SURPRISE! Ben Carson Campaign Lays Off Half Of Staff

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Ben Carson is the one candidate in the race that we can say has had very, very few good weeks.

Even though he had a good showing in Iowa, he had to stomp on his own accomplishment with the ridiculous allegations he and his campaign have made against the Cruz campaign couldn’t even withstand the scrutiny of a media predisposed to believe anything bad about Cruz. Last month, five of his super PAC paid staff in New Hampshire quit to go to work for Ted Cruz as volunteers. And his Fourth Quarter fundraising report was little short of disastrous; his super PAC is broke and his campaign has enough money to make it through another couple of months.

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Now the Carson campaign is jettisoning staff:

Ben Carson, the famed neurosurgeon whose bid for the Republican presidential nomination has struggled to keep pace with rivals, will cut more than 50 staff positions Thursday as part of an overhaul and downsizing of his campaign.

Salaries are being significantly reduced. Carson’s traveling entourage will shrink to only a handful of advisers. And instead of flying on private jets, Carson may soon return to commercial flights.

Longtime Carson confidant Armstrong Williams said the drastic shake-up has been under consideration for weeks but was postponed until after Monday’s Iowa caucuses, where Carson finished in fourth place with 9.3 percent of the vote.

“Dr. Carson is going to get his campaign lean — really lean,” Williams said in an interview. “One issue for a while has been too much infrastructure and he has decided to fully address it so that he can sustain his campaign until the convention.”

There is a relative fine line between “really lean” and “emaciated” and “skeletal”. And the only way the Carson campaign is still around by the time of the GOP convention is if he is the only person remaining on staff.

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For a while it has seemed that Carson’s political campaign was constructed more with building his profile and personal brand than any political objective. The fact that his single largest source of fundraising last quarter was by renting his campaign’s mailing list should also raise eyebrows. Carson needs to call it quits before he damages himself irreparably.

 

 

 

 

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