(Headline USA) The honeymoon may be over for pro-Establishment Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley.
Despite the media’s fleeting love affair with anything that represents a threat to former President Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, Haley was put to the test Wednesday with a politically tricky question from a a New Hampshire voter about the root causes of the Civil War.
Haley didn’t mention slavery in her response—leading the voter to say he was “astonished” by her omission.
The nuanced issue, even after 160 years, can be as divisive among Republicans as the ongoing Hamas—Israeli war is for Democrats, with modern-day conservative attitudes split over how much sympathy to extend to the Confederacy, much of which is now red-state territory.
Many Republicans—particularly among the growing ranks of pro-Trump African Americans—opt to celebrate the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president.
Lincoln’s crowning policy achievement, apart from reuniting the country, was to abolish slavery—first through the Emancipation Proclamation and, later, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which Congress passed 10 weeks prior to his assassination.
However, the Left’s cancel-culture attacks on Confederate monuments and heritage—as well as its current fetishization of slavery as white America’s original sin—leave a bitter taste in the mouths of both Southerners and civil libertarians who cast government encroachment as the foremost issue, setting aside the moral imperative of the abolitionist movement.
Historians argue that many of the rebelling states specifically mentioned slavery in their articles of secession—although, conceptually, they were likely to have conflated the issue more with states’ rights than with the civil rights of the enslaved population.
South Carolina’s 1860 Ordinance of Secession mentions slavery in its opening sentence and points to the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” as a reason for the state removing itself from the Union.
Meanwhile, the federal government’s authority to impose its will on states without adhering to the prescribed constitutional process remains a prime point of contention in contemporary debates on hot-button issues like abortion.
A POLITICAL QUAGMIRE
During Haley’s term as governor of South Carolina—where the first shots of the Civil War were fired—she controversially authorized the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol in Columbia.
That 2015 decision may backfire on her as she seeks to pry the primary victory in her deeply conservative home state from the vastly popular Trump.
Asked during a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire, what she believed had caused the war, Haley talked about the role of government, replying that it involved “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.”
She then turned the question back to the man who had asked it, who replied that he was not the one running for president and wished instead to know her answer.
After Haley went into a lengthier explanation about the role of government, individual freedom and capitalism, the questioner seemed to admonish Haley, 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 retorted, before abruptly moving on to the next question.
Haley has frequently said during her campaign that she would compete in the first three states before returning “to the sweet state of South Carolina, and we’ll finish it” in the Feb. 24 primary.
Haley’s campaign did not immediately return a message seeking comment on her response. The campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another of Haley’s GOP foes, recirculated video of the exchange on social media, adding the comment, “Yikes.”
Haley, a second-generation Indian who would be the first non-white candidate on a GOP presidential ticket if chosen, has been pressed on the war’s origins before.
As she ran for governor in 2010, Haley, in an interview with a now-defunct activist group then known as The Palmetto Patriots, described the war as between two disparate sides fighting for “tradition” and “change” and said the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.”
During that same campaign, she dismissed the need for the flag to come down from the Statehouse grounds, portraying her Democratic rival’s push for its removal as a desperate political stunt.
But five years later, Haley urged lawmakers to remove the flag from its perch near a Confederate soldier monument following a mass shooting in which a white gunman killed eight black church members who were attending Bible study.
At the time, Haley said the flag had been “hijacked” by the shooter from those who saw the flag as symbolizing “sacrifice and heritage.”
DAMAGE CONTROL
During a Thursday campaign event in North Conway, N.H., Haley sought to amend her response by affirming slavery as the war’s cause, something so self-evident that it didn’t bear mentioning.
Nonetheless, she faced a bombardment of attacks from both the Right and Left.
On Wednesday night, Christale Spain—elected this year as the first black woman to chair South Carolina’s Democratic Party—said Haley’s response was “vile, but unsurprising.”
“The same person who refused to take down the Confederate Flag until the tragedy in Charleston, and tried to justify a Confederate History Month,” Spain tweeted. “She’s just as MAGA as Trump.”
Jaime Harrison, current chairman of the Democratic National Committee and South Carolina’s party chairman during part of Haley’s tenure as governor, said her response was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor.”
“Same person who said the confederate flag was about tradition & heritage and as a minority woman she was the right person to defend keeping it on state house grounds,” Harrison tweeted Wednesday night.
“Some may have forgotten but I haven’t,” he continued. “Time to take off the rose colored Nikki Haley glasses folks.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
