On election bid, Carson says he's in

Potential Republican 2016 presidential candidate Ben Carson speaks to the media at the Arthur Outlaw Mobile Convention Center in Mobile, Ala., before he was to deliver a speech at a fundraising dinner for the University of Mobile, Thursday, April 30, 2015, in Mobile, Ala. Carson is a retired neurosurgeon turned conservative star. (Mike Brantley/AL.com via AP)  MAGS OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT
Potential Republican 2016 presidential candidate Ben Carson speaks to the media at the Arthur Outlaw Mobile Convention Center in Mobile, Ala., before he was to deliver a speech at a fundraising dinner for the University of Mobile, Thursday, April 30, 2015, in Mobile, Ala. Carson is a retired neurosurgeon turned conservative star. (Mike Brantley/AL.com via AP) MAGS OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who has never held elective office, said Sunday that he would seek the 2016 Republican nomination for president, joining the party's fast-growing field.

Carson is predicted by analysts to be the only high-profile black to enter the GOP's presidential primary as he tries to parlay his success as an author and speaker into a competitive campaign against established politicians.

"I'm willing to be part of the equation and therefore, I'm announcing my candidacy for president of the United States of America," he said in an interview that aired Sunday night by Ohio's WKRC television station.

He is set to make a more formal announcement during a speech in Detroit today.

Carson has portrayed himself in speeches and interviews as a fighter against political correctness and of politicians on the whole. It's a position reflected in his policy ideas, many of which are laid out in his six published books that don't necessarily follow straight conservative orthodoxy.

He's a fierce opponent of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act who, as a world-class surgeon, says health insurance companies should be turned into utilities with profit limits. He's a free-market advocate who points to the deregulation of Wall Street in the 1990s as the root cause of the financial crisis. He relied on food stamps during periods of his youth, yet points to President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society era as the start of the steady fall of the country's individualism and independence.

"I'm not going to do and say what's politically expedient; I'm going to say what's right," Carson said in an interview with Bloomberg before his announcement.

Carson earned national acclaim during 29 years leading the pediatric neurosurgery unit of Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore, where he still lives. He directed the first surgery to separate twins connected at the back of the head. His career inspired the 2009 movie, Gifted Hands, with actor Cuba Gooding Jr. depicting Carson.

"I see myself as a member of 'we the people,'" he told The Associated Press in an interview earlier this year, arguing that his lack of experience is an asset.

"I see myself as a logical American who has common sense," he continued, "and I think that's going to resonate with a lot of Americans, regardless of their political party."

But that belief is likely to be tested quickly as he is forced to compete for donors and support with more established and organized candidates like Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida -- all of whom have announced their candidacies -- and leading party figures like Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

The 63-year-old Detroit native remains largely unknown outside of conservative activists who have embraced him since his address at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast, where he offered a critique of the modern welfare state and the nation's overall direction.

The speech restated themes from Carson's 2012 book America the Beautiful, but he excited conservatives by doing so with President Barack Obama sitting just feet away.

Carson has since become a forceful critic of the nation's first black president on everything from health care to foreign policy. Carson also offers himself as a counter to other notable black commentators with more liberal views.

Most recently, Carson has spoken out on the unrest in his hometown, where residents have protested and rioted in the wake of Freddie Gray dying while in custody of the Baltimore Police Department. In a Time op-ed, Carson decried the protests and related vandalism as "gross misconduct."

Carson moved to Palm Beach, Fla., after his retirement from Johns Hopkins, but he is formally announcing his campaign in Detroit, where his mother raised him and his brother in poverty.

He attributes his politics to his upbringing, often describing his neighborhood culture as one where residents celebrated any new announcement of government support. Still, he acknowledges that his mother received welfare aid, and he insists that he supports "a safety net for the people who need a safety net."

His back story, though, was only a piece of what Carson acknowledges as an unexpected political rise that resulted in speaking engagements across the country, regular appearances on Fox News and viable poll numbers in early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. While he remains a long-shot candidate in a deep Republican field, Carson has consistently pulled 5 percent or 6 percent in those early state polls, which his advisers say was enough to lure him into the race.

The goal, according to Carson and his aides, is to use the campaign launch as a springboard in the weeks ahead, with each day that follows packed with events in early primary states. "The plan is to be able to speak in a very public forum," Carson said, adding that he's targeting the debate stage, where he'd face off with at least a half-dozen other Republican hopefuls, as his time to hit the national mainstream.

In the first 28 days after launching his exploratory committee in March, Carson raised more than $2 million. A super-political action committee established by outside supporters to push Carson toward a run raised more than $13.5 million in less than two years as of the end of 2014, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Carson is a staunch social conservative, opposing abortion rights and same-sex marriage, views he attributes to his personal faith as a Christian.

He has also undergone media training to round the edges off his incendiary rhetoric. In 2013, Carson was forced to withdraw as a commencement speaker at Johns Hopkins after linking same-sex marriage to pedophilia. He has pronounced the president's health care law the worst thing to happen in America "since slavery." And in March, he issued an apology after declaring that the experience of men in prison proved that homosexuality was a choice.

Carson, who has three sons, is rarely without his wife, Candy, by his side. Though she has no official title, she's described by aides as a senior adviser on his team, a group that has hired a mix of businessmen and political veterans in recent months in preparation for a run. Carson, who has made stops in New Hampshire during the exploratory portion of his campaign, will immediately hit the road to early voting states. He will head to Iowa tonight, then South Carolina this weekend. He'll then start next week in New Hampshire.

Information for this article was contributed by Steve Peoples and Bill Barrow of The Associated Press; by Phil Mattingly of Bloomberg News; and by Trip Gabriel of The New York Times.

A Section on 05/04/2015

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