It would be great fun to have a women in the White House! Wooooooooo! And if given the choice to cast a ballot for Nikki or Trump I'll glady not vote for Mr. Mean.
That said, Haley has zero...sorry that's not strong enough...I mean't less than zero...negative 1000% chance to win the GOP nomination.
Is she a great candidate? Not really, my chief issue is her support of the US defense industry which has paid heavily for her support and her enthusiastic advocacy for Proxy Wars like the Ukraine. Sorry not a big fan of our sending money and Americans to far off places and ....you know where I'm going with this.
Bill's sort of a mysogynic idiot at times, but does capture the Haley stuff pretty fairly.
Can Nikki Haley’s ‘Strategy of Conviction’ Beat Trump?
The Republican challenger has charm, willpower and a clear sense of the big picture, though she can be fuzzy on policy details.
By Kate Bachelder Odell, WSJ
Dec. 8, 2023 2:51 pm ET
Nikki Haley has a theory about Donald Trump. When he “senses one ounce of weakness, he topples you,” she says. If he runs into “any amount of strength, he walks away from you.” Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations is describing how she plans to confront—and defeat—her old boss in the Republican presidential primary. “I’m not movable when it comes to what I believe, and I call you out like it is. He knows that.”
Mr. Trump is 50 points ahead of his nearest competitor in some GOP national primary polls. But most voters are only now meeting Ms. Haley, 51, a former South Carolina governor and daughter of Indian immigrants. On the campaign trail, she says on a visit to the Journal’s editorial board, people “whisper, ‘I voted with him twice, but we got to win in November.’ ”
She is careful to give her former boss his due: “I think President Trump was the right president at the right time,” she says. “I really do.” But “chaos follows him wherever he goes. And every one of you knows I’m right.” She scans the room. “When the world is on fire and our country is completely distracted, we can’t continue down this chaotic path.”
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan has called Ms. Haley a “growth stock.” Republican donors increasingly regard her as the best shot at beating both Mr. Trump and Joe Biden. In this week’s Wall Street Journal poll of GOP voters nationwide, she scores second to Mr. Trump—albeit at 15% to his 59% (Ron DeSantis is third at 14%). Mr. DeSantis leads her in Iowa, 18% to 15% (with 47% for Mr. Trump), but she is gaining on the Florida governor, who has visited all of the state’s 99 counties. The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity Action recently endorsed her, bringing its substantial ground game.
Faced with a restive public, declining national confidence and failures abroad, Ms. Haley offers an aspirational view. “I envision an America where we rediscover our national purpose and our pride,” she said at Wednesday night’s GOP debate.
“I don’t want my kids to grow up like this,” she tells the Journal, with “$34 trillion in debt,” crime “that’s out of control,” a “border that’s reckless,” with “only 29% of eighth-graders in our country” that are “proficient in reading.” The “cost of a house is unbelievable,” she mentions later. She says her 25-year-old daughter, a pediatric nurse, and her schoolteacher husband struggled to buy a home.
Meanwhile, “you have a war in Europe, you’ve got the war in the Middle East, you’ve got China on the march, you’ve got North Korea testing ballistic missiles.” She connects all those dots to “that debacle in Afghanistan,” and says the world needs to see “what a strong America looks like.” Of her prospective presidency, she says it’s “not going to be a fun eight years. But guess what? At the end of it, we’re going to show that America has an amazing ability to self-correct.”
Ms. Haley is also willing to risk taking unpopular positions. “Every other candidate in this field says they’re not going to touch entitlements,” she says. “Knowing Social Security goes bankrupt in 10 years, Medicare goes bankrupt in eight—does that mean you’re going to go be president for eight years and leave it bankrupt? You can’t do that. You have to acknowledge we have a problem.”
And in contrast to the equivocations of Messrs. Trump and DeSantis, Ms. Haley says “it’s incredibly important we stay with Ukraine.” She frames it as a matter of American credibility: “Right now, no one fears us. . . . If we leave Ukraine, we’re doing the narrative that they know, is we get bored and we leave. We move on to the next thing.” That might embolden Beijing to invade Taiwan.
She faults President Biden, saying he has “done a horrible job communicating why this is important—a horrible job. If you don’t tell the American people why something is important, you can’t expect them to be with you.”
But if she sees the big picture clearly, she seems to go blurry when it comes to the details of policy. She says that renewing K-12 education would be a priority but is light on specifics beyond “send that money down” from the Education Department to the states. Later she shoots off that “social media companies should have to show every American their algorithms” but also says her administration wouldn’t issue any regulations compelling them to do so.
An accountant by profession, she answers a question on tax policy with bromides: “the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer”; “small businesses are the heartbeat of America”; she would focus on “middle class” tax cuts. Among her few specific proposals are to eliminate the federal tax on gasoline and to “really focus on getting rid of the tax distortions,” such as the deduction for state and local taxes.
An exchange on Social Security illustrates both her political courage and her limited command of policy. She has the backbone to say the U.S. must raise the retirement age. But she is unfamiliar with an idea to tweak how benefits are calculated—basing adjustments on rising prices instead of rising wages—that could help address the shortfall with less political pain. “That’s interesting,” she says. Then she turns to an aide: “Remind me to look at that.”
