Ben Carson said that if elected president he might implement a “covert division” of government workers who spy on their coworkers to improve government efficiency, MSNBC reports.

Carson told a crowd of Iowa Republicans he is “thinking very seriously” about adding “a covert division of people who look like the people in this room, who monitor what government people do.”  He suggested people would work harder if they suspected their coworkers of monitoring their work.

“The presidential candidacy of Ben Carson, a tea party star who has catapulted into the top tier of Republican contenders, has been rocked by turmoil with the departures of four senior campaign officials and widespread disarray among his allied super PACs,” the Washington Post reports.

“The moves gutted the core of Carson’s apparatus and left the 63-year-old first-time candidate with only a handful of experienced advisers at his side as he navigates the fluid, crowded and high-stakes contest for the Republican nomination.”

“Ben Carson, who formally announced his run for the presidency Monday, is a brilliant surgeon, gifted storyteller and charismatic speaker. But modesty is not among his talents,” Dana Millbank reports.

“The retired Johns Hopkins professor’s launch video, nearly five minutes long, positions the aspiring Republican presidential nominee right alongside Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr… The video moves on — to an American flag, the Declaration of Independence, a church, and then the seated stone figure of Lincoln, enthroned at his memorial on the Mall.”

Politico: Carson’s home field disadvantage

Ben Carson told the Detroit News that since he “launched his official exploratory committee in March, it has attracted more than 50,000 donors.”

Ben Carson (R) “is expected to officially declare his decision on whether to run for president May 4 in his hometown of Detroit,” the Detroit News reports.

“The political action committee backing Carson raised nearly $13.3 million in donations last year… Carson’s presidential exploratory committee, formed in early March, brought in more than $2.1 million in its first 28 days.”

New York Times: “Rhetorical excess was good for business, but Carson now wants to be seen as more than a novelty candidate. He has come to learn that such extreme analogies, while true to his views, aren’t especially presidential. They alienate more moderate voters and, perhaps even more damaging, reinforce the impression that he is not “serious” — that he is another Herman Cain, the black former Godfather’s Pizza chief executive who rose to the top of the early presidential polls in 2011 but then bowed out before the Iowa caucuses, largely because of leaked allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denied but from which he never recovered.”

“Cain lingers as a cautionary tale for the party as much as for a right-leaning candidate like Carson. The fact that Cain, with his folksy sayings (‘shucky ducky’) and misnomers (‘Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan’), reached the top of the national polls — much less that he was eventually followed there by the likes of Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who all topped one or another poll in the 2012 primary season — wound up being a considerable embarrassment for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, and for the longtime party regulars who were trying to fast-track his way to the nomination.”

“An aide helping with conservative darling Ben Carson’s presidential exploratory committee recently deleted his twitter account after some offensive tweets —including one telling President Barack Obama to ‘bend over bitch’ — caught public attention,” TPM reports.

“A lot of people who go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay.”

— Ben Carson, quoted by Politico, arguing that homosexuality is a choice.

Stuart Rothenberg: “Carson has never run even a single political race, raising huge questions about what kind of a candidate he will be and what kind of political team he will put together. The early indications are not good.”

“He and his conservative admirers dismiss his lack of campaign experience, as well as the fact that he has never held either high elective or appointive office. To them, his values and views strongly outweigh any lack of electoral experience or government service. But most voters consider experience an asset, not a liability, and candidate skills go well beyond being interviewed by a friendly voice from Fox News or conservative talk radio.”

“If you want to understand the conservative appeal of the former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, messages like this, which go out by the thousand on conservative email lists, are the place to start. No prospective candidate’s name and likeness, including the Democratic field-clearer Hillary Clinton, has been as successful in attracting small donations over the last year than that of Carson,” Time reports.

“In addition to his own political action committee, Carson has lent his name and signature to other online efforts, including Newt Gingrich’s American Legacy PAC, where he is the face of a $5.9 million campaign called ‘Save our Healthcare,’ which raises money in the name of fighting President Obama’s health insurance reforms. A separate independent effort, the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, raised more than $12 million in the 2014 cycle through email and direct mail with appeals featuring Carson’s name. That effort, which Carson plays no direct role in supporting, collected more during the reporting period than Ready For Hillary, the SuperPAC run by Hillary Clinton’s former aides to prepare the ground for her campaign.”

“Carson’s online fundraising efforts are so prolific that his own political operation is sometimes not aware of them.”

New York Times: “As a political outsider, Ben Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon, is given only a slight chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination. But people who want him to run for president have already donated $12 million to the cause. A look at whom those donors also backed suggests that his support isn’t relegated to the fringe of the Republican Party, although the donors have given more to Tea Party and insurgent Republican groups than to party committees.”