Nikki Haley’s Unforced Error
A poor answer to a softball question has created unnecessary controversy.
WaPo (“Haley acknowledges Civil War ‘about slavery’ after facing backlash“):
Nikki Haley on Thursday scrambled to quell a firestorm that rocked her ascendant presidential campaign, acknowledging the Civil War was “about slavery” after critics in both parties admonished her for omitting that fact during a recent town hall.
First during a radio interview then again later during a campaign stop, Haley, a former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor who has risen in polls of the Republican race, made remarks that departed from what she said a day earlier. When asked about the cause of the war at a Wednesday town hall, she made no mention of slavery, which scholars agree was central to the conflict. That initial exchange attracted widespread attention and criticism in both parties that continued Thursday.
“Of course, the Civil War was about slavery. We know that. That’s unquestioned. Always the case. We know the Civil War was about slavery,” Haley said at a town hall in North Conway. “But it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government. For 80 years, America had the decision and the moral question of whether slavery was a good thing. And whether government economically, culturally, any other reasons, had a role to play in that. By the grace of God, we did the right thing and slavery is no more.”
“I say that as a Southerner. I say that as a Southern governor who removed the Confederate flag off the State House grounds,” she added to applause.
The outcry over her comments and the attempt to clarify them marked a new test for Haley, who until this week had made few unforced errors and rarely veered off script as she pitched herself as the strongest general election candidate in the field. Her remarks came amid a year-end push in New Hampshire, a state that is seen as key to her chances in the GOP race and where she has shot up into a distant second against Donald Trump, the clear polling leader. They presented a fresh opportunity for rival campaigns and critics, who have accused Haley of trying to have it both ways on key issues.
At a presidential campaign event in Iowa on Thursday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a rival Republican, said Haley “had some problems with some basic American history,” calling her response to the Civil War question an “incomprehensible word salad.”
“I just think that this shows this is not a candidate that’s ready for prime time,” the governor said, adding that it’s “not that difficult to identify and acknowledge the role slavery played in the Civil War.”
[…]
The response she offered Wednesday evening did not include slavery.
“What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” a man asked Haley at a town hall in Berlin, N.H.
She replied, “Well, don’t come with an easy question.” Then she proceeded to answer.
“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley said.
“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley added. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.”
The questioner expressed surprise at Haley’s response, saying, “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery.’”
“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Haley asked.
The man responded, “You’ve answered my question, thank you.”
[…]
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a Republican candidate who has cast himself as the unfiltered truth-teller in the race while castigating Trump as unfit for the White House, said Haley’s Wednesday answer was a reflection of her unwillingness to speak hard truths. He argued that Haley knows the history of her state and doesn’t “have a racist bone in her body.”
“So don’t get confused about what she’s been saying and what she and her new political husband [New Hampshire Gov.] Chris Sununu are trying to mop up all around New Hampshire,” Christie, who is competing for moderate and independent voters who have also gravitated toward Haley, said during a town hall Thursday night in Epping, N.H. “She did it because she’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth.”
MAGA Inc., the super PAC backing Trump, echoed in an email blast that the comment showed Haley is “not ready for prime time” and said the “issue is her response, not the question.” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who is Black and has endorsed Trump, said slavery was the obvious answer and wrote on X, “This really doesn’t matter because Trump is going to be the nominee.” Trump’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Speaking with reporters Thursday afternoon, Haley dismissed her opponents’ assertions that she had flip-flopped on the cause of the Civil War. She said she didn’t mention slavery in her initial response because she thought it was “a given.”
“If it requires clarification of saying, ‘Yes, the Civil War was about slavery,’ I’m happy to do that,” she added.
To the limited extent Haley has a shot at the Republican nomination, I doubt this will hurt her all that much. And, if she’s somehow the nominee, I don’t think this will be a deciding factor eleven months from now. Still, it’s an unforced error.
As noted in the piece, Haley was governor of South Carolina and dealt with the controversy over the Confederate battle flag in the state. She’s surely aware of the history here. And, while I’m more sympathetic than most OTB readers to Southern sensitivities over the issue, Haley has had more than enough time to workshop an artful answer to questions like this.
Something like this:
“Slavery” is an inadequate explanation for something as complex as the political causes of the war, let alone the reasons individual soldiers fought in it. It’s perfectly reasonable for politicians, particularly those trying to appeal to Southerners, to acknowledge that. But it’s simply absurd not to acknowledge that the “peculiar institution” was the sine qua non. Absent the divide over the future of slavery, the war simply wouldn’t have happened.