Asked to name her greatest intellectual or political influence, Ms. Haley says Margaret Thatcher. “She was underestimated in everything,” Ms. Haley says. “She didn’t govern on what was popular.” In “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy,” the late Henry Kissinger distills Thatcher’s success to “personal fortitude,” a “strategy of conviction” and “an indomitable willpower made effectual by ample reserves of charm.” Ms. Haley seems to see herself in this story.
One of Ms. Haley’s books quotes Milton Friedman’s early estimation of Thatcher. “She is a very attractive and interesting lady,” he wrote after meeting her in 1978, the year before she became prime minister. “Whether she really has the capacities that Britain so badly needs at this time, I must confess, seems to me a very open question.” Forty-five years later, one might ask the same about Ms. Haley.
Then again, her policy acumen is a less pressing question than whether she has the juice to defeat Mr. Trump. Her biggest asset is a commanding but warm demeanor, a high-wire act for women in politics. “I love all the attention, fellas—thank you for that,” Ms. Haley quipped at the debate this week, responding to multiple attacks from her opponents.
And you can’t teach instinct or chemistry. Republicans are absorbing that lesson with Mr. DeSantis’s stumbles. Yet Mr. DeSantis is also strong where Ms. Haley is weak—relaxed and fluent when discussing the details. Mr. Trump has surely watched with satisfaction as the two (and the other remaining candidates) spend GOP debates tearing down each other instead of the front-runner. The Haley-DeSantis exchange on Wednesday over which governor enticed more Chinese investment was especially unhelpful since they essentially agree on China.
What does Ms. Haley make of the critique that she isn’t hitting Mr. Trump hard enough? “I’ll tell you where I differ from him. I think that he allowed the spending—$8 trillion—and our kids are never going to forgive us for the situation that we’re in. I see that he used to be good on foreign policy when it came to Ukraine. He was great when he gave them the Javelin missiles. He reversed the Obama policy. Now he’s walking it back wanting to get out of Ukraine. That’s exactly the wrong thing to be doing.”
She continues: “He said Jan. 6 was a beautiful day. I think Jan. 6 was a terrible day. He thinks that praising Kim Jong Un is a good thing. He congratulated the Chinese Communist Party on the 70th anniversary. I think that’s horrific.” She shifts to the second person to make a point about Israel: “At a time where our best ally was on her knees, you criticized Netanyahu and you praised Hezbollah. I don’t think you should praise any of those thugs.”
Ms. Haley says that “anti-Trump people think I don’t hate him enough and pro-Trump people think I don’t love him enough.” Some people “just want me to hate on him, and I’m not gonna hate on him,” while others “want me to love him, and I’m not gonna love him. I don’t love my husband 100% of the time.” (“There’s the news,” a Journal editor quips, prompting a laugh and a correction: “I don’t like my husband 100%. I love my husband all the time.”)
The Haley calculation may be that by picking her battles with Mr. Trump, she can confront him without alienating voters who like him. And she managed him deftly when he was her boss: “The reason I got out of the Trump administration without a tweet was because I told him the truth.”
Apart from dubbing Ms. Haley “Birdbrain,” Mr. Trump hasn’t criticized her much. “He’s kinda lost it a little bit—it’s not even a funny nickname,” Ms. Haley says, rolling her eyes. Is his focusing his fire on Mr. DeSantis an indication that he sees her as less of a threat? “The opposite,” she insists: “He would tell people in the administration, ‘Don’t mess with Nikki.’ ”
Ms. Haley would have to get Mr. Trump in a one-on-one fight. Mr. Trump is “strong in Iowa right now. You look at those numbers, those are pretty strong. His numbers are soft in New Hampshire. New Hampshire’s going to be where I think I have a fight with him.”
Can she force the field to winnow? If she finishes second in Iowa, “I think Ron is out. He’s put all his eggs in the basket.” She thinks she can survive a third-place finish, but “I need to do even better in New Hampshire, and then I need to be great in South Carolina.”
Denying Mr. Trump the nomination would be a presidential upset with no modern equivalent. And some polling suggests that Mr. DeSantis would be better equipped to consolidate Mr. Trump’s support. The former president’s loudest defenders view Ms. Haley as unacceptable because of her hawkish foreign-policy views.
The obvious case for Ms. Haley is that she’d fare better among the moderate, suburban voters Republicans have been losing since 2018. Polls show Messrs. Biden and Trump “pretty much head to head,” Ms. Haley notes. “You look at me in those exact same polls and we win by 10 to 13 points over Biden.”
Ms. Haley is 30 years Mr. Biden’s junior, and she raises the age issue in a one-two punch: “No one wants to see a President Kamala Harris,” she says. “No one. It sends a chill up every person’s spine. And it is why I continue to say a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris. Because you can’t honestly think that he’s going to make it that far. He’s just not.”
Getting to November will be tough, but Ms. Haley notes that she’s done it before: “My first race,” for a legislative seat in South Carolina, “I ran against a 30-year incumbent in the primary, and people laughed at me.” She won. When she sought the nomination for the governorship in 2010, “I ran against an attorney general, a lieutenant governor, a very popular congressman and a state senator. I was ‘Nikki Who?’ I had 3% in the polls. I had the least amount of money.” She won.
“I have been underestimated in everything I’ve ever done, and it’s a blessing because it makes me scrappy.” She has clearly rehearsed this elevator pitch, but it’s still revealing. She flashes a smile: “So just watch.”
Mrs. Odell is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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