COLORADO SPRINGS — This Front Range city is not a subtle place. It’s a tent revival, a year-round festival of flags and crosses, host to residents of military bases and to long-established evangelical mega-churches and Christian institutional empires. It is home to mountain views so close and wide and colorful it’s hard to take them in fully from any one spot.

On Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson was the beneficiary of the city’s flair for the dramatic.

Minutes before he was scheduled to take the stage at America the Beautiful Park downtown, wind swept down from the mountains and the sky went deep gray and then opened up, sending down a storm of rain and hail that splashed and ricocheted off car-metal and asphalt.

Prospects for the Carson rally seemed dim.

The candidate

Carson is one of 17 candidates in a GOP primary that is a source of entertainment and confusion and exhaustion. The contest has been running all year and the first real electoral test, the Iowa caucus, won’t happen for another five months. Add to that the theatrical hail storm, the fact that the candidate was flying in from an event held just hours before in Arkansas and the sad crackle-hum-silence filling the air at America the Beautiful Park that signaled the sound system was on the blink. When it came time to open the proceedings, U.?S. Rep. Doug Lamborn climbed the stage and did his best with a megaphone, shouting out introductory remarks that were as clear as mud from the wet field.

Carson is the Christian former pediatric neurosurgeon who has made a splash espousing an outsider, folksy, conservative politics. To his supporters, exhausted with the finger-pointing and posturing of standoffs and shutdowns, Carson comes off as someone more interested in fixing things than in breaking them, who views government as more workplace than boxing ring.

And he is popular in Colorado. Carson has won the presidential straw poll two years running at Denver’s Western Conservative Summit. He’s also surging in Iowa.

Monmouth University on Monday released a poll of Iowa Republicans, showing Carson is tied for the lead with Donald Trump at 23 percent, way out in front of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich — none of whom cleared single digits.

“We have so many talented people in America,” said Carson, as he took the stage smiling broadly, sun streaming out now over the park, the crowd streaming in over wet pavement from the parking lots. Carson was praising the techies who set the audio right.

“You see, we have to be united. We have so many purveyors of division right now. We the People of America must reject them and recognize that we are not each other’s enemies.”

Carson paced the stage. He talked about his childhood in Detroit.

“We were living in the ghetto. It was everything you would imagine. There were rats and roaches, police sirens. My mom was working two and three jobs and would come home after midnight. She never took welfare. She didn’t want to be a victim. She saw that welfare created dependency. She never felt sorry for herself — the problem was, she never felt sorry for us, either.”

The crowd laughed.

“If she were secretary of the Treasury, we would not be in a deficit crisis.”

More laughs.

Carson delivers his jokes with spaces between words and phrases that make them seem of the moment. At one point, he trailed into an anecdote about throwing rocks at cars as a child with his friends, a pastime he said drew the attention of the police and sometimes gave rise to foot chases.

“We practiced getting over a 10-foot fence. You jump up and swing over. The police would think they had us cornered and then, boom, we’d swing over. They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t catch us,” he said, but then added, “That was before they would just shoot you.”

No laughter from the crowd.

“Just kidding,” he said. “Just kidding. “Seriously, I love the police.”

Then came applause.

“Seriously, I have never had a conflict with a police officer, because my mom taught me to be respectful. We need to teach our children to be respectful of the law.”

Lots more applause.

“There are rogue police officers. Of course there are… But you can’t indict them all. You don’t go shoot a police officer. We have to be more intelligent than that. We’re being fooled,” he said. “A house divided unto itself cannot stand.”

Bob Sprenkle stood on the sidewalk outside the park, asking people to sign a petition calling for 12-year term limits for members of Congress. “Some of them have been there for 40 years,” he said. “They’re isolated from the rest of us. It’s too much.”

The Carson crowd is receptive, 57 of them signing the petition in an hour. Sprenkle likes the crowd, and he likes Carson, too.

“It’s a diverse group of people. It started out old but now some young people are coming… I don’t know if Carson will win, but he’d sure be a good alternative.”

Beth Garrett holds a Carson campaign sign and wears a Carson T-shirt.

“He’s coming up,” she said. “It’s good timing. You don’t want to peak too early. If he stays a little under the radar while Trump gets all the headlines for now, that’s okay, I think. If you talk to people in Republican politics around there, they’ll tell you, his name is popping up everywhere.”

She thinks Carson can win it all.

“Add it up. He would win Christians, conservatives, minority voters, the black population and Republicans,” she said.

Ruth and Deane Albright are sitting on camping chairs at the far end of the crowd. Ruth said she’s attracted to Carson because he is eloquent in a way other politicians aren’t.

“He’s smart and, to me, he sounds like he talks from real beliefs. He’s, well, you want to find out who he is, where he’s coming from.”

Deane is Ruth’s mother. She lived her working years in Texas and then moved in with Ruth’s family in Colorado Springs. They got her interested in Carson.

“The truth is, I’m just so tired of simply voting against people. I know who I don’t want, that’s never been a problem, and this year there’s quite a few. I didn’t like Perry when he was my governor. I don’t want him for president!”

“I like what I see so far in Carson,” she said.

— john.tomasic@gmail.com