By Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday, December 28, 2023
While you and I were enjoying a sleepy, pleasantly
aimless post-Christmas decompression period, some people out there apparently
couldn’t leave well enough alone, and continue to labor under the delusion that
they are running for the Republican nomination for president of the United
States. This explains why, instead of enjoying holiday leftovers in the quiet
of her own home, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley was out there on the campaign trail yesterday in Berlin, N.H.,
casually holing her insurgent campaign’s entire raison d’etre below
the waterline with the sort of gaffe that would matter more in an actually
competitive race. I could ignore it, but hey: This is what she gets for not
taking the end of the year off, like decent folk should.
Haley was doing the standard New Hampshire “town hall”
gig on Wednesday — you know, field questions from the audience, basically
demonstrate your retail chops and your ability to remember your pre-rehearsed
beats like a pro while behaving recognizably human. (It’s a test that has
defeated many a candidate; charisma matters.) She got a historical question
from the crowd, one I myself would immediately have recognized as having a barb
behind it: What, in the opinion of the former governor of South Carolina, caused
the Civil War?
It’s a gimme question for all but the most craven, one
where the ‘trap’ is obvious — the answer is “slavery,” don’t pretend it was
anything other than slavery for all else truly was mere pretext — and of course
Haley completely and embarrassingly whiffed on it. You can watch
the clip here if you enjoy cringe humor; I instead listen to the
former governor of the first state to secede from the nation and fire upon the
Union talk about “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do” and think
of Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”
I invite the reader instead to step back for a moment and
enjoy what will probably be an attempt to gin up a little feeding frenzy in a
primary race that has otherwise fallen into boredom and stasis. Trump is set to
crush all comers (likely even in New Hampshire), and frankly everyone in the
media is snored senseless with the non-story this entire cycle has become.
Anything that even vaguely reminds reporters of the “horse race” they thought
they were going to be covering this cycle will get an inordinate amount of
coverage relative to its actual importance for the simple reason that hey,
let’s face it: It’s the end of the year, Ron DeSantis’s poll numbers are
trailing into irrelevance, and it’s Something To Do.
It’ll all be disingenuous nonsense, obviously, not worth
taking even the slightest bit seriously. The most predictable and insulting
outcome of Haley’s kerfuffle will be accusations that she is a racist. That’s
entirely predictable because this is the route that media attacks always take,
but in this case it’s particularly inapt as a club against the woman who took
the Confederate flag off her own state’s capitol building years ago.
But what insults about it is that — lost in rote
accusations of “racism blah blah GOP base blah blah” — we will avoid discussion
of Nikki Haley’s real sin: holding her voters either in such contempt, or fear,
that she can’t confidently state a simple truth. The real gaffe
Haley committed on Wednesday was that, when she froze up under an unpredicted
question and defaulted to her factory settings in answering, those answers
demonstrated such contempt for the intelligence of her voters. We can be told
the Civil War was about slavery, Nikki — we’re all adults here. Few
politicians look good when caught nakedly pandering in public, but Nikki Haley
wears the look witheringly poorly — it knocks out one of the key underlying
struts currently upholding her fragile public brand. That’s why this little
gaffe, however minor, memorably reveals something about Haley; we rarely get
such accidental insight into how little politicians think of their own voters.
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