Nikki Haley: Ambition, But No Moral Compass
Despite Haley’s claim to the contrary, her last chance to be president may be to become the 2024 GOP vice-presidential nominee, to elevate her fading national profile and better position her for 2028.
Jazz fans watching Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s recent speech to a pro-life group might have recalled how Cannonball Adderley introduced one of the tracks on his band’s At The Lighthouse album (1960). He said, “I’ve been trying to figure out for a long time what this name means, for this tune that Victor Feldman wrote for us. This one is called Azule Serape. Now he’s from England, and I know it’s not English. It’s something else.”
The comparison is not perfectly apt, because Cannonball was dealing with only the difference between English and Spanish. In Haley’s case, the difference is between the factual things she said to hook her audience and the self-promotional nonsense that followed.
Haley said, correctly, that before Roe v. Wade (1973) “each state decided where it stood” on abortion, Roe ended that by imposing a national standard more pro-abortion than what most states had previously, and the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year, overturning Roe, returned the issue to the states. As a result, “[s]ome states have passed laws protecting life” while “other states have doubled down on abortion.”
Then, the nonsense.
First, she said that with Roe gone, “we are free to forge consensus” on abortion, the problem being that “consensus” means “general agreement,” to which abortion supporters and opponents are nowhere close.
For example, the New York Times reports that 14 states generally prohibit abortions, some without exceptions for rape and incest, and 19 now allow more abortions than did Roe. Many Democrats within every state agree with abortion for any reason, including dismembering viable babies within the womb late in a pregnancy and killing babies on the delivery table. Driven by the Left’s historic lust for killing with impunity, abortion terrorists attack facilities that help women carry pregnancies to birth, depriving abortionists of victims to slaughter.
Second, right after pointing out that Dobbs took the federal government out of the abortion issue, Haley fantasized “there is a federal role on abortion” on which “the next president must find national consensus.” Then, back to reality, she said a national consensus is “unlikely to happen soon,” because it would require “a House majority, a 60-vote (filibuster-ending) Senate majority, and a president who are all in alignment,” and “we are nowhere close to reaching that point.” She added, “no Republican president will have the ability to ban abortion nationwide, just as no Democrat president can override the laws of all 50 states.”
A president and Congress have no such power because, as Robert A. Levy, of the Cato Institute, explained last year, “Congress is not constitutionally authorized to prescribe a national abortion regimen. First, there is the Tenth Amendment, which mandates that all powers not enumerated and delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states.”
If Haley’s idea is politically unlikely and unconstitutional, one might wonder what “federal role” she has in mind. The answer is probably “none:” that “consensus” is only a campaign slogan, as suggested by her use of the word so many times in her speech that one might have been reminded of the Little Rascals episode where a toddler kept saying “remarkable” to everything. Irritated, Spanky finally asked, “can’t you say anything but ‘remarkable?,’” to which the toddler responded, “remarkable.”
Third, Haley said she wants “to save as many babies . . . as possible,” which means to save some babies but not others, by prohibiting some abortions but allowing others. As an example, she said “we can all agree that abortion up until the time of birth is a bridge too far. Only seven countries on Earth allow elective late-term abortions. We’re talking about brutal regimes like communist China and North Korea.”
But, again, people do not “all agree.” Like communists, many Democrats support late-term abortions, no questions asked. Also, the justification for prohibiting late-term abortions, other than to save the life of the mother, might be that they are murders, and murders are evil. Yet Haley said “we can’t . . . accuse our opponents of being evil.” Of course, she meant, “not if I want them to vote for me.”
Disloyal, ruthless, cold-blooded, without core beliefs . . .
Haley’s transparently calculated abortion speech is not a one-off. In the course of an eye-rolling, over-the-top hit piece against then-president Donald Trump and conservatives generally, a leftist writer for Politico, to whom Haley gave a lengthy interview, asserted that in South Carolina, she is widely perceived as “willing to do whatever necessary to advance,” and of having “an absence of core beliefs” and “a reputation for demanding loyalty but rarely giving it.”
Said former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, “She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.” Described in the article as “ruthless” and “cold-blooded,” Haley is quoted as saying “I’ve always kicked with a smile.”
An example of Haley’s “absence of core beliefs,” in April, two weeks after criticizing Bud Light’s ad campaign promoting transgenderism, she invited transgenderism- and occult-promoting Disney to South Carolina.
. . . ambitious . . .
Sam Houston, general and battlefield commander of the Texian-Tejano army that won Texas’ independence from Mexico’s dictator at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, knew about politicians, having served in the Texas House of Representatives, in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, as governor of Tennessee and Texas, and as president of the Republic of Texas. Abandoning the Democratic Party and opposing the secession of southern states, he thought the Confederacy’s eventual president, Jefferson Davis, was “cold as a lizard and ambitious as Lucifer.”
Much the same has been said about Haley by some who know her well. Former South Carolina congressman and White House Chief of Staff under Trump, Mick Mulvaney, said Haley “may be the most ambitious person I ever met.” More recently, former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway corroborated former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s claim that Haley and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner conspired to convince Trump to dump then-Vice-President Mike Pence and select Haley as his 2020 running mate.
. . . overconfident, calculating . . .
In November, Haley said “I’ve won tough primaries and tough general elections. I’ve been the underdog every single time. When people underestimate me, it’s always been fun. But I’ve never lost an election, and I’m not gonna start now.”
Asked last week whether she’s running for the Republican presidential nomination in the hope of being nominated for vice-president, Haley said “I don’t play for second. I’ve never played for second. I’m doing this to win it. . . . [B]eing underestimated . . . makes me scrappy. . . . I enjoy the moment when I can prove them wrong.”
Notwithstanding Haley’s braggadocio and references to having fun proving detractors wrong, in Republican presidential nomination polls she’s at about four percent. That’s a country mile behind Trump (whom she said she wouldn’t run against) and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, slightly behind Pence, and ahead of the random conservative voter only because the random conservative voter isn’t running. By comparison, on the Democrat side, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is at about 20 percent and New Age book-seller Marianne Williamson is at about seven percent.
So, despite Haley’s claim to the contrary, her last chance to be president may be to become the 2024 Republican vice-presidential nominee, to elevate her fading national profile and position her for 2028. She knows that, currently, at least, Trump is the likely Republican nominee, so she appealed to him when she invited Disney to South Carolina, saying her home state isn’t “sanctimonious,” an obvious play upon Trump nicknaming calling DeSantis “DeSanctimonious” a few weeks ago.
. . . and manipulative.
In her book “Can’t Is Not An Option: An American Story,” Haley says she made her husband change his name. “Everyone who knew him before I did knows him as Bill. Everyone who met him after I did knows him as Michael.” If Haley can get her husband to change his name, she may think she can wield similar control over Trump. It wouldn’t be the first time. After vilifying Trump during his 2016 campaign, she convinced him to appoint her as his U.N. ambassador. As a former ally put it, “Nikki is willing to do whatever she needs to do and be whoever she needs to be.”
© 2023 Mark Overstreet