Earl O. Hutchinson

When Ben Carson emphatically declared that he has no government experience that would qualify him to run a federal agency, most took this to mean that he would quietly fade from public attention.

We should have known better.

President-elect Trump saw to that when he brushed aside Dr. Carson’s momentary candid admission and plopped his name down for secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This was a remarkable but not surprising return from the political dead for Dr. Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon.

Now we’ll have a man who admits he has no government experience running a crucial agency that ladles out billions annually in public housing subsidies, rental assistance and housing finance activities, employs more than 8,000 workers and administrators and operates more than 100 subsidy programs.

If that’s not bad enough, Dr. Carson doesn’t even like what HUD does. He has a long and well-documented track record of lambasting housing discrimination suits, over-dependence on “social safety net” programs, getting government out of competition with private enterprise and denouncing anything that supposedly deadens individual initiative.

This was the stuff of snickers, chuckles and lampooning when Dr. Carson was simply a private citizen or a mercifully brief, failed GOP presidential candidate. Few then could ever imagine that Dr. Carson would ever be in a position to act on any of his rabid, antique, ultraright notions of how a government should be run. However, with the Trump HUD post offering, Carson now can give free rein to his basest impulses about government.

HUD has been a long-standing favorite whipping boy of ultraconservatives. They have repeatedly ripped HUD for its alleged corruption and cronyism, and complained about the high cost and waste of public housing projects and vouchers for low-income renters. But HUD’s biggest sin to them has been that it supposedly shackles private housing developers by putting the federal government directly in the business of subsidizing home ownership. They have made the unsupported and outlandish claim that HUD’s butting into the housing business was one of the biggest reasons for the 2008 financial meltdown.

The only thing missing from the conservative hit plan on HUD was finding the right someone to do the dirty work to defrock the agency. And who better than Dr. Carson? He is black, and he and other conservatives never tire of repeating his woeful tale of rising from the hard-scrabble streets of an urban ghetto to the pinnacle of success in the medical profession. He even lightly played on it again when he said that he had great expertise on poor people living in public housing because he once lived in a ghetto.

Trotting out of Dr. Carson to deliver the right wing gospel in the hacking up of HUD fits in with yet another ploy used by ultraconservatives during the Obama years. And that was to float Carson as a GOP presidential contender. It worked twice in 2012 and 2016. And as always, some in the media took the bait and actually treated Dr. Carson as a serious contender. That absurdity only got to be too much when Dr. Carson made ever more bizarre statements about anything that came to his mind. However, it was more than political theater of the absurd. It got attention for the GOP. It also touched a deep, dark and throbbing pulse among legions of ultra conservatives who fervently believed that President Obama and many Democrats are communists, gays are immoral and that the health care reform law was exactly what Dr. Carson likened it to — slavery — meaning the tyrannical intrusion by big government into their lives.

In the past, mainstream GOP leaders couldn’t utter these inanities. They had to give the appearance that they were above the dirt, mud and hate-slinging fray. So they left it to a well-paid stalking horse like Dr. Carson to do their dirty work for them. This, of course, all changed with Trump. He openly and unabashedly said what many conservatives thought about President Obama, Muslims, immigrants and minorities. He cynically, but masterfully, crafted this hate and bigotry into a winning campaign. It was no accident that his biggest and most visible black cheerleader was Dr. Carson. He was ever dependable to be trotted out on talk shows to defend and even praise Mr. Trump.

Dr. Carson, though, has another kind of shelf value for President-elect Trump. He gives the illusion that his administration will be race neutral and that African-Americans could have access to him. Putting Dr. Carson in the top spot at HUD fits neatly into the script. He is black, is admired for his saga in some circles and as such, can do as much damage as conservatives want at HUD with maybe minimal attention.

That’s why Dr. Carson is around and will continue to be our never-ending nightmare.

The writer is an author and political analyst.