-O-Meter. Nevertheless, that was all the finger wrote for the godfather. He was making whoopee at the wrong party.

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