Full interview: Ben Carson meets with Register editorial board

I'm Glenn Hicks the Des Moines Register's editorial board and we're here with our endorsement interview of dr. ben Carson he's running for the Republican nomination for the presidency dr. Carson welcome well thank you I see that we're gonna start with just having the editorial board which is sitting close here introduced themselves family Nash executive editor Clark Kaufman I'm an editorial writer David shavers president publisher Brian Smith engagement editor you look too young to be that we're working on that we just would like you to start off by telling us why we should consider endorsing you for the nomination okay well first of all you know why did I even get into this after a arduous career in neurosurgery 15,000 operations I was very much looking forward to retirement my wife was looking forward to it even more than I was but after so many people started clamoring for me to get involved after the prayer breakfast I kind of ignored it at first and said that don't worry about it that'll go away but it didn't go away it kept building and pretty soon I was getting 5,000 petitions every week I had literally hundreds of thousands boxes filling every room and I said well I don't really see this as my calling in life but I said Lord if you really want me to do this you have to open the doors because all the professionals say it's impossible for somebody like me but if you open the doors I walk through them and the doors began to open and we felt that really there was no way financially to be able to run an organization because of my personal philosophy which is not to take money from billionaires who want to inflow and not to take special interest money I just believe that that's one of the scourges of our society has really caused us a lot of problems and distorted the system that was intended for our country nevertheless we were still able to raise a lot of money from We the People now the initial startup cost of raising money is very high and I think a lot of people who understand the political arena know that if you have an organization already your governor your senator the costs are not nearly as high but to start from scratch with no donor base nothing is expensive that expense comes down every month and is now down considerably however having said that starting a novice organization we put together people I had to take the words of a lot of people because I didn't know anybody and it was quite credible and creditable the job that they did and getting me you know where I was it was almost impossible task and yet they did it and yet I was able to see that things were not moving the way that they need it to move the messaging wasn't what it needed to be there was a lot of animosity between you know my campaign and the media which caused the media to start looking for other routes to get to me and that's how the whole Armstrong Williams thing started and I just did a deep dive and I realized that it wasn't working ultimately and we didn't have a good operator one of the things that I learned in my 18 years on the Kellogg board of directors and 16 years on Costco is that when things don't work you know you have a few options you can ignore it you can double down on what you're doing or you can do a deep dive analysis figure out what the problem is and correct it and particularly it frequently requires someone with operational ability there are a lot of people who can talk and who actually espouse very good ideals but don't know how to actually execute and that's what was needed having put that in place has been tremendous you've already seen things happening you've already seen our tax policy come out which I've been trying to get out for months and you're going to see a bunch of other policies coming out very shortly so that people will not have to guess and you know as you saw Forbes that that our tax plan is the best one they're going to be seeing that about a lot of our policies quite frankly as they come out because you know I'm not a highly partisan person but I'm very concerned about America so the things that I talk about they're not democrat or republican things they're American things the things that concern me are the divisiveness that are going on in our society all the wedges that are being driven between the people a house divided against itself cannot stand and yet you know we have a war on women ratio Wars age Wars income Wars religious wars everything imaginable and previously our strength has been our unity and that is something that I think should be very high on the agenda for the next leader of this nation it has not been high in the agenda most recently I think fiscal responsibility is another thing that's very important the current generation is the first generation in our nation's history that will be worse off than the previous generation and the generation after that will be worse than the one after that worse why because of our policies as we continue to run up our national debt as the fiscal gap continues to increase and no one even talks about it it's sort of like they're just numbers they don't matter and yet they're impacting our society you know why does the Fed central bank have to utilize the policies it does why can't they raise the interest rates to a normal level because our national debt is so high because the debt service order is so high and who does that impact the most average people middle class and poor people who now no no no longer have a mechanism for increasing their wealth they used to be able to put 5 percent of their check in the bank every Friday and watch it grow over a few decades and have a nice nest egg and be able to retire that's gone the bond market doesn't work from the only thing that works is the stock market but you have to have risk tolerance to be able to use that the average American doesn't have that rich people do income cap grows it's not because rich people are evil is because of this silly policy of continuing to run up our debt so that we can't adjust our monetary policies in a way that is beneficial to the average American also the huge number of regulations I'm not an anti regulation person but recognize what the deleterious effect of those regulations are every single regulation cost money in terms of goods and services it's a