Ben Carson says reading changed his life

IOWA CITY - Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon running for the GOP nomination for president, said his childhood classmates called him 'dummy” until his mother forced him and his brother to start reading books.

'Two books a week, and we had to do book reports,” he said. 'Within the space of a year and a half, I went from the bottom of the class to the top of the class.”

Speaking to about 150 people at the University of Iowa Athletic Club, Carson described growing up poor in Detroit but loving to go to the doctor's office where he could smell the alcohol swabs or to the hospital where he could hear doctors being paged on the intercom. He imagined hearing his name someday.

'There's a reason God gave us a brain with the ability to dream,” Carson said.

Carson, who has between 7 percent and 10 percent support of likely Republican caucusgoers, covered a lot of ground in his 40-minute talk: Education, national debt, terrorism, immigration and religion.

He lamented the national debt, which is more than $18 trillion, and the fiscal gap - 'please look it up when you get home” - that accounts for unfunded liabilities owed by the United States.

At the same time, Carson said, the United States is not fully utilizing its assets, such as empty office buildings.

'When somebody says ‘Free college for everybody!' they're just a pied piper,” Carson said.

Carson wants tougher border security to keep out illegal immigrants and drugs. He applauded Israel for having sharpshooters in the schools to deter terrorist attacks.

'The response is not what the Obama administration offered: taking guns away. They ought to be teaching gun safety,” Carson said, getting applause from the crowd.

Justin Scott, 34, a self-proclaimed atheist from Waterloo, asked Carson whether he thinks God's laws trump the nation's.

'If we create laws that are contrary to the Judeo-Christian values we have, then we should fight against those kind of laws,” Carson said. 'We still have an obligation to obey the laws, whether we agree with them or not, otherwise we would be a lawless nation.”

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley introduced Carson as a man of courage and common sense but did not endorse him.

Grassley pressed fellow Republicans to get out and caucus Monday: 'The enthusiasm I see in all these rallies is something that, if it's kept up, we can have a Republican president, not a third term of an Obama presidency.”