The Long, Disastrous Career of Nikki Haley

https://portside.org/2024-01-16/long-disastrous-career-nikki-haley
Portside Date:
Author: Branko Marcetic
Date of source:
Jacobin

Nikki Haley’s pitch is simple: She’s capable. She’s levelheaded. She gets things done. She’s not Donald Trump.

In a pool of anti-Trump also-rans whose challenges to the former Republican president have one by one fizzled out, Haley has run a surprisingly effective campaign, drawing oodles of money from establishment Republicans wary of the Trump circus, while coming shockingly close in the polls to the man who has spent the past year proving he has a stranglehold on the GOP base. She’s won the reluctant support of some prominent liberals, who view her as a vehicle to halt the march of Trump. All the while, she’s carefully left the door open for a possible future as vice president, deftly threading the needle between running as the antithesis of Trump and his possible future partner.

Haley appears as the Republican Party’s road not traveled in living, breathing form, a throwback to an older style of GOP politics that the 2016 election seemed to smash apart: when politicians weren’t borderline con artists selling conspiracy theories and plagued by outrageous scandals, when they seemed to be rooted in some semblance of decency and exuded basic, professional competence. “If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman,” Haley memorably said four months ago, in a line typical of her political brand.

She’s gotten away with this, because her actual record as an elected official has largely escaped close scrutiny.

The reality of Haley’s twelve years in South Carolina as a state legislator, then governor, contains much to give the US public pause. Far from a competent executive, Haley was accused of shocking mismanagement and scandals as governor, sometimes costing public money, sometimes costing lives. She waged a relentless, six-year-long war on workers, the poor, and the unemployed that left the poverty-stricken and broke state and its people in numerous difficulties, all while doling out endless favors to corporations and the rich. And all of it was underwritten by a shameless practice of pay-to-play that made a mockery of her pretensions as a champion of ethics.

If Haley really is the future of the Republican Party, it’s a bleak future indeed.

The Giant Slayer

For a long time, Haley was viewed as the American right’s answer to Barack Obama — the classic immigrant story, the American dream, and the US melting pot all rolled into one.

Haley’s parents were Sikh immigrants who ended up in the United States in 1969 after leaving the northwest Indian city of Amritsar. They settled in Bamberg, South Carolina, where Haley’s mother started a women’s clothing company out of a motel room in 1976. Haley, born four years before the business opened, became the firm’s chief financial officer after graduating college with an accounting degree, and the company blossomed into a $1.8 million business soon after — the crux of Haley’s initial political pitch.

As Haley pounded the pavement for a state House seat in 2004, pressing flesh in the winter armed with a fur-collared coat, coffee, and Krispy Kreme donuts, she vowed to bring the same approach to elected office. “If we run our state like a business, with that same urgency, then we can get South Carolina back on the right track,” she told voters.

Neither a dog-whistling opposition campaign that pointedly used her full maiden name, Nimarata N. Randhawa, nor the realities of Bush-era South Carolina — which still proudly flew the Confederate flag, and where only 0.2 percent of the population was of Indian descent and fewer than one tenth of its lawmakers women — were enough to stop Haley from trouncing her more established competition for the Lexington County seat. That included the state House’s longest-serving member, whom she defeated by ten points, winning even in his home precinct.


Source URL: https://portside.org/2024-01-16/long-disastrous-career-nikki-haley