Ben Carson, popular surgeon, declares bid for US president

Benjamin S. Carson, former head of paediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University, United States of America, returned to his hometown in Detroit on Monday to declare his bid for the Republican nomination for president.

“I’m Ben Carson and I’m a candidate for president of the United States,” said Mr. Carson, speaking before several hundred people in the city’s downtown Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts.

He joins what is expected to be a crowded GOP field of political veterans and first-time office seekers including Mr. Carson.

The official campaign rolled out gradually over the weekend, starting with several television appearances airing on Sunday by Mr. Carson. They were followed by early morning visits to Detroit’s African-American history museum and a public high school named in his honor. 

An anticipated, subsequent visit to Iowa, however, was put off because Mr. Carson wanted to attend to his mother who has fallen ill, his campaign said.

Born into poverty in Detroit on September 18, 1951, Mr. Carson was raised by a single mother. He graduated from Yale and the University of Michigan’s medical school, then moved to Baltimore. At age 33, he became the youngest head of paediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and the first African-American to hold the post.

When he was 37, Mr. Carson rocketed to fame when he became the first doctor to successfully separate twins conjoined at the head. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the nation’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mr. Carson has long been a hero in America’s black communities. His first book, “Gifted Hands,” became a staple in inner-city schools and church book clubs. And though he has long held conservative views, Mr. Carson didn’t emerge onto the political sphere until 2013, when he rebuked the Affordable Care Act and called for a flat tax during remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast as President Barack Obama sat feet away.

The prayer breakfast speech introduced Mr. Carson to a new audience: conservatives desperate for someone to make a compelling and distilled argument against the Obama era. Mr. Carson became a Fox News commentator and in 2014 published One Nation, a political manifesto that, among other things, called for term limits for federal judges and a new constitutional convention. The book sold more copies than Hillary Clinton’s long-awaited memoir, “Hard Choices.” Mr. Carson concluded there is an audience for him in the Republican primary.

Nobody has won a major-party nomination for president without holding prior elected office or leading the nation at war since Wendell Willkie in 1940. No person with such a profile has ever won the White House.