[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]If Nikki Haley is elected governor of South Carolina in November, I believe she will soar into the primary tier of Republican Presidential candidates for the ‘12 election — against President Bumbles or Hillary.
At 38 years old, she is startlingly young, but she is whip-smart, so articulate she makes Bumbles look as if he is munching marbles, possesses a dose of charisma to match Hill and Bill rolled into one unit, and pretty enough to distract the whole audience at a beauty contest.
Nikki vs. Hillary has an historic ring although the impressive new Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, could start a stampede to his kitchen door, too. A sizabl;e man with the accent on large, he will need to aggressively peel back his girth or risk being compared, by a chronically unfriendly media, as a latter-day William Howard Taft.
But Ms. Haley is the story of the day, and probably the yarn of the year, a magical tale of a courageous lady spitting large odds in its cocked eye. A state legislator, she won a runoff for the Republican nomination yesterday by capturing two-thirds of the votes cast.
Don’t Let Hate Hit You in the Face
The individual South Carolinians who fear women in power and hate Republicans, especially non-purely white ones, would fill our Coliseum seven days a week for three years.
She ain’t one of us, suh, those hate-drooling ol’ Suthin’ boys are tellin’ one another over loud speakers in the town square.
It will not surprise observers of the Deep South that South Carolina, which thinks the Stone Age is too darned fancy, still is entering the Bozo stage of civilization.
You think the journalistic whores at the Los Angeles Times have treated Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina like tramps the last six months because they are successful Republican women —ooooh, stinky, the worst kind?
Nikki Haley can make bald heads curl into pretzels with the tales of the dirty tricks that them there good, ol’ boys have been sitting up at night, pouring moonshine down their gullets, while they think of ways to assassinate her character.
In May, two gentlemen from camps of Ms. Haley’s opponents — a detail newspapers commonly ignored — gained national headlines for weeks by claiming they have slept with the very married candidate.
Well, yes, they could not produce any evidence or corroborating witnesses, but, hey, they said, we don’t want her to be governor. Nobody has noticed that not a shred of evidence was found, but the allegations are mentioned in every local and national story about her.
Just last Friday, a county GOP chairman in South Carolina, trying to sabotage Ms. Haley’s stunning momentum for yesterday’s runoff election, made the kind of charge that only would become airborne in a state with Carolina in its name. He challenged her conversion to Christianity 13 years ago, when she married.
Lest we be accused of muting a crucial fact, Ms. Haley’s parents emigrated to South Carolina — why, in heaven’s name — from India before, I emphasize, she was born. By noble, historic Deep South standards, Ms. Haley’s parents committed the odious crime of not only being slightly darker than some of you and I am, but — horrors, call the cultural police — they were practitioners of the Sikh religion, not Christianity.
Obviously, the immigrant family was not welcome in the pristine home of them there good, ol’ Suthin’ white boys. Your hands should never touch mine. Or is it mahn?
My favorite Nikki Haley surfaced yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:
A few weeks ago, Ms. Haley and her three Republican rivals for governor sat for a videotaped interview with an obvious hayseed group known as the Palmetto Patriots. The Patriots’ mission is to “fight attacks against Southern Culture” and “to ensure compliance with conservative values.”
Said the Journal:
“But Mrs. Haley was the only one to be asked the freighted question of what she thought caused the Civil War.
“Members of the group were curious about Mrs. Haley’s views because of her heritage, aid Robert Slimp, a Columbia, S.C. pastor who participated in the questioning. The group did not ask her rivals about the war, he said, because ‘all of them are Southerners whose families go back to beyond the war between the states, back to antebellum times, and they would have a deeper appreciation of Southern thinking and mentality.’”
For now, no comment.
