We’re just over two weeks out from the first votes being cast for the 2024 Iowa Republican primary caucuses. But instead of surging toward the finish line, Nikki Haley is ending 2023 with a horrible choke.
In case you missed it, during a New Hampshire town hall meeting on Wednesday, Haley was tripped up by a question on what caused the Civil War. Rather than simply answering “slavery,” Haley gave a convoluted answer that included saying, “the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”
Freedoms? Whose freedoms? The slaves? The slave owners? Her meaning is unclear. And despite becoming embroiled in a back-and-forth with a questioner who kept pressing her on the subject, Haley never provided a clear answer.
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The obvious question is: why couldn’t Nikki hit this softball out of the park? How could someone as eloquent and intelligent as Haley get so flummoxed by this simple question?
The notion that Haley, an Indian-American woman who as governor of South Carolina took down the Confederate flag from the state capital, is some sort of Confederate sympathizer seems absurd. Still, we can only speculate as to why she choked on this particular question.
One cynical theory is that Haley thought the obvious answer would not be well received by primary voters in the Party of Lincoln. And rather than challenging her audience to embrace their better angels, she gave a nonsensical answer.
If true, it’s illustrative to see how much perceptions have changed regarding the GOP electorate in recent years.
I am reminded of an important moment during the 2008 general election, when John McCain’s mettle was similarly tested.
“I can’t trust [Barack] Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, he’s not, um, he’s an Arab,” a woman told McCain at a town hall meeting in 2008.
“No ma’am, no ma’am,” McCain interrupted. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with…on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”
It was a stand that won McCain a lot of respect. But for some on the right (some audience members booed McCain), it also proved that establishment sellouts like McCain weren’t willing to fight for them.
Eight years later, the GOP would nominate Donald Trump, a man who also suggested Obama was a Muslim, and spread the false “birther” conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the U.S., and thus ineligible for the presidency.
Of course, it’s unfair to compare Haley to McCain or Trump.
McCain bravely stood up to his crowd, as a real leader does, and Trump boldly and proudly threw red meat to the crazies. Meanwhile, Haley remains stuck in the mushy middle, coming across more as weak than anything else by failing to answer an easy question.
In this regard, she reminded me a bit of McCain’s 2008 running mate, Sarah Palin.
As you might recall, Palin stumbled during the election, sometimes failing to answer even banal questions such as what newspapers and magazines she read. Palin never pretended to be a genius, but she could have easily said, The New York Times, The Washington Post, or even National Review. So why didn’t she just say that and move on?
My theory always was that Palin, being overly defensive, resented what she perceived as a sort of “gotcha” question asked by the liberal media, so she refused to give a decent answer. As a result, Palin—not her interlocutor—came off looking weird.
This brings us back to Haley. On Thursday, she sought to clean up her mistake, while also explaining that the man who asked her the question was a “Democratic plant.”
In my book, the motives of the questioner are irrelevant. Your answer should be aimed at your target audience, anyway. But apparently to Haley and Palin, the motives matter greatly.
Regardless, this is now a distraction for Haley. And while it obviously raises questions about the current state of the Republican Party, it also reintroduces and reinforces some negative perceptions that many of us have long had about Haley’s character.
The knock on Haley has long been that she tries to have things both ways and that she’s wishy-washy. The most obvious example was how she frequently oscillated between criticizing Trump and sucking up to him. This suggests that maybe personal ambition, not principle, drives her decisions.
But after the first Republican primary debate, when Haley came out of the gate swinging at Trump for having increased the debt by $8 trillion, I thought that (for strategic reasons) Haley had at least clarified who she was as a candidate and what kind of campaign she planned to run.
But old habits die hard. And Haley’s answer didn’t just demonstrate moral cowardice, it was also a sign of a flawed campaign strategy.
Let’s be honest: If Republican voters are hell-bent on denying that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, then Nikki Haley doesn’t have a chance to win the nomination anyway. Simply put, anyone who cares about relitigating that lost cause is not going to vote for Haley.
This might be one of the rare times that it’s possible for someone to underestimate the GOP primary electorate, but I think Haley would have been just fine by telling the truth. Not only would she have appeared stronger, she would have pleased her actual constituency of potential voters.
With time running out, Haley needs to be surging, not floundering. Haley needs every non-Trump Republican (and in New Hampshire, independents) to galvanize behind her. She needs Chris Christie to see this happening and decide to drop out.
Pandering to MAGA voters, while tacitly insulting New Hampshire Republicans, is a huge step in the wrong direction.
I fear that this unforced error has revealed a deeper problem with Nikki Haley’s candidacy. Simply put, good candidates don’t make these kinds of mistakes.
