YOU CAN GRIFT AND RUN FOR PRESIDENT AT THE SAME TIME

This seems to have a lot of people puzzled:

Republican presidential contender Dr. Ben Carson has put his public campaign events on hold for two more weeks to go on book tour for his new tome “A More Perfect Union” and catch up on fundraising events....

The campaign says the next time they will appear publicly with Carson will be the day of the next GOP debate on Oct. 28. His last public campaign event was Oct. 2.

Carson's campaign staff will not travel with him while on tour, noting that it’s better to stay off the trail for fear of being accused of using campaign assets to sell books.

“It’s a question of co-mingling from the corporate standpoint to the Federal Election Commission standpoint so it’s just better to avoid any bad appearance,” spokesman Doug Watts told ABC News.

At RedState, Leon Wolf writes:

Now it becomes much clearer -- the reason Carson hasn’t even cared to study the issues is because he’s not even seriously running for President. He’s merely using his Presidential campaign as a vehicle to sell more books.

On the left, Ed Kilgore writes:

If New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina were on the book tour itinerary, you might figure the “book tour” is just a campaign swing under another name, with the twist that Carson’s book profits are going into his own pocket rather than the campaign’s. It’s also possible Carson’s handlers think he’s a bit too “hot” in his public utterances of late, and want to get him out of the spotlight....

However you slice it, this development is going to remind the chattering classes of 2012 candidates Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, who were frequently accused of using their campaigns to sell books and videos and so forth.

Well, one of the sites promoting Carson's book tells us he made six appearances last weekend -- in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. Check the GOP primary schedule and you see that South Carolina votes early, at the end of February, and Georgia and Tennessee are among the large number of mostly Southern states voting a few days later, on March 1. Go here and you see that Carson has a couple dozen events lined up between October 18 and November 5 -- several in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska (all of which vote the first week in March), followed by four events in Iowa and thirteen in the critical state of Florida.

So, yeah, Carson is campaigning by not campaigning.

Kilgore adds:

Indeed, most candidates release their “campaign books” either before or early in their candidacies, as appetizers, not ends in themselves.

Yes, but most books by presidential candidates don't actually sell. Carson's books do. Publishers Weekly says his book One Nation was the 12th-biggest adult nonfiction book of last year, outselling the likes of Amy Poehler's Yes, Please and Cheryl Strayed's Wild. The one he's flogging now is at #10 on USA Today's bestseller list, ahead of current books by Lee Child and John Grisham, and just behind the new George R.R. Martin book.

I assume that Carson thinks these events (rather than traditional campaigning) will make him money and build his buzz. As Hot Air's Allahpundit notes,

He’s already been off the trail for the past 13 days. And since then, he’s had two of his best national polls to date. CBS had him above 20 percent, within single digits of Trump, in a survey conducted last week and Fox News had him just a point behind the frontrunner in their new one a few days ago, a poll brimming with data favorable to Carson. How’s he managing that without pressing the flesh in the early states?

Well, maybe this is part of how he's doing it. He is pressing the flesh -- just not at formally designated campaign events. He drew more than a thousand people to a Knoxville book signing on Sunday. And hey, this is something he can do, unlike talking intelligently about the issues. So why not?