Nikki Haley says a lot that I agree with. The most important thing she says is that we don’t need a president who is in his 80s, who is not at the top of his game, who will not be part of the future. That the biggest problem with Trump is that chaos follows him wherever he goes, whatever he does.

She also says many things that I don’t agree with. Like she says that she agrees with many of Trump’s policies, that he was the right president when he was elected in 2016.

There are some things she says that scare me. When she says that she would veto any spending bill which exceeds our pre-Covid spending levels. Understanding that we have a debt problem, I don’t think that blanket policies like that would best serve the country. And what do they do to items like Medicare or Social Security? While I suppose she has addressed these questions somewhere, I haven’t heard her on these topics.

She also scares me when she says that she wants to limit the federal government by taking various federal programs and simply block granting funds to the states. She is a states righter – I assume a result of growing up in rural South Carolina – as she says again and again. I am not. I think you cannot have one country comprised of 50+ separate smaller countries, each with different policies on basic governmental functions.

On the other hand, when she talks foreign policy, my ears pick up and my head bobs up and down. Here, I think she knows what she is talking about. If I were elected president, and assuming I had been elected a Democratic president, I would certainly consider her as my first choice for Secretary of State, or maybe even better, National Security Director.

But as sharp as she is on foreign policies, she struggles with explaining her own country. Last week or so, when she said that the Civil War was about “freedom”, not mentioning slavery, and equating freedom with (you guessed it) states’ rights. It sounded like she was taking the side of the Confederacy, ignoring the overriding question of slavery, and castigating the Union as anti-freedom in telling states how they should be administered and what their laws should provide. To me, freedom is something that you give to an individual (including an individual who is or was enslaved), not something you give to a state so that the state can make sure certain individuals have much less freedom than others. Her backtracking on her explanation was not at all convincing. I think she told it as she sees it.

Last night, during her CNN Town Meeting in New Hampshire, she put her foot in her mouth again, this time in her answer to the question (I paraphrase): is the United States now, or has it ever been, a racist country?

Now this is a big question, and it of course the question that the 1619 Project answers (and many scholars answer) by concluding that racism has been, and to a great extent remains, THE biggest problem in the United States. This has become quite controversial of course, because it has been politicized, not because people are digging in to the subject and trying to formulate their own opinion.

Haley has no problem with her answer. Her answer is that the United States is not and has never been a racist country. But just like she delivers (in Ron DeSantis’ opinion) word salad in talking about the Civil War, her answer to this question is poorly articulated. 

She seems to me to have two separate, and very different, reasons for her answer. Maybe three.

First, she looks at the Declaration of Independence, which of says that all “men” are created equal and have inalienable rights. It is the Declaration of Independence, she assumes, that defines the country. The country was, and still is, the home of many racists. The constitution and the early laws of country show that Blacks and women and others were not considered the equal of White men under the law. But, she says, we worked through this, making progress, keeping the words of the Declaration of Independence in mind.

In other words, believes that the “country” and the “people in the country” are two very different things. You can have a country filled with racist people and racist laws, but that defines what is in the country at a given moment, not what the country itself is. (Of course, you can use this same logic to say that Israel – with its beautiful Declaration of Independence – is not a racist (or whatever word you think is better) country, no matter what the right wing settlers or the right wing government says at any time.)

Haley’s second argument for saying the country is not racist is that, whatever the facts are and whether or not the country is racist, it is dangerous to call it that, so we must always say that it isn’t. Saying the country is racist pits citizen against citizen, she says, which hinders progress. So, facts be damned, she concludes that we should always say that the country is not at all, in any way, racist.

Finally, there’s politics. And I can’t say that I understand this well, but any Republican is walking a thin line. You are running against Trump – so you can say he is not right for 2024. But you can’t say he wasn’t right for 2016 or maybe even for 2020. You can say that there is a lot we have to do in this country to move it forward, but you can’t say that we should concentrate on racial issues during this process, because that will turn away “racist” Republican voters, consciously or subconsciously racist Republican voters, and cost you your ability to be nominated for or to win the presidency.

Of course, all of this is just rhetoric in 2024. To supplant Trump for the Republican nomination will only be possible if Trump himself is disabled by some personal disaster. But there is always 2028, when Trump (presumably) won’t be able to run for a third term. Isn’t this what she and DeSantis are really preparing for?

With all her faults, I think that Haley would make a better president by far than Trump. But compared with any Democrat? Without degrading her personally, I have to say that any Republican president with a Congress filled with dozens of crazy Republicans (and we know they will be there) would spell disaster.

Finally, Trump has denigrated Haley, he thinks, by referring to her by her birth name: Nimarata. Let me say this to that: that is one nice name. I think she should use it.