Is Nikki Haley Ready for Prime Time?

The flap over Nikki Haley botching an answer to an audience question in New Hampshire about the origins of the Civil War has produced the usual flood of hyperbole, with Democrats accusing her of being some sort of racist for not saying “slavery” and partisans of her primary opponents declaring her career over. That’s what you get when you combine campaign silly season with a slow news week over the holidays. Still, we shouldn’t write off the real meaning of all this: It reminds us that Haley still hasn’t really been stress-tested enough in the true limelight of a presidential race to know how ready she is for the prime time of a general election.

We can certainly give Haley some benefit of the doubt. Politics, at its highest level, is hard. Among other things, running a national campaign means being able to do two contradictory things. First, you must maintain the message discipline to keep repeating the same collection of words and phrases and facts and anecdotes over and over and over and over and over again, day after day, at multiple stops a day, like a stage actor who has to keep the same lines sounding fresh each time. Second, you must also have the mental flexibility to respond to unexpected questions and unforeseen events that aren’t in the script. And you must do both of these things in front of cameras and crowds and friendly and hostile media while also maintaining a punishing schedule of travel, fundraising, and managing the strategy and often-fractious personnel of a campaign. It’s not for everybody. The national-campaign grind has eaten alive even a lot of veteran politicians who were long accustomed to the national stage on the floor of the Senate or the Sunday shows, or who flourished in the Cabinet or as big-state governors. Sometimes, even the best of talents just lock up mentally in the moment.

So, we don’t expect winners at this game to be flawless. Ronald Reagan wasn’t flawless, and in four decades since Reagan, we’ve seen nobody in the party who approaches his talent. George W. Bush survived by maximizing message discipline at the expense of flexibility. Donald Trump just refused to play by the rules, surviving campaign-killing gaffes by the strategy of producing too many of them too regularly to matter.

Still, there are some self-inflicted wounds you don’t want. Never make it easy on your enemies, to the point where Joe Biden and Democrats get to ride their high horse about slavery. Biden, recall, is the guy who once bragged that his state used to be a slave state. Haley is well-known nationally for getting the Confederate flag taken down at the South Carolina capitol — a flag that was put there by a friend of Biden, whom Biden eulogized in 2019. The problem here isn’t that Haley stepped in it, but what it says about the likelihood that she’ll do so again in more consequential situations.

As Jeff Blehar noted, Haley’s response may have been a simple brain freeze, but it does reflect the limits of her political instincts: “The real gaffe Haley committed on Wednesday was that, when she froze up under an unpredicted question and defaulted to her factory settings in answering, those answers demonstrated such contempt for the intelligence of her voters. We can be told the Civil War was about slavery, Nikki — we’re all adults here.” Indeed, while he has had his own moments of disaster in being afraid to say certain things for fear of offending some supporters, one of Trump’s greatest strengths has been his authenticity and candor: Even when voters know perfectly well that Trump is lying to their faces, he seems authentic in doing it because he’s being the real Trump. He’s telling you the same load of BS he’s telling himself in the moment, and you’re all in on the joke.

What we’ve seen in the post-gaffe cleanup has been more of the same. She blamed the questioner for being a Democratic plant. That may well be true, but it’s irrelevant: This wasn’t some viral moment where an “undecided voter” chewed her out, it was a softball question. In fact, it’s a question that provides a positive opportunity for a nimble politician. Every war, after all, is about two things. One is the cause of conflict. In the case of the American Civil War, there were several reasons for the North-South conflict, but slavery is the big one that drove events, without which there would most likely have been no war. Fear of losing slavery was the primary cause cited by most of the seceding states. The other thing every war is about is why and how the conflict led to war. And unlike slavery, which is long dead and gone, that second question is quite relevant today. The events of the 1850s are full of examples of how presidents, Congress, the Supreme Court, the bureaucracy, and the state governments took steps that made it harder to resolve the existing conflicts peaceably within the system. The Republican anti-slavery strategy of the era is an especially familiar model to today’s pro-life movement.

Then, we get Haley’s effort at a do-over, which is yet another word salad of platitudes:

For conservatives and traditional Republican voters who want to pick a horse against Trump, the hour of decision between Haley and Ron DeSantis is fast approaching. There are reasons why Haley is an appealing candidate, and while I prefer DeSantis, Haley would still be the most conservative Republican nominee in 40 years. That’s part of why she polls so well. She performed better than DeSantis in the primary debates (although that may understate DeSantis’s capacity to debate a Democrat, as he showed against Gavin Newsom). But having spent eight months with a target on his back as the top Trump alternative, on the receiving end of more negative advertising than Trump or Biden, DeSantis has had all of his flaws and limitations exposed. We know by now what we’d be getting. And for all of the criticism of DeSantis’s personal affect, he’s just better at this tightrope walk with reporters and audiences, and less prone to this kind of thing. Trump, meanwhile, is hiding from these kinds of interactions and ranting like a humorless crazy person every time he makes an appearance. The next few weeks will be a serious test of whether this is just one silly-season news cycle, or whether Haley really is not ready for the next level.