I wouldn’t go so far as Haley’s political opponents as to argue that her bungling this episode establishes that she’s not up to the job of the presidency. Lots of future presidents have been caught flat-footed on the campaign trail and recovered. But this was one she should have been prepared to knock out of the park.
I’m going to bring my comment from the open forum over to here:
FWIW, I’m not sure that the Haley/Slavery thing is the epic fail it’s being made out to be. I wonder if she was attempting to use a Trump technique (one he no longer uses), where he would say something outrageously as a signal to the racist part of his base and then, when challenged, attack the press for misinterpreting what he said. This allowed him to show solidarity with his racist base (who don’t really give a sh*t about the backpedal because, “Hey, that’s the way to pwn the libtards! I do it all the time!”) while simultaneously giving an out to his fans who were at least mildly uncomfortable with his racism (“Hey, he’s clumsy in the way he speaks because he’s so real and genuine and the press never give him a break.”)
If that’s what Haley was attempting (which, IMO, it was) then sure, she didn’t pull it off as well as Trump used to, but in my mind the jury is still out whether it was a net gain for her or not. Remember, she’s not just running for President, she also has to maintain her support in South Carolina.
@MarkedMan: That seems like a stretch. I can’t imagine any reasonably intelligent candidate taking such a chance. Trump is unique in American politics in my lifetime. Almost all of his base will accept ANYTHING he does, no matter how absurd. The “shoot someone on 5th Avenue” turned out to be a huge understatement. He could get a truck, run over a group of nuns, stop, turn around and run over them again, get out of the truck and desecrate their bodies, and then tweet out that they started it, and his base would say of course they did.
I think Haley and her campaign are smart enough to understand that they can’t be like Trump. I think she just screwed up, and I think it hurt her 1. by making her look like an apologist for slavery to normal people, and 2. making her look weak to the Republican base.
The not ready for prime time player flubs her lines.
@MarkedMan: I don’t see her behavior as particularly Trumpian. Republican politicians from the South have been playing this game for decades, long before Trump came along–indeed, Haley herself has played both sides of the Confederate issue going back at least to 2010.
The truth is, if Haley had mentioned slavery amongst several other reasons, no one would have blinked and the moment would have passed without note. By avoiding the answer, so as not to offend the minuscule number of MAGAts that might have noticed, her campaign has been knocked off its agenda and is dealing with days of bad press. It should be noted, that none of those who she tried to avoid offending are jumping to her defense.
Like her refusal to attack trump where he is vulnerable, this incident simply proves that Haley is gutless and adds to the doubt that she can summon the fortitude to deal with the crises America is facing.
Kevin Drum covered the part where Haley whines about the question coming from a Democratic Plant, and basically said the same thing that I and I suspect tens of millions of other folks thought when she whined about that…so what if the question came from a Democratic plant???
It was a softball question and she should have said yes, one of the main causes of the Civil War was slavery, and of course slavery is abhorrent and I am against it. Then followed up with a head shake, and comment that a Democrat must have slipped into the room while no one was looking, and went for the laugh.
At that point, pretty much no one would be talking about Haley today, but that is also not a positive result for Haley when she is trying to point out to large crowds why she deserves to our next President, so maybe she thinks to herself that there is no such thing as bad publicity, even though folks are talking about her performance on the stage but just not quite how she hoped they would. It is early days, and she can still recover.
What is honestly and truly not helping her are when folks like the GOP sycophants at NR try to spin things by saying that Haley insulted the GOP/MAGA crowd, as they are adults and the folks in the room with Haley could have handled being told that yes, slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War.
Kevin notes that this is not a good look for the folks at NR who just sound like foolish and very unserious thinkers when they try to spin the words of someone like Haley or Trump. He points out that there is plenty of evidence that a pretty darn significant percentage of the GOP/MAGA folks do not want to declare slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War, and this evidence is not exactly hiding from the eyes of the folks who write for the NR website.
At the end of the day, all these attempts to spin Haley’s words do her no good, and only serve to make NR look like a shell of what it was say 15-20+ years back.
I find her assertion that she would pardon Trump to be as problematic.
In saying that it’s “best for the country” adds a new dimension to the basis for a pardon, without any regard to the crime. Sure Trump is popular (with a significant segment of the population) and a lot of people would be upset it he were convicted and sentenced. But should the disappointment of a large group of voters be the basis for a pardon?