very regressive tax that is imposed upon our society and who does it hurt when you go into the store and buy a box of detergent and it costs 10 cents more because of regulation rich people don't notice that poor people don't notice it right away middle-class notices when they get to the cash register and everything has gone up a little bit and they're they don't fill it their quality of life is the same as it used to be but can't quite put their finger on the reason why that is the case and then you look at the deleterious effect of all the regulations manufacturing segments for instance the regulations per capita in a manufacturing industry for companies with employees of less than 50 is $34,000 it makes it really hard to compete particularly with other countries when we do things like that when we have the highest corporate tax rates of course we're going to drive this here and it would be so simple for us to lower that system that's why you know I've come up with the tax plan that is a flat rate across the board for everybody with no deductions and no exemptions because as soon as you put in a deduction or an exemption everybody starts manipulating everything to be able to take advantage of it and some people can take advantage of it better than others we need something that is completely fair and that's why I like the ideal proportionality you know I think God's pretty fair and he had proportionality and tithe he said he didn't say if you have a bumper crop you owe me triple tithe you didn't say if your crops fail you owe me nothing and so I it's a simplistic idea but it works and you don't get to inject your ideological preferences into it you know you make ten billion dollars a year proportionately you pay a billion you make ten dollars a year you pay one you get the same rights and privileges if your neighbor makes ten times more money than you do they pay ten times more taxes than you do it's a very very simple and in terms of just a corporate rate there's over two point one trillion dollars overseas if we provide a mechanism to bring that money back it will come back and what I've suggested is a six month hiatus on corporate taxes they pay zero we repatriate that money the only stipulation being that ten percent of it has been used in empowerment zones and to create jobs for people who are unemployed and on welfare it will be the biggest stimulus since FDR's New Deal and wouldn't cost the taxpayers one penny low-hanging fruit and it gets corporate America to start thinking about investing in their communities investing in people around them because I really believe that it is a responsibility of the private sector to take care of the downtrodden it is not the government's responsibility and when the government began taking that over that's when we started accumulating unreasonable debts you know Johnson's you know war on poverty how'd that work out 19 trillion dollars later we have 10 times more people on foods more welfare more poverty broken homes crime incarceration everything is not only worse it's much worse and it doesn't mean that the government is evil and horrible it simply means that they're doing the wrong thing and it's a private sector the government can help facilitate private sector facilitate life liberty the pursuit of happiness but not insinuate itself into every aspect of our lives it is not the way the system was designed and you know in terms of the way the system was designed it was also designed for citizens statesmen not for career politicians and career politicians would have you believe that they're the only ones who can solve the problems but you know we got almost 9,000 years of experience in Congress and they're not solving our problems we need to look for people who have a long history of solving problems you know I have been involved in solving a lot of problems my nearest surgical career was fraught with controversy because I tended to push the envelope you know for instance with a contra blast you know the most common form of dwarfism 7% of them used to die in infancy it was a well known problem when I came up with a mechanism for fixing it there was outrage and no surgeons are the ones who killed these people because when people would go in the area was so tight they frequently did kill them or made them worse but we figured out a way to do it without doing that and I was reported to the Maryland Medical Society the AMA carson's a wild man but by that time you know I had done enough cases I could reveal the data and in medicine unlike politics and data does matter and now you know it's a standard technique used all over the world and a conjurer class no longer 7% of them died in infancy same thing with brain stem tumors with a lot of the seizure procedures and it's it's not because I'm the smartest person that ever existed in the world not by a longshot but by working with people a lot of people we were able to define the problems we were able to look at data we were able to figure out what was going on and how to fix it and I think that's a paradigm that works in politics as well be there well we'll ask some questions but that's kind of things you talked about first I wanted to talk about something that's in the news right now something we're not really clear what happened in North Korea yesterday last night what is the proper response and how would you respond as president - okay situation like that well you know first of all I think North Korea is a very dangerous regime particularly with what Kim Jong and who seems to be somewhat unstable and unpredictable and we need to try to keep him under control now whether they actually exploded a hydrogen bomb or not who knows but I think it's always safer to assume the worst than to assume the best in order to keep him under control I think we need to work with China because you know China is really their lifeline and working with them to try to keep him under control you know reimposing severe sanctions when he starts doing things that he's not supposed to do you know there are treaties says he's not supposed to be exploding nuclear weapons so if he does that justifies the imposition of severe sanctions in those situations but I think another thing that we need to be thinking about you know Ronald Reagan was severely criticized and ridiculed when he talked about you know Star Wars