{"id":1444250,"date":"2024-01-14T12:01:55","date_gmt":"2024-01-14T12:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2024\/01\/nikki-haley-south-carolina-scandal-mismanagement\/"},"modified":"2024-01-16T12:44:37","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T12:44:37","slug":"the-long-disastrous-career-of-nikki-haley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/01\/14\/the-long-disastrous-career-of-nikki-haley\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long, Disastrous Career of Nikki Haley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Nikki Haley\u2019s political career has been great for corporate executives and campaign donors. For everyone else, particularly workers and the poor, it\u2019s been terrible.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Republican presidential candidate and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley takes a question during a town hall in Rochester, New Hampshire, on October 12, 2023. (Michael M. Santiago \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Nikki Haley\u2019s pitch is simple: She\u2019s capable. She\u2019s levelheaded. She gets things done. She\u2019s not Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in the polls to the man who has spent the past year proving he has a stranglehold on the GOP base. She\u2019s won the reluctant support<\/a> of some prominent liberals, who view her as a vehicle to halt the march of Trump. All the while, she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Haley appears as the Republican Party\u2019s 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\u2019t 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. \u201cIf you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman,\u201d Haley memorably said four months ago, in a line typical of her political brand.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s gotten away with this, because her actual record as an elected official has largely escaped close scrutiny.<\/p>\n

The reality of Haley\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

If Haley really is the future of the Republican Party, it\u2019s a bleak future indeed.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

The Giant Slayer<\/h2>\n \n

For a long time, Haley was viewed as the American right\u2019s answer to Barack Obama \u2014 the classic immigrant story, the American dream, and the US melting pot all rolled into one.<\/p>\n

Haley\u2019s 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\u2019s mother started a women\u2019s clothing company out of a motel room in 1976. Haley, born four years before the business opened, became the firm\u2019s chief financial officer after graduating college with an accounting degree, and the company blossomed into a $1.8 million business soon after \u2014 the crux of Haley\u2019s initial political pitch.<\/p>\n

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Nikki Haley’s high school yearbook photo. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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. \u201cIf we run our state like a business, with that same urgency, then we can get South Carolina back on the right track,\u201d she told voters.<\/p>\n

Neither a dog-whistling opposition campaign that pointedly used her full maiden name, Nimarata N. Randhawa, nor the realities of Bush-era South Carolina \u2014 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 \u2014 were enough to stop Haley from trouncing her more established competition for the Lexington County seat. That included the state House\u2019s longest-serving member, whom she defeated by ten points, winning even in his home precinct.<\/p>\n

Haley \u2014 her husband Michael and her parents in tow \u2014 represented \u201cNew Lexington,\u201d part of a surge of out-of-towners and out-of-staters that flooded the county\u2019s quickly spreading subdivisions in the 1990s, transforming it from its rural, small-town roots into a sprawling suburbia. Not everything was \u201cnew,\u201d though: Haley, a Sikh who had converted to Methodism, heard ugly comments on the campaign trail directed at Hindus and Buddhists.<\/p>\n

The \u201cgiant slayer,\u201d as she was dubbed in the press after her win, quickly established a public profile as a champion of good government. A prolific fundraiser, she nevertheless cosponsored a bill to ban campaign donations from leadership PACs (\u201cI’m one of those people who think you can’t put enough sunshine on the process,\u201d Haley said) and joined the South Carolina New Statesman Society, a nonprofit created by a Republican colleague to promote \u201cethical and enlightened leadership.\u201d Lawmakers \u201ccan’t work hard enough at public confidence,\u201d Haley said of the initiative.<\/p>\n

She had less to say about the foundation\u2019s generous funding by wealthy individuals and corporations \u2014 many of whom were actively lobbying lawmakers, and who could give and give without heed to state limits on campaign donations. This contradiction between Haley\u2019s apparent passion for ethical government and comfort with obvious corporate influence peddling would remain a theme throughout her political career.<\/p>\n

In 2008, she started a months-long and very public campaign to force the state legislature to adopt on-the-record voting. South Carolina was one of only five states granting lawmakers the luxury of casting their \u201cayes\u201d and \u201cnayes\u201d free of public scrutiny, which they had used to give their pensions annual cost-of-living increases earlier that spring. Haley paid for her efforts with a vindictive demotion by a bitter House speaker but vowed that it wouldn\u2019t \u201cslow me down or stop me from fighting.\u201d By January 2009, the resulting public pressure led both chambers to change their rules on the matter.<\/p>\n