Taylor Swift is very popular, however if she were tried and convicted of say, intentional voter fraud (casting ballots in ten different states for the same election) is it sensible that she should be pardoned so as to not upset her fans?
Granted that the President can pardon anyone for any reason, but a pardon based on popularity says a lot about Haley’s view of justice.
@SenyorDave:
You may be right, but that doesn’t rule out my theory. The technique is actually quite commonly used, both within a racial context and otherwise. One example in my personal experience: a Mayor seemed to get over his skis in supporting the police after an ugly incident (knowing they can have a big impact on a reelection campaign if they decide to hurt the sitting mayor) and then seemed to walk it back with an “of course there are bad cops and we absolutely will not tolerate them in this department but the vast majority of cops are good, yadda, yadda, yadda”. Did the mayor flub the initial statement or did he succeed in sending contradictory messages to two groups in sequence? At the time I felt it was the second.
Also, and this is just my personal opinion after having lived in two Deep South states, she absolutely would not be governor of South Carolina if she has not convinced a large number of white people, including powerful and influential people, that she is with them on “THOSE people are a problem and we can’t let them run wild”. To me it seems very likely that she has used the technique in SC and it has worked well there for.
I can’t offer any concrete proof for this, it’s just an opinion.
@Kylopod:
Agreed, and I would go even farther and say that this is a technique used by all kinds of politicians, everywhere, even ones we admire, in many contexts other than race. I used Trump as a recent example, not as the originator.
I don’t even necessarily think it is a bad thing, depending on how it is used. Haley’s use of it here was for a bad purpose, but it can also be used in a good way to show you are listening to a group and responding to their legitimate concerns, even if you don’t necessarily agree with their solutions.
It wasn’t an error. She knows her base and what they want.
I don’t know why this is so hard.
@MarkedMan: this is why I never warmed up to either of the Clintons. There’s a difference between being “a middle-of-the-roader” and “saying different things to different audiences.”
@Cheryl Rofer:
Exactly. She read the room.
Only someone raised in the debased Southern lost cause “culture” would say this.
The civil war was about slavery, full stop. Primary sources confirm this. Secondary sources confirm this. There is literally no proximate or secondary cause of the war that does not relate to slavery.
I appreciate that southerners, with their twisted “shame/honor” mentality, have a hard time getting to grips with this. But FFS, get over it. You people have cause too much arm to the country, what with your slavery and Jim Crow and KKK domestic terrorism and synagogue bombings and everything else. Stop inflicting your pathology on the rest of us and join the civilized world.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m not sure she read it accurately.
@MarkedMan:
Depends on what kind of fail.
If like the mainstream press we elevate horserace politics over any other concern, then sure it won’t hurt her much politically.
If among your central concerns is competent leadership, then Haley has again undercut her supposed appeal by being cynical and weak — the main critique of her. She has a pattern of sounding reasonable for a time then weathervaning into crazy. Romneyesque.
She’s selling herself as the conservervative compromise that can lead Republicans out of the Trump wilderness. But leaders have to lead at times. That means sometimes pushing back on allies — moving them where they need to go, taking the initial friendly fire, and letting them thank you later.
The “But South Carolina” excuse won’t work. Haley once stood up to pro-Condeferates in South Carolina and won. So we know she knows better. It’s just the true crazies have taken over since then. If she’s too weak to pushback against the crazies on a slavery softball, what’s the argument for her?
She’s not a leader. She keeps showing won’t save Republicans from Trumpism, and she won’t be able to hold the center as president. So.
Plus she may have read the politics wrong, as opportunistic pro-Trump black Republicans are piling on. Their gang up on Ron DeSadness after his Florida Ed. Dept’s “slavery benefitted blacks” debacle helped permanently damage that candidacy.
@Cheryl Rofer:
Sure. But I’m taking the question of whether it’s an error or not to be, “at the end of the day, does this pander net out to be a positive or negative?” And that’s further complicated by whether we are asking it for her Presidential run, or for maintaining her base in South Carolina.
@inhumans99:
She should’ve just gone for the partisan boilerplate about racist Democrats supporting slavery over the objections of freedom-loving, colorblind Republicans.
James, thank you for that factual and anodyne statement. I’ve seen so many columns saying her removal of the flag says she’s anti-Confederate or aware of the realities or something She signed a bill that got a big majority in the legislature in the wake of a particularly horrific shooting. That she signed it says nothing about her character or beliefs.
IIRC, she had up until then, opposed removing the flag. That does say something about her.
@DK:
Just to be clear, when I’m talking about whether it is an error or not, it’s 100% in the context of the horserace.
