Nikki Haley is an opportunist in freefall
In the 2004 election, the Republicans pulled quite the dirty surprise by making the topic of debate not the war in Iraq and the record of both candidates regarding that, but instead a war that happened over 30 years before: making it about how John Kerry was supposedly never the war hero he actually was.
Now, Republicans are making things about a war even older – one that happened over 160 years ago that they can’t quite admit what it was about. This was how Nikki Haley ended up embarrassing herself at a campaign event in New Hampshire. Pressed on what the cause of the Civil War was, she made the classic racist case that it was actually about “states’ rights” – the government interfering in peoples’ lives too often. In doing so, she didn’t just give a terrible answer, but also gave away what Republicans are really saying when they use this kind of rhetoric.
To tell the truth about this has quickly become taboo if you’re a Republican politician, and we’ve already seen Ron DeSantis stumble over it countless times in the last two years, to say nothing of the former guy’s ignorance. For Haley, it’s especially bad because it’s getting harder and harder for the media to boost her campaign by consistently portraying her as a moderate. She never was. Her positions on virtually everything are even worse than Donald Trump’s – as if that were somehow possible – and the fact that she can’t give a good answer shows that she’s not nearly as smart as the media wanted her to be.
She’s an opportunist in freefall, blaming a Democratic operative for posing the question, but it begs the question of why she couldn’t answer the question honestly and maybe win over a few moderate voters in doing so? The fact is there are no moderates in this party to speak of – and that’s why we need to defeat the Republican candidate in not just 2024, but 2028 and every election year afterward.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making