Nikki made an icky……….
This much we know.
The thing that baffles me though, is that as a studied and (so far) successful pol, Haley could have side-stepped that question any number of ways. But she chose to answer it (IN A NORTHERN STATE) by attempting to completely wipe slavery from history.
But was it a gaffe? No.
It was simply a craven move…….
…….that backfired.
In one answer to a town-hall question in New Hampshire, ex-governor Nikki Haley revealed most of her strategy to win the GOP nomination.
Yet she did the worst possible thing for her general election candidacy, by doing what she thought was the only thing she COULD do, to win the nomination: coddle MAGA voters.*
Now, she’s managed to reveal the rest of her strategy by answering the question of a 9-year-old: “If you were elected, would you pardon Trump?” She says she would pardon him, “in the best interest of the country."
So, she’s hoping for (counting on!!) the conviction of Trump, to allow her the narrow path to become the GOP candidate, so that she can ultimately pardon Trump.
That’s her grand plan.
Granted, it is the only plan that affords her (or anyone else) a greater-than-zero chance of getting the nomination.
But then what?
She would be a second-generation Asian-American woman, trying to raise money and support from a distinctly racist and sexist GOP (even the moderates in the GOP are moderately racist and misogynist).
Her parents are immigrants, for heaven’s sake. Anathema to the MAGAs.
MAGAs would have to support her, while hating Kamala?
For exactly the same reasons?
Anyway, that’s her grand plan……………or was……….until she baffled a large percentage of GOP voters who KNOW the civil war was mostly about slavery**. (non-MAGA) GOP voters are not nodding their heads in agreement, even if they WANT the Civil War to have been about…………..other things.
But If she really wished to re-write history in this particular way, that would have taken months (years) of preparation and conditioning, not just one ridiculously sterile answer to a softball question………..at least to stave off the national backlash she’s now seeing.
So, she said it. Or didn’t say it.
Now, she quickly walks back her comments, playing the victim of a “gotcha” question, reminiscent of……………..Sarah Palin, of all people?
This is what got Trump the nomination in 2016. Republican voters were dead tired of weasily R’s saying anything to get their votes.
It will be quite interesting to see if Trump is dumb enough to dip his toe into this “controversy,” and foul the GOP up even more…………...
So far, I think he’s been smart for once……………
* — Governor Nikki Haley took the confederate flag down from the South Carolina Statehouse. And, running against MAGA-KING Trump, means that this is a very weak point in her bid to secure the GOP nomination.
** — Even though she knows what the war was principally about, many Americans don’t. In its 2018 Teaching Hard History report, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that only 8% of high school seniors surveyed knew slavery was the central cause of the Civil War; nearly half thought the bloody conflict was about taxation.