defense but the fact of the matter is whether it's Kim jong-un whether it's Ali Khomeini you know whether it's some terrorist group as much as we don't want this to happen eventually they're going to have nuclear weapons eventually they're going to have nuclear capabilities and we need to be able to defend ourselves so we need to be working on Strategic Defense Initiative and one of the things I think that is very important is we need to re-engage ourselves in space you know we've largely Abid in their space program I think to our detriment because one of the reasons we were able to stay so far out in front of everybody else and our offensive and defensive military capabilities was because of the many discoveries that came out of the space program even our everyday lives are affected by our cellphones came out of the space program and as we've abandoned that you know people have caught up with us there maybe even some who have surpassed us this is not something that we can afford to do so it's not about men walking on Mars it's about the kind of technology the kind of innovation that really keeps us up front and in the future he who controls space will control the earth and it is going to be our capabilities of monitoring when somebody launches a nuclear weapon and the ability to track it and to shoot it down before it reaches us this is absolutely critical for us we also need to respond to the cyberattacks from Korea you know when somebody hits us with a cyber attack we should return the fire and it should be so severe that they would never even consider doing such a thing again but we can't be afraid to do that our offensive capabilities and cyber are very substantial our defensive capabilities still need some work and I think there needs to be a public-private partnership take advantage of a lot of the innovation that has come out of Silicon Valley and other places working along with our government but you know this affects us all we need to be talking about our electrical grid you know we have harden that this is absolutely critical all it takes is an electromagnetic pulse those come from the Sun every approximately 150 years the last one was 150 five years ago with our grid the way it is right now EMP today could set us back 40 years makes us extremely vulnerable so could a nuclear blast in our EXO atmosphere and if that was coordinated with multiple cyberattacks and a few dirty bombs can you imagine what would happen we have to protect ourselves can I ask you to back up just a little bit you mentioned the responsibility for taking care of the downtrodden and you would acknowledge that the federal government has a responsibility to act as a safety net atmosphere I don't have any problem with safety nets there's been a false narrative about me people say Oh Carson grew up very poor and he must have benefit from got some government programs and therefore now he wants to take them all away what a piece of crap you know but you know people just come out with all of these lies all the time that's probably the most disappointing part of this whole process is the lack of integrity and the press I mean unbelievable stuff I mean I even saw an article yesterday in Yahoo News that was still talking about you know saying that Carson was dishonest about a class at Yale and he took where he was the most honest student when that's already the article has been found that showed that that was true and there's still you know propagating these lies is it's just horrible but at any rate I have no desire to get rid of safety nets for people who need them my emphasis is on providing ladders of opportunity to allow people to climb out of a state of dependency and become part of the fabric of America that's where the emphasis I think that that the the private sector yeah the private sector is the place where those things are done the best it's relationships with other people you know there's a program for instance in Tennessee where they go out and they find people private sector who are down and out and they bring them into a program that they pay for 13 week program clean them up give them new clothes you know nonprofit yeah and teach them what they need to know in order to hold a job help them get a job talk to their employers work with their employee 70 percent of those people wind up off the dole in less than a year and one young lady I talked to when they found her she was homeless and a drug addict when I talked to her she was three months away from getting her PhD you know what can happen when we are willing to invest in people a reason that's so important is because we only have 330 million people in our country we're competing with with China with 1.4 billion with India with over a billion we can't afford to waste any of our people we can't afford to have 20% of everybody who enters high school not finishing high school in this country we've we've got to start thinking about how do we develop our people we have to start looking at education and recognizing what works and what doesn't work you know when we look at the statistics home school is the best private school is next best charter school is next best public school is worse now let's not just know that let's do something about that right the federal government I think can help facilitate and coordinate those efforts but the reasons well the reason I don't particularly like to have the federal government doing these things is because they don't seem to be able to resist the urge to become big bureaucratic operations and that's what I'm interested in well what sort of programs are you talking about that are these big bureaucratic things that that need to be scaled back or maybe even eliminate almost everything in government you know there's a six hundred and forty five government agencies and sub-agencies 645 there's 4.1 million federal employees I mean just think about those numbers that's staggering and in terms of trimming them back what I would personally do is recognize that tens of thousands of those federal employees retire each year don't we hire them you can shift people around to make sure critical positions are covered but don't keep hiring people and let that die by attrition and get down to an efficient level with all those 645 agencies and sub-agencies I would bring in the director of every single one of