Is Ben Carson planning a major staff shakeup within his floundering campaign? Yes. Yes. No. No. Yes.
Carson told the Associated Press and the Washington Post in separate interviews conducted early Wednesday at his Maryland home that he was planning “personnel changes” in the final weeks before the early-voting states begin choosing the Republican party’s presidential nominee.
“Everything. Everything is on the table,” he told the AP. “Every single thing is on the table. I’m looking carefully.” The AP noted that the interview was conducted unbeknownst to his campaign manager, Barry Bennett.
He gave similar quotes to the Post. “Everything is on the table, every job is on the table,” he said. Carson was “coy” when asked about the possibility of Bennett being replaced, the Post reported.
Later that day, both Bennett and Carson “pushed back” against those claims (made by Carson himself, as you’ll no doubt recall).
Carson accused the Post of “sensationalism” and told CNN’s Don Lemon that the interviewers “were convinced that I was gonna fire everybody and we were going to just go in a completely different direction, and that’s absolutely not true.”
Bennett told the paper that had “100 percent faith in the team” as of Wednesday afternoon.
Unpaid Carson adviser and confidant Armstrong Williams, who set up the interviews, seemed to contradict that backpedaling, telling the Post late Wednesday: “Take what the candidate said to you, in his home and on his invitation, seriously. That is what he said and what he believes.”
If this head-scratching, gratuitous media snafu was brought about by Carson alone, as it seems it was, he may want to consider replacing his campaign’s current “presidential hopeful.”
