Let’s just call a spade a spade
Believe it or not, there are savvy ways for Republican politicians to answer a question such that the far right base hears what it wants to hear, without handing the other side any ammunition. Code words. False equivocation. We used to see this kind of thing all the time, back when Republican politicians still knew how to be savvy.
But these days “savvy” is no longer a thing in Republican politics. Maybe it’s because all the moderate politicians are now Democrats. Or maybe it’s because Donald Trump, one of the least savvy presidential candidates of all time, “won” in 2016 for reasons that had nothing to do with his inept campaigning. Ever since then, aspiring Republican politicians have tended to be as unsavvy as Trump is.
This brings us to Nikki Haley. Believe it or not, there is a way for a Republican politician to answer a question about the Civil War that allows right wingers to pretend that it wasn’t about slavery, while also making your answer sound just reasonable enough that it doesn’t become a mainstream scandal for you. These kinds of fence-straddling answers are disingenuous, racist, and wrong. But they exist. And they work. If you’re going to be a Republican politician seeking national office, you have to be savvy enough to straddle that fence. And Nikki Haley has no savvy whatsoever.
Of course the professional lamenters on our side are insisting that Haley’s dimwitted answer was intentional, and that she wanted this controversy. No she didn’t. This is a disaster for her. If she somehow got the Republican 2024 nomination, she’d spend every day of the general election having to face questions and negative headlines about how she doesn’t know anything about slavery. Again, there was a savvy way for Haley to answer the question. She just didn’t come close to finding it. That’s because she’s terrible at this. And she always has been. That’s because she’s only ever been a media creation.
For the better part of a decade, the mainstream media (on both sides) has insisted that Nikki Haley was the future of the Republican Party, that she was super savvy, that she was inevitable. Meanwhile she proved herself to be the kind of political dimwit who couldn’t navigate the confederate flag at her state capitol. She proved herself to be clueless enough to think that resigning her position as Governor and joining Trump’s cabinet was somehow going to advance her career. All these years she’s basically been walking around with the word “moron” flashing over her forehead in neon lights, even as the media has insisted she’s savvy and relevant, simply because the media thinks she’s good for ratings.
Of course this isn’t unique. It’s the norm. Ron DeSantis spent his entire time as Governor of Florida picking one stupid fight after another, alienating the wrong people, biting off more than he could chew, and proving that he had no political savvy whatsoever. DeSantis has always been even further in over his head than Haley. Yet because the media (on both sides) felt that it could generate ratings by pretending that DeSantis was savvy and inevitable, it did precisely that.
Everyone can now see that Ron DeSantis is a hapless idiot with zero political savvy. Everyone is now starting to see that Nikki Haley is also a hapless idiot with zero political savvy. But this isn’t new. They didn’t fall down recently and hit their head. They were always hapless idiots. The media was just willfully portraying them in fictional fashion, in an attempt at milking them for ratings. But now that they’re at a stage of the election process where they have to stand on their own, everyone is watching them fall in the way that they were always going to fall.
Again, this is now the norm. Look at the Republican Senate. The savvy villains have either been pushed aside (Mitch McConnell), or have turned themselves into buffoons in order to stay relevant (Lindsey Graham). And the Republican House doesn’t have a single politically savvy member left. It’s not just that they’re awful, that they’re corrupt, that they’re extremist. They’re also idiots who have no idea how politics even works.
At this point any serious, savvy Republican politician is presumably sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the Trump show to come and go, before thinking about getting seriously involved again (think Liz Cheney).
It’s tough to say if the Republican Party will ever shift back toward an entity where serious and savvy political villains can thrive, or if it’ll remain a clown show where savviness is shunned. But in the meantime it’s important for us to be clear eyed about the fact that leading Republican political figures like Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and (especially) Donald Trump are idiots. There’s no savvy. There’s no strategy. They just flail around and screw up and then try and often fail to keep their heads above water.
You’re not being “vigilant” by pretending that idiots on the other side are smart and savvy. You’re just helping build them up. I tried telling everyone three or four years ago that the quickest way to get rid of Ron DeSantis was to stop playing up how “dangerously powerful” he was, and instead start playing up what a hapless idiot he was. Sure enough, people are finally seeing that this was the correct strategy all along.
So let’s all make a New Year’s resolution to start calling a spade a spade. Nikki Haley is an idiot with zero political savvy. Ron DeSantis is an idiot with zero political savvy. Donald Trump was an idiot with zero political savvy even before he started going senile. We’re only helping these idiots when we insist that they’re smarter and savvier than they are. We need to expose them for being inept idiots. It’s always the quickest way to get these types off the national stage.