them and I will say cut your budget by 2 to 3 percent and if you can't do that give me your resignation right now anybody who tells me there's not to the 3% of fact I don't think they're dealing with reality and not only that but I would tell them you have to do it in a way that the public won't even know that you did it because the last time you remember a few years ago with the sequestration people were told to cut their budget but I think they were told just the opposite if they cut it and the way the people feel it that most so that nobody will be talking about cutting budgets anymore that's ridiculous and you know the amount of money that we waste you know for instance the government owns nine hundred thousand buildings 77 thousand of those buildings are either not utilized or under your life and yet we least 500 million square feet of space using taxpayers money does that make any sense you know you see these kinds of things all over the place and one of the things that I learned in the business world is how to be efficient how to use money efficiently how to use things like the Lean Six Sigma program some of you've probably heard of that it's applied you know to corporations Toyota to be a lot of business have used it usually gets them at least 25% savings and enormous amount of efficiency can you imagine what happens when we start applying programs like that to the federal government I think it needs to be done we the American people deserve to have a government that is run efficiently and not like this garbage that we have right now so one of the reasons that no one in the traditional political arena isn't the think about me and they shouldn't be because I'm not gonna abide by all of the crap but that's been going on you know the government needs to be returned to the people it needs to be working for the people it needs to be truly transparent there needs to be some integrity people need to believe in the government again I know I don't think that's what I said what I said is that the vast vast majority of police are honest decent hard-working people there are some bad police there is no question about that just like there are bad teachers and bad doctors and nurses even bad journalists but we don't judge the whole group you know by what's done there and rather than you know casting stones and aspersions why don't we look at how we fix the problem the problem I believe is fixed by relationships you know when I went to Ferguson this summer and I talked to the police you know to the city officials to business owners who were hurt during the riots to people who were in the riots all in the same room I was shocked by the level of cordiality that existed there and the respect they have for each other why because they have been having regular meetings they knew each other they were on a first-name basis with each other and they were making real progress it was because of the relationships and that's what we're going to have to do we have to introduce police into the communities early and often so that they are known so that they're not feared they're part of the community I started to a police officer in Baltimore this summer he said he makes it his duty every day to go to the neighborhood to walk through the neighborhood everybody knows him he says he never has to buy lunch people are always inviting me in for lunch you know I mean this is what happens when people begin to know each other and that's how we solve that problem we're not going to solve it I don't think in any other way I do like the idea of the body cameras think it protects both the police and the populace but we also need to emphasize the importance of respect people need to respect the police the police need to respect the people and you know I was talking to one lady in Ferguson she said you know it was 2:00 in the morning there were all these lights police cars in her neighborhood she came out and she said to one of the policemen oh what's going on he said go back in the house it doesn't concern you that's not showing respect for people this is their a neighborhood you know so we have to teach the police to respect the people we have to teach the people the respect of police go back to your tax plan so this would lower taxes for the wealthiest households and it would everybody would pay something it would probably it's gonna increase taxes for the poorest right even even the people at below the one fifty percent poverty line have to pay something we call it de minimis tax would be like a hundred bucks but that way everybody has some skin in the game so how do you sell this to the majority of Americans where does middle-class see their that's benefiting them I think we sell it by telling people that every policy that we push is talking about equality liberty and justice for everybody treating everybody the same and you know the vast majority of Americans in this tax plan if you go through it and you analyze it very few people if anybody is going to be paying more but in terms of the wealthy you say that it gives them a big tax increase what you have to recognize is that many of the wealthy are not paying their fair share of taxes right now I know a lot of wealthy people I mean really wealthy people who don't pay as much as I pay I pay a lot because I don't have all these shelters and tax accountants and lawyers and you know we have costed this out we have analyzed it all because we want to make sure that you know we're basically revenue neutral that we're able to take care of all the duties of the government everybody needs to participate that in that and they need to participate it in a fair way and I don't think care the American people are going to be opposed to having something that treats everybody the same if your neighbor makes ten times more money than you do your neighbor pays ten times more ting into I think people are gonna like that help me with the math on the revenue neutral because PolitiFact has said it has agreed with the statement that there's a one trillion dollar shortfall so where tell me how they're wrong and it's actually revenue neutral well none of that has taken into account the tremendous spurring of the economy that this is going to create nor has it taken into account the fact that we're going to be reducing the size of government through attrition and through cutting