SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. What's past is prologue is a line from Shakespeare. In politics, what's past can be a time bomb to explode or fizzle. Dr. Ben Carson leads in some national polls, but he's now being asked about claims he's made about his past. And Jeb Bush, who's fallen into single digits, may have political problems with the new biography about his beloved father, and all just before the next Republican debate. NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good morning, Scott.
SIMON: I would guess nobody doubts Dr. Carson's a superb surgeon with an amazing personal story. But he's had to handle questions this week about a temper he said he once had to overcome an acclaim he's made about West Point.
ELVING: You know, being the frontrunner gives you a kind of claim to scrutiny that no one else gets. And CNN was unable to corroborate Dr. Carson's stories about his violent youth, including a stabbing incident where he says his knife blade broke off on the belt buckle of a friend. The implication is that these stories have been enhanced or exaggerated for effect to, you know, improve the story of his personal redemption. And that story also includes what he has called his full tuition scholarship to West Point, where, it turns out, he did not even apply.
SIMON: Let me ask about that because a lot of people might call a free ride, which every student gets at West Point who's accepted as a cadet - a scholarship. And couldn't a bright high school student who was head of his ROTC high school program get the idea he was being recruited to West Point?
ELVING: Absolutely. The top ROTC guy in Detroit in 1969 with good enough grades for Yale would've been recruited by his ROTC commanders and perhaps others for West Point. But the story he has told has created a slightly different impression and puts forward this full tuition scholarship as a kind of trophy, when the fact is, as you say, the service academies don't charge tuition. Now, last night, he told a news conference that he had never used that phrase. So I suspect we're going to see a fair number of instances of where he did being brought back by the media.
SIMON: Dr. Carson said he once had a violent temper and overcame it. He says the people he attacked were in his family circle, and they don't want to be named. I wonder, will a lot of people just say, look at what the man has done with this life, give him a break?
ELVING: Yes, and many will give him a break. No question about it. But, you know, the problem here is pattern. And some people are going to say this is the media being unfair, and other people are going to say look at the pattern of some of the things that he has said. Some people are going to say that he made a misleading statement about his relationship with that health food company in the last Republican debate, and there was the business about the pyramids and so on. And that's going to be around to trouble him.
SIMON: Yeah, Dr. Carson, in his press conference yesterday, last night, said - let me ask you, Ron. Is the media showing more interest in picking apart his autobiography than they did in President Obama's bestselling autobiography in which he talked about using drugs as a young man?
ELVING: Some parts of the media surely are. The media have been roundly criticized, I think, over the last few years for giving Obama's candidacy what you might call rather a light rinse back in 2007, partly because he wasn't taken very seriously at first and also because he was a media darling candidate. No question. And other candidates have paid the price for that since.
SIMON: Do you see political consequences?
ELVING: A lot's going to depend on how his rivals for the nomination handle this. You know, Trump has been critical of Carson. Others have defended him, particularly on the political story about West Point. And in the short run, it will probably make him a rallying point for conservatives who are angry with the mainstream media.
SIMON: New biography of George Herbert Walker Bush has been making some waves. Now, do reports that the first President Bush felt his son, President George W. Bush, was ill-served by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld create political consequences now for Jeb Bush?
ELVING: You know, it's tempting to say this new biography is the least of Jeb Bush's problems right now. But it does hinder his efforts to revitalize his campaign and focus on the future because it drags him back into the past and his brother's past, in particular
SIMON: Republican debate coming up next week. Two big name candidates have been dropped from the main lineup.
ELVING: That's right. We won't see Mike Huckabee, and we won't see Chris Christie in primetime. But they will be in the undercard debate earlier on Tuesday evening. They didn't make the cut based on the latest national polls checked by Fox Business News, which is sponsoring this debate. And two other candidates were dropped from the undercard debate, as well - George Pataki and Lindsey Graham. Not good news for any of these candidates, but, you know, in the game we're playing right now, low polls can be deadly.
SIMON: And we did mention Donald Trump. NPR's senior editor, Ron Elving. Thanks so much, Ron.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.