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Dr. Ben Carson stepped into the national spotlight recently when, as a  speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast, to an audience that included President  Obama, he was openly critical of the president’s approach to health care and his  overall management of the nation’s economy.

Carson, who is director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital,  is a hero to many.  His life story, rising from a Detroit ghetto to a life of  accomplishment and distinction, is a story of American ideals on steroids.

The hard history of blacks in America has always made it a challenge for them  to accept this credo.  Many still carry a sense that those ideals may be true  for whites, but they never were true, and still aren’t true, for blacks.

So in this context, Ben Carson’s story is particularly important.  It’s  making liberals nervous, and the attacks on him are starting.

He’s now pulled out, under pressure, from giving the commencement address at  Johns Hopkins University because some are unhappy with how, in an interview on  Fox, he expressed his views regarding the importance of maintaining the  integrity of traditional marriage.

See all of Dr.  Carson’s books and find out why this man has captured a nation’s  attention.

Blacks have known about Carson for years.  I gave his book “Gifted  Hands” to my daughters to read when they were little girls.  A highly  acclaimed made-for-TV movie about his life aired in 2009, with Dr. Carson played  by Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding Jr.

But this story of personal responsibility, hard work and traditional values  is becoming a political story.   It is becoming political because Ben Carson’s  American dream story, according to the liberal script, is not supposed to work  for blacks.

Ben Carson is the biggest threat to liberals since Bill Cosby got out of line  at an NAACP banquet in Washington, D.C., in 2004. 

Cosby had the temerity to deliver tough, critical talk about what too many  blacks are doing with the freedom civil rights activists of the 1960s fought to  achieve. He contrasted the ’60s generation with the new generation of black  youth sitting in jail.  “… [T]hese are not political criminals.  These are  people going around stealing Coca Cola.  People getting shot in the back of the  head over a piece of pound cake.”

Cosby attributed the chaos to breakdown in values, family and personal  responsibility.  It’s the last thing the NAACP crowd wanted to hear that night,  and he paid a price.  Cosby was vilified and marginalized until he backed  off.

Liberals never take on what black conservatives actually say, because they  can’t.  So the attacks become personal.

Trillions of taxpayers’ dollars have been poured into black communities over  the last half-century, producing virtually no change in the incidence of black  poverty.

Yet, Ben Carson, through diligence and traditional values, achieved on his  own what those trillions of dollars of government programs were supposed to  deliver. 

Liberal black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates put the cards on the table in an  article about Cosby that appeared in 2008 in the The Atlantic magazine.  The  typical black conservative votes for Democrats, he notes, “not out of love for  abortion rights … but because he feels … that the modern-day GOP draws on  support of people who hate him.”

So stoking paranoia about racism has always been the strategy of liberals to  fend off the political threat of conservative values that so many churchgoing  blacks embrace.

Predictably, Coates has produced a New York Times column on Carson, reducing  this great man to the usual caricature of a black empty suit manipulated by  white conservatives.

Ben Carson is an accomplished and wealthy man.  Americans, certainly black  Americans, need him in public life more than he needs to be in public life.   Let’s hope the left wing and the haters of traditional morality don’t succeed in  making him conclude it’s not worth it.