the various federal agency programs it which is which is going to be a lot more than one point one show it now is by the way it's gonna be a lot more the cuts will be more than one point it'd be a lot more but you're also talking about you previously talked about increasing spending on the Strategic Defense Initiative and technology and other things to protect this in the space program obviously that's gonna talk cost a lot of money so where where's that money coming from well recognize that there is an enormous amount of money that is not being tapped you know our country in terms of assets owns well more than a hundred and fifty trillion dollars now if you take a well-run business and you give them 150 trillion dollars in assets even if they only get a two percent return on it it's going to be an enormous amount of money not only are we not getting a return on our assets we're actually paying money because we run things so inefficiently so you mentioned in the beginning that some things about your campaign and how you wanted to get this tax policy out sooner so what happened and what happened in the campaign we didn't have operators we had people say well wait a minute listen Alissa oh look you know you know how that works and that just doesn't get things done and you know I I have a surgical personality if you know anything about medicine surgical personalities we like to get stuff done they don't like to sit around talk about it all day long so where is it going from here in terms of your campaign some have suggested that this shows some faltering of the campaign but it sounds like you're recalibrating to be able to get some more action is that yeah I think what faltering would be is recognizing that there's a problem and shutting your eyes and not doing anything about it that would be a real problem now you know I don't you know get upset by the fact that people criticize whatever I do if I don't do anything they're gonna criticize if I do this healthier - you know that's life in the big city that's just gonna happen don't worry about that you just worry about getting stuff done the notion of the Department of Education monitoring institutions of higher learning for extreme political lives how would how would that work and where would the monitoring take place now kind of people be looking for well basically when complaints are heard you know from students or from other faculty members you would go in and investigate you can do that rather surreptitiously and you find out whether there's any validity to it right for instance yeah just as an example you probably know this example already but one of this colleges in Florida one of the professors told the students as an assignment to all take out a piece of paper and write the name Jesus on it and then they put it on the ground and stomp on it and one of the students refused to do that and he wounded up being disciplined you know there turned out to be enough ruckus about it any eventually you know they rectify this but that's that's what I call extreme political bias people would suggest that having a federal agency investigate college campuses for political bias it leans a little bit toward thought police yeah no I don't think so I think when we're talking about federal taxpayer dollars going to an institution that is educating our children I don't care whether extreme political bias is coming from the right or the left it shouldn't be there institutions of higher education are supposed to be just for that higher education that means you have to be able to look at everything you need to be able to discuss these things because these are people who are going to be leaders in our society they cannot be sheltered yeah you know they when you get out in the real world there is no safe zone let me go over here so nobody will say something that will offend me you know that's craziness that's not what we want to be teaching our students we want to teach our students to be able to look at listen to and evaluate and discuss everything and when that's not happening we are doing ourselves a disservice we are weakening ourselves and we are setting ourselves up for failure do that role given your concerns about over-regulation and other again guidelines would have to be in place you know I I take it a step further I believe in the secret shopper concept you know for for all government agencies you know I believe that there should be people out there who are acting as consumers and saying if we are taking care of them appropriately and you don't have to have very many people you just need to have people know that they could be out there but for example federal employees may be infiltrating classrooms or libraries it's not just classrooms and libraries but anything that the taxpayers are paying for we ought to be monitoring it and making sure that it is done appropriately there should not be such a regard to inefficiency in regard to unresponsiveness you know when you have a problem and you go to the federal housing administration and you talk to people and it takes you four hours to talk to somebody and then they blow you off you don't get anything done you know I want to know about those kinds of things and I want to know what can be done to fix those kind of things American people should not be subject to that it sounds like you're require you're suggesting a radical transformation the way people view federal government that you want their people to trust I want them to trust the federal I want the federal government to work and and how can you our unit what's the first thing you're gonna do to do that well first of all you know I'm and as the if I'm president I will talk to everybody I will tell them what the vision is for how we should be working and I will tell everybody that we welcome them and we welcome their suggestions in terms of how we make sure that we have a government that is responsible but also will let them know that we are going to be holding people responsible for what's done just like we do in the private sector we would do the same thing in the government the people deserve no less than that let's talk a little bit about foreign policy and you've been criticized and your expertise in that area sounds like that's part of when you switched up your advisors and got the new people so tell me what what have you