Stop right there. Surgery is a SMALL-team activity, with a single person (the senior surgeon) in absolute charge with the ability to remove team members who will not accept his authority.
Contrast with government, where executives have to use persuasion to get cooperation. Totally different activities.
Where is Ben Carson's experience in running a major entity of ANY kind?
I am not sure how I feel about Carson running for POTUS and am not jumping in to back his run should he decide to run, but if I understand anything about neurosurgery, especially high risk pediatric neurosurgery, that takes someone who can lead and make decisive, sometimes split second decisions.
And for what it is worth, we are not talking about someone who was a general practitioner, someone who practices “family medicine” or just a resident surgeon- he was, until recently, until his voluntary retirement, the director of pediatric neurosurgery and co-director of the Craniofacial Center at Johns Hopkins Hospital. That means not only was he still a practicing surgeon at the same time in addition to his teaching duties, but also overseeing the entire department and not a small unit FWIW at one of the premier hospitals in all the world, supervising all the other neurosurgeons and all the other staff members and in doing so probably had to deal with all the mundane things like budgeting and staffing, personnel issues and the politics, yes the politics of being a director at a major medical facility.
Dr. Carson was a professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery, and pediatrics, and he was the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.[3] At age 33, he became the youngest major division director in Johns Hopkins history, as director of pediatric neurosurgery. He was also a co-director of the Johns Hopkins Craniofacial Center.
In 1987 Carson successfully separated conjoined twins, the Binder twins, who had been joined at the back of the head, making them craniopagus twins. The 50-member surgical team, led by Carson, worked for 22 hours. At the end, the twins were successfully separated and can now survive independently. As Carson wrote in his book:
“ ...they would always exsanguinate. They would bleed to death, and I said, ‘There’s got to be a way around that.... I was talking to a friend of mine, who was a cardiothoracic surgeon, who was the chief of the division, and I said, ‘You guys operate on the heart in babies, how do you keep them from exsanguinating?’ and he says, ‘Well, we put them in hypothermic arrest.’ I said, ‘Is there any reason that—if we were doing a set of Siamese twins that were joined at the head—that we couldn’t put them into hypothermic arrest, at the appropriate time, when we’re likely to lose a lot of blood?’ and he said, ‘No way.’ ... Two months later, along came these doctors from Germany, presenting this case of Siamese twins. And, I was asked for my opinion, and I then began to explain the techniques that should be used, and how we would incorporate hypothermic arrest... And, my colleagues and I, a few of us went over to Germany. We looked at the twins. We actually put in scalp expanders, and five months later we brought them over and did the operation, and lo and behold, it worked.[5]”
Carson figured in the revival of the hemispherectomy, a drastic surgical procedure in which part or all of one hemisphere of the brain is removed to control severe pediatric epilepsy. He refined the procedure in the 1980s, encouraged by Dr. John M. Freeman,[6] and performed it many times.[7][8]
In addition to his responsibilities at Johns Hopkins, he has served on the boards of the Kellogg Company, Costco, and the Academy of Achievement. He is an emeritus fellow of the Yale Corporation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson
He is so far above and beyond being a mere “community organizer”. He would be IMO a vast improvement over what we have now. I’m willing not to throw him under the bus or dismiss him; rather I’ll wait and see how it shakes out.