FOCUS: On Haley’s accolades, raspberries and revisionism

Staff reports  |  Gov. Nikki Haley earned a lot of accolades last week for moderate comments, particularly on immigration, during the nationally-televised GOP response which she gave following President Obama’s final State of the Union address.

Haley

Haley said the country needed to head in a “new direction,” but added that Democrats like Obama weren’t totally to blame for the nation’s problems.

“We need to recognize our contributions to the erosion of the public trust in America’s leadership,” she said. “We need to accept that we’ve played a role in how and why our government is broken. And then we need to fix it.”

Even The Economist, the erudite consolidator of news, noticed in a profile titled, “Haley’s comet.” It reported, “That combination—fiscal ferocity and a capacity for conciliation—has led to chatter, now intensifying, about Mrs. Haley as a contender for vice-president.”

But Haley, in a reference to presidential candidates like Donald Trump, garnered some hard-right raspberries after she said the nation needed to resist the temptation to follow the “angriest voices.” That criticism prompted outlandish conservative pundit Ann Coulter to tweet that Trump should deport Haley.

Immigration also provided the background for a criticism that Haley ignored the nation’s history.

When speaking to reporters, she said, “When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion. Let’s not start that now,” she said while speaking to reporters in South Carolina.

Left-wing critics reminded Haley on social media that Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution originally included the “Three-Fifths Compromise” which valued slaves as worth three-fifths of a white person. Her comment also ignored Jim Crow laws passed after the Civil War that disenfranchised blacks and others.