done to get up to speed on foreign policy well I have talked to a lot of people you know former government officials general policy advisors I think I've become very conversant quite frankly in foreign policy and and therefore you will see if you ask me a foreign policy per question you won't get what you get from most of the candidates which is you know a 30 second or 1 minute spiel which always says the same thing I think my knowledge has increased dramatically but having said that I also recognize that no matter how much you learn you're never going to be the world expert and you know Russian Affairs or in Islam even though I can tell you a lot about both of those things but recognize the Bible says in proverbs 11:14 and the multitude of counselors is safety and that's what I've done I've gotten a multitude of consulars I get to hear viewpoints of lots of different ways to take care of Isis a lots of different approaches to taking care of the safety of our citizens in this country and I'm ready to to wax on any of those subjects in some depth well as you may remember about 6 or 7 weeks ago and Sinjar which had been taken over by Isis what we did in working in conjunction with the Kurds and our Special Ops people as we cut off the supply routes to Sanjar that softened the target so that we were then able to go and with the Kurds and their Special Ops followed by our Air Force and was able to take that city pretty easily the same kind of thing that I'm talking about when we look at their command and control center and Raqqa there's only four entry and exit routes you can take control of those you can soften them and then you know we can tell where they are we know where they are our Special Ops people can go in there at 2:00 in the morning and raid those areas and we can make life very miserable for them I don't see any reason at all why we let them sit up there smoke their fat cigars you know we ought to make life very very difficult for them you talked a little bit earlier about holding government accountable a lot of fact checks of statements that you've made during this campaign have come back saying that they were inaccurate or untrue how do you give me an example accountable to me I'll show you because they're virtual act here but when I look at a lot of the stuff that people have accused me of and then we come back and demonstrate that it's not true how come nobody ever retracts it let me talk to Fleming who the fact is done a number of it pollutes ambled that are they biased are they bias do you think are they but they're not just biased against me they're biased against a lot of people you know why don't they police check themselves sometimes why don't they check themselves they never admit to being wrong about anything and they're not right about everything by any stretch of the imagination and a lot of times when they apply their criteria they apply their criteria based on their ideology not on objective evidence so there is there something specific because I can I can generally tell you what's behind anything that I've said so here's the one example you previously said that the Family Research Council according to some government agencies is a terrorist group but a fact rated this false saying the Southern Poverty Law Center had called them an extremist group but that they could find no record of a single government agency referring to them as a terrorist group well when I referred to that I was talking about the southern group and I didn't refer them to them as a government agency yeah big because somebody says that I refer to them as a government agency doesn't mean that that's true I know the Southern Poverty Law Center is not a government agency but they did make that claim and they also put me on their list said that you know I was a terrorist but there was so much pushback on it that they rescinded that said that did cause up quite a storm of controversy was the comparison with a Affordable Care Act to slavery do you still think that's a valid comparison well first of all I don't think it was a comparison I said it was the worst thing since slavery that's not equating it to slavery by any stretch of the imagination slavery is by far as I'm concerned the worst thing that ever occurred in our society having said that I do realize that that probably is the wrong kind of language to use you notice I don't use that anymore because people focus on that and they don't focus on what you're saying my point was that it shifts the dynamic between the government and the people and most people had no idea that that was happening the people were supposed to be at the pinnacle the government beneath them to facilitate life liberty and pursuit of happiness with the Affordable Care Act the government comes along and says don't care what you people think this is what we're doing it was something it down your throat and if you don't like it too bad that fundamentally shifts the relationship between the people and the government and it's one of the reasons that you know Stalin Lenin all these people when they you read their writings they say first thing you have to do is you take control of the most important thing that people have which is their health care and I don't think the average American has any idea what just happened do you think that's a valid comparison with what's happening in the United States today well I think we obviously need to be cognizant of the fact you know there's a whole list of countries where tyranny reigned and where the first thing they did was disarm the populace so obviously it's something that we need to be very much aware of and we need to recognize that second Amendment rights are there for a reason but we also need to recognize that we have to be responsible as a society we need to be talking about how do we keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of mentally ill people we need to be talking about how do we protect the children in our schools you know we if we just get in our separate corners and fire shots at each other no pun intended that's not going to solve the problem what do you think in Oregon well I don't think obviously that we should condone you know lawlessness there are other ways to make their protest I do understand the issue you know the Bureau of Land Management can be pretty heavy-handed the federal