I don’t know much about Haley and haven’t really formed a strong opinion, but my impression is that she is a typical politician in that her primary motivation seems to be that people like and support her. I haven’t noticed (but again, never really followed her career) any real line-in-the-sand morality defining moments from her. She’s given me no indication of actual leadership, much less competent leadership. The little I know of her gives me the impression that she finds a parade forming and then runs to the front of it. While not admirable I don’t think it’s the worst way for a politician to be. But it does mean that the public good is completely dependent on the people in the background.
I don’t see this the same way you do. Perhaps in some way you could say she stood up to the crazies, but a more apt description is that she recognized that this insistence on flying the traitor flag was beginning to hurt SC economically and I suspect that was the argument she used in the vast majority of her interactions taking place out of the public eye. She would never be so sloppy as to go on record as saying to the wealthy and powerful in SC, “Don’t let the rednecks drag your business down”, but I’m sure she could get that message across without outright saying it.
As for whether she should get the credit for leading that effort, I don’t know enough about the SC power structure to know whether she actually led the coalition or was merely their flunky.
@Cheryl Rofer: Agreed. It’s a “let’s just teach the controversy” style moment.
@DK: Reading your text, I thought immediately of John McCain correcting his supporter on whether Obama was an Arab, instead calling his opponent a “decent family man.”
That’s leadership.
@Jay: There’s no single cause for any war. But, as noted in the same paragraph as the sentence you object to, I note that slavery is the sine qua non. Most of the other contributing factors related in some way to slavery.
She is a piss poor candidate, but a billion times preferable to Trump. It won’t happen, but she is leagues better than Trump.
The calendar goes Iowa, NH, Nevada then South Carolina. Haley DGAF about the country at large at this point, she absolutely needs to win South Carolina or it’s all over. She needs to beat expectations in Iowa, NH and NV, then score a clear win in her home state. If I was her campaign manager I might calculate that this racist pander helps her more in SC than it hurts her in the earlier states. If she wins SC and comes in second in the earlier states, she slides to the center and cements her hold on the #2 spot.
But then she’ll lose Michigan, Idaho and Missouri, leaving her limping into Super Tuesday where she could take California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont and Virginia. In theory. But she still needs Stinky Trump to have a diaper leak caught on video.
@Michael Reynolds: If Trump were to have that diaper leak or whatever event would finally lead to that long-awaited collapse in his support everyone’s been predicting would happen since 2015, color me skeptical that Haley would be the one to be able to pick up the pieces.
@James Joyner: So… slavery in 14 different ways.
The issue that nearly prevented the constitution from getting ratified, and that needed special mention that it wouldn’t be addressed for N years to get the South on board. The same issue that led to Bleeding Kansas? Who could have expected that it would have been the cause of a secession crisis?
It’s almost as if her main concern was to not piss off the current R base which is totally fine with historical slavery in America. Imagine being dumbfounded about this question. Blaming a “Democrat plant” for asking a potentially tricky question you flubbed and then whining about it after. You had the opportunity to disassociate and distance yourself from neo-confederacy nonsense and chose not to, live.
Still way better than Trump and I hope she wins the R nomination. Won’t happen, but a person can wish.
To pull from a comment on this from yesterday, I read James and his later comments as advocating for the advanced/expert view on the causes:
Basic understanding: Slavery
More developed understanding: there were a number of causes and dynamics at play.
Advanced understanding: (almost all of the significant causes and dynamics at play tie back to) Slavery
@James Joyner:
But that’s just it, race-based slavery was the fundamental root cause for all of the other reasons. It was the atomic element fueling all of the chemistry they try to cite.
Economic issues? Comes from being an agrarian / feudal system based on a color-based class system. If the South had gone from chattel slavery to debt bondage or temporary indentured servitude, it’s economy as is would have collapsed. They needed a permanent underclass that could not only be unpaid but actively sold and abused. The North had slavery both du jure and de facto (wage slavery) throughout the years but the decision to stay with chattel slavery was absolutely intentional. Most Southerners did not own slaves or plantations so the economic hit would have been at the top. In fact, paying poor Southerners to work might have increased economic prosperity in the long run for everyone and put them on par with the North again.
Political issues? Oh, the political arraignments that counted the population oddly so they could have the numbers without having the numbers to unfairly give them an advantage in the EC and Congress? Or when previously negotiated terms regarding new territories kept getting changed since they choose to be free states and it upset the balance? They saw they were losing power they never should have had in a fair system and instead of trying to keep it legitimately decided to overthrown the government when they lost an election (sound familiar?). Slave states had outsized power in a world rapidly realigning itself and was willing to kill to keep it and its underclass.
