Ben Carson Says 'Power of God' Enabled Presidential Campaign
Dr. Ben Carson said his current success in the presidential race shows "the power of God."
The 64-year-old Carson, a member of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, is a retired pediatric neurosurgeon and currently the second-highest polling Republican candidate.
He appeared on Daystar Television's "Marcus and Joni" program and was asked why he, a political novice, decided to run for the nation's highest public office.
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Just as Carson has maintained throughout his candidacy, he explained that he never wanted to run for president. But after he gave a keynote speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast, where he bashed "Obamacare" in front of President Barack Obama, thousands of Americans begged him to run.
"Well, I must admit that Candy [Carson] and I were really looking forward to retirement, and we bought a beautiful home in Florida on a country club on a 17-hole [golf course]. I bought an organ, I was going to learn how to play the organ, and read all those books you never read, and see all those movies, and not have to set the alarm clock," Carson stated. "But you know, sometimes the Lord has a plan that is different for us."
Carson said that the desire of thousands of Americans and the will of God compelled him to jump in the race.
"After the [National] Prayer Breakfast, people started clamoring for me to run for president, which I kind of thought was a ridiculous thing," Carson admitted. "I said 'that will all die down, so just ignore it.' But, it never did and it just kept building and pretty soon, I was getting a box every week with 5,000 petitions in it. Pretty soon, I had a whole room full of these boxes, and people saying 'you have to do this, you have to do that for us.'"
As more and more people called on Carson to run for president, he finally turned to God for direction on whether he should sacrifice so much time and energy into a presidential campaign.
"The draft movement built and I finally said, 'Lord, I don't particularly want to do this, this is not on my bucket list, but if you want me to do it, you open the doors and I'll walk through them. If you close the doors, I'll sit down,'" Carson said. "And, the doors began flying open, much to the consternation of all the professional class and all the pundits who said 'it is impossible, you can't possibly put together a national organization as a political neophyte. You don't know any of the people, there is no money. You can't do it. It is impossible. Forget about it.'"
"And yet, you see it is happening and they don't understand the power of God," Carson continued.
Although many pundits thought Carson's campaign would struggle to get off the ground, Carson is less than six percentage points behind Republican frontrunner, billionaire Donald Trump, according to the RealClearPolitics average of national Republican nomination polls.
Also in the interview, Carson was asked about his newly released book, A More Perfect Union, and opined that the U.S. Constitution is "inspired" by God.
"The principles were wonderful. I think they were geniuses and I think they were divinely inspired," Carson argued. "The whole thing was about to fall apart in 1787 and Benjamin Franklin, the elder statesman, said, 'Gentleman, during the pre-revolutionary days and the revolutionary war everything out of your mouth was 'God save us,' and now you don't want to talk to God. Let's get down on our knees and ask God to give us wisdom.' They knelt and prayed and got up and they put together 16-and-a-third-page document that is one of the most admired and substantial documents in the history of mankind."
