Chuck Todd: ‘Danger’ for Carson to Have Built His Candidacy on ‘Biography’

TODD: "Gwen, you’ve been on the trail a long time over the years. Personal stories."
IFILL: "Thanks for that."
TODD: "No, and I guess to me, the danger for Dr. Carson is the fact that his candidacy is built on biography."
IFILL: "It is."
TODD: "And build on honesty."
IFILL: "It is built on saying, 'This is who I am. These are my bootstraps.' And we all admire that. The interesting thing about people, are the outsiders we talk about so much, is that they all seem surprised what it takes to run for president. And what it takes to run for president is scrutiny. When Dr. Carson says there has never been scrutiny that there has been directed at him, that is just not so. I think, I mean, we were all there when Bill Clinton went through the whole thing with the killing Vince Foster, with the airstrip in Mena, Arkansas, where we’re still talking about Barack Obama’s birth certificate years after he was president. There’s always the scrutiny. And each and every one time, those folks hated it."
HEWITT: "But Gwen—"
IFILL: "They complained, they felt like victims. And of course, this is the way Dr. Carson, who has great self regard, as he deserves to, because he accomplished a lot in his life."
HEWITT: "But his objection to the double standard. This week, there is the NDA story in the Free Beacon, there is the story of Teneo refusing to answer. Mrs. Clinton is not being covered in the same way Ben Carson is."
IFILL: "And Hillary Clinton would say, 'You know what, there was also a report saying that those two emails that were supposed to be classified were not classified and nobody covered that.'"