The sad thing is this could have all be dealt with and the culture healed and moved on if people were willing to call a spade a spade then. There’s be generations of Southerners who learned about the mistakes of the past and why they were mistakes instead of awkwardly Well Ackchyually every-damn-body. You know why we can’t talk about the nuances that may have lead to the war to more fully understand our history? Because it’s blatantly used as an excuse to avoid the literal stated casus belli for every single state – slavery. As long as people like Haley try this crap to dodge, the question will continue to be asked and the answer the same. It pleases her base because they’re the same type of people who were the base for secession in the first place.
@Michael Reynolds:
It’s not going to help her because conservatives are treating it like the milquetoast answer it was. They don’t want lip service after years of Trump and his ilk. Either say or don’t but the wishy-washy ain’t gonna fly anymore.
Say it – YES, she’s one of us LET’S GOOOOOOO!!!!
Don’t say it – she’s gotta win in liberal bits for now, we know what she’s REALLY say if she could
What she said – WTF is that?! She flubbed it, here’s how she SHOULD have responded
Like Romney or Jeb, she’s trying to be “reasonable” in a party the most assuredly Does Not Want. They want “Out Loud and Proud” or “Quietly Working Behind the Scenes for Us Without Causing a Fuss”. There were soooo many ways she could have spun that and pleased them but she tried to thread a line she’s not capable of. Don’t forget, she’s a woman and people are much less forgiving of their gaffes. It will play into perceptions of competence and being cool under pressure. She’ll get extra criticism for it and won’t be able to recover enough to be front-runner. At best she’s looking at VP
@Tony W:
And that’s why John McCain was my last Republican vote.
@MarkedMan:
That’s a problem. This is where comparisons between the Clintons and someone like Haley break down.
Yes, the Clintons pandered like all politicians do. But Hillary also has non-negotiables and core convictions. Is there any audience that could get Hillary to backslide on abortion rights or women’s empowerment? No.
Or, after the 1993 healthcare push failed, it would’ve been easy for Bill Clinton to abandon his push to raise taxes and give up on any kind of healthcare law. But he raised taxes, and Democrats got wiped in 1994 because of it. Then the Clintons compromised to made sure the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (the biggest public healthcare expansion between Medicare and Obamacare) became law. That’s leadership. Bill Clinton, as personally slimy as he was, does not get enough credit for stopping Democrats’ electoral bleeding, given their otherwise dismal presidential election results post-1968.
What are Nikki Haley’s non-negotiable core issues? Is there any issue on which she would not cynically sellout to benefit her personal ambition? I can’t think of any.
@de stijl:
This is still true too.
@James Joyner:
What do you mean “most?” Name one, one, contributing factor that was even remotely unrelated to slavery.
One has to be a debased lost cause Southerner steeped in the most debased of all debased primitive cultures to deny that slavery was the first, last, and only cause of the Civil war. The causes of the civil war are not even in any way “complex,” as you assert. It is the most simple war to understand. It is only considered “complex” because of almost two centuries of intellectual dishonesty propagated by Southerners and their fellow travelers in an attempt to retain a scrap of undeserved dignity. But I fail to see why the rest of us should have to go along with it.
I’m intrigued that so few Americans – none in fact that I’ve actually seen, but I assume there must be some – make the distinction between the reason states seceded and the reasons war broke out. Slavery was self-evidently the former, but war could have been avoided if the North in general and Lincoln in particular had elected to accept the secessions as a fait accompli, withdraw federal troops from the rebel states, and get on with building a modern, prosperous, industrialised United States. Indeed there are good reasons for believing today’s Americans, both liberal and reactionary, would be happier if he’d done just that.
None of which of course is relevant to Haley’s preposterous word salad, which wasn’t remotely relevant to the question she was asked.
@Ken_L:
“Why do you keep making me hit you?” is what you are actually saying.
There are also good reasons for believing that decent Americans would be happier if the US army had gone through every Confederate state like Sherman did in Georgia and South Carolina, we had done reconstruction for real, hung every Confederate officer who resigned a US army commission to fight against the US (from Robert E Lee on down) higher than Haman for treason, hung every Confederate cabinet official and legislator for the same reason, and not accepted 150 years of Jim Crow and domestic terrorism. That is a much better counterfactual and why do you not explore that?