government there's no reason the federal government needs to own millions and millions of acres out there I personally believe I've said and I've written that we need to engage in a transfer of federal lands to the States where the states and the people of those states can then determine the best use of that land there's absolutely no reason that the federal government has to own all that land a little bit about your fall in the polls I mean is that are you what do you think the main reasons are behind it always a little bit about the media you've talked about your camp I think it's multifactorial you know I've been hit with all kinds of accusations you know that you know you lied about you know your upbringing you know and you know they go back to my old neighborhood talk to people who knew me after I had my violent temper I mean why would anybody else know about it and they said well obviously it didn't happen and then finally they find an article and create magazine from 1997 where they did an extensive interview with my mother who talked all about my temper and all about those things and they said oh never mind and any move on to the next thing and then they say well you know your West Point story you know it doesn't jive you know West Point doesn't give out scholarships general Westmoreland was never in Detroit around that time and then subsequently they find out on the West Point web page that they do talk about giving scholarships but they just talk about a different way they did the same thing back then and and then they found out that he was in fact in Detroit for a Congressional Medal of Honor just like I described but it was in February instead of May you know it's a long time I didn't remember exactly which month it was but did they go back and retract any of that absolutely not and then they you know talked about you know class and Yale where I was the most honor student they said obviously just made all that up and then when the article was found the show that that actually did happen yeah well let's just move on never any retraction you got all of that stuff hitting you you know Saturday Night Live making fun of you I think I'm the first person who ever had four segments on one program and then you know obviously you know they're concerned about me and then you know you have Paris and then you have San Bernardino and a lot of people with the narrative that because he's a nice guy and he saw smoke and he couldn't possibly be able to deal with terrorism so I had a lot of stuff coming down on me at the same time and you know it's okay I can deal with that and you know I haven't given up I'm going to ten continue to say the same things to bring logic and common sense to the people and I do believe what Thomas Jefferson said he said that you know before we turned into something else that people would wake up and recognize what was going on and start thinking for themselves and I believe that's exactly what's going to happen I think we're all going to be surprised okay but first you yes why do you think there has been such a focus on your personal life in your upbringing because I can't find any scandals you know everybody was absolutely certain they would find scandal this guy has been a Jones off for 36 years just got to be some nurse he's had an affair with there's got to be something and they can't find anything and it's very frustrating so they say well let's attack his character people think that he's a good person and that he's honest so see if we can destroy that that's what that's what's going on you mentioned being soft-spoken do you think that that is a hindrance when you're going against people like Donald Trump I think a lot of people equate you know loudness and brashness with strength I'm encouraging people to look at records of accomplishment what have people done what have they accomplished in their lives you know is there a reason for instance that the Library of Congress named me one of 89 living legends on the occasion of his 200th anniversary maybe there isn't maybe we should go back and look and see why that happened maybe there's a reason that I have 67 honorary Doctorate degrees I doubt anybody else has anywhere close to that probably you combine them all you know there's a reason for that obviously a lot of accomplishment that has occurred and you know I want to use that ability to get things done in conjunction with a lot of other extraordinaire really talented people to solve the problems because I can't in good conscience sit back and watch what's happening to our country happen and not do anything about it I just can't what I love to believe me I would love to put my feet up and relax but I can't do it we have senator Rubio coming in next we're throughout this up soon what question would you ask him I want I might ask him what is the advantage of accepting money from very rich people who want to influence you and will you be able to resist their influence what do you think it's something that people don't know about you that they should well what they don't know about me I guess is that I am NOT a person who gives up easily I'm a fighter and even though I don't yell and jump up and scream you probably not find anybody who's more tenacious than I am what does that mean going forward let's say that a little finish in February first subsequent what do you see your role going forward well I'm not looking at a low finish on February 1st I'm looking at a good finish and I'm looking at continuing to improve but if I were one of those individuals you know whose polling 0 1 2 % persistently I would drop on what can we expect from you leading up to February first how often are we gonna see you here what's your campaign strategy I will be here at least 16 days and I will be hitting a lot of different venues and talking to a lot of people and you know the more people that I talk to the more people who actually did an opportunity to see Who I am for themselves as opposed to who people say I am the better off we're going to be

Channel: DMRegister

Views: 53,404

Rating: 4.7624521 out of 5

Keywords: ben carson, News, iowa caucus, iowa politics, des moines, des moines register, des moines register editorial board, iowa, politics, iowa caucuses

Id: 5RU0cXlWqOU

Length: 52min 14sec (3134 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2016