The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Give Nikki Haley a Chance
We wrote about Nikki Haley jumping into the 2024 presidential race Tuesday without much in the way of endorsement or criticism. Donald Trump wants her — and a dozen other Republicans — in the race to boost his own chances. Other presidential hopefuls obviously don’t. Mike Pompeo criticized her for quitting the Trump administration when “there was still an enormous amount of work to do.” John Bolton derided her as “really running for vice president.”
Yet political analyst Jim Geraghty argues that her record is something Republicans ought to consider, starting with her personal life.
The next president is going to face a dangerous world and sooner or later is likely to deploy U.S. troops into harm’s way. It might be nice to have a president whose husband is a captain in the U.S. Army National Guard, who served for a year in Afghanistan, and whose convoys were hit with improvised explosive devices twice, thankfully with no injuries.
Upon Michael Haley’s return from his deployment in 2013, then-governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley later said, “Seeing him, I felt like I took my first breath in a year.” It might be nice to have a president for whom military deployments and the effect on military families is not an abstract issue.
He also points to her fiscal record:
The next president is going to face a national debt beyond $31 trillion. It might be nice to have a Republican nominee who not only balanced a budget, as required by state law, but who was willing to fight her own party on spending she deemed excessive and pushed for a simpler tax code. It might be nice if the Republican nominee could point to reducing ineffective spending in, say, the United Nations peacekeeping program, reducing the U.S. contribution by 7.5 percent and overall spending by $600 million.
Haley took on her own party establishment in key ways, Geraghty says. He notes that the controversy over her daughter working in the South Carolina state house gift shop is almost hilarious. “Remember when that was considered a controversial way for the child of an elected official to earn money, in the pre-Hunter Biden or Jared Kushner Saudi deal days?”
The next president is likely to face a widespread public perception that large corporations benefit from unfair laws and rules that hold back small businesses. It might be nice to have a president who stepped down from Boeing’s board of directors after less than a year because she opposed a request for $60 billion in government aid to the company during the Covid-19 pandemic, declaring that she “cannot support a move to lean on the federal government for a stimulus or bailout that prioritizes our company over others and relies on taxpayers to guarantee our financial position. I have long held strong convictions that this is not the role of government.” As a member of the board of directors at Boeing, Haley made $256,322 in 2019 and $83,750 in 2020.
Identity is certainly part of her appeal, Geraghty argues, and she’s been through the battles:
We know the Democrats and their allies will contend that the Republican Party is misogynistic. It might be helpful to have a nominee who is a woman. We know the Democrats and their allies will contend that the Republican Party is full of “white nationalists,” and is xenophobic and anti-immigrant. It might be helpful to have a nominee who is the daughter of Indian immigrants.
Much like the man she appointed to the U.S. Senate, Tim Scott, Haley tends to bring out the worst, ugliest, and most hateful sides of her critics. Figures from Ann Coulter to South Carolina Democratic chairman Dick Harpootlian have “joked” that Haley is not really an American and “should go back to where she comes from.” Apparently it doesn’t matter if you’re born in Bamberg, go to Clemson, live in South Carolina almost your entire life, build a business, sit on the board of your church, donate $130,000 to charity in one year, and have a husband in the Army National Guard who serves in Afghanistan for a year … you will still face “You’re not one of us” crap.
“Haley has her flaws,” Geraghty concedes — as do all candidates, by the way. But, he concludes:
a good and serious Republican Party would give Haley real consideration as a potential nominee, noting that her depth and breadth of experience and combination of indisputable toughness and charisma on the stump represent a rare combination of strengths in a potential president who is only 51 years old.