BRACK: Haley’s new book is craven plea for political relevance

By Andy Brack, editor and publisher  |  Former S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley offers a craven mush of platitudes in a new policy book that is little more than a painful cry for political relevance.

As former President Donald Trump’s enabler in the United Nations where she served as U.S. ambassador, Haley brings together 16 essays on domestic and foreign policy in “American Strength: Conservative Solutions Worth Fighting For.” 

The new 160-page free book from her Stand for America advocacy group features short essays from conservative luminaries such as U.S. Sens. Tim Scott of  South Carolina, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, as well as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Gen. H.R. McMaster. 

But it is the four pages of Haley’s introduction to the nine essays on domestic policy that are chilling and filled with stolid, cliched word play that offers a narrow, unsettling view of America.  

She repeats something that Trump supporters want to hear, but is blind to reality: “America is not a racist country,” she wrote.  

Governor, you grew up in Bamberg County.  Drive around a little today and you’ll see a continuing legacy of the racism that split the country apart in the Civil War and continued for 100 years with Jim Crow and segregationist policies.  Get out a little and you’ll see how Black and brown America has more poverty, more health inequities, shorter lives and fewer economic opportunities due to a failing rural education system where school choice efforts siphon public dollars.

Haley

Walk into a restaurant in Mississippi or Indiana or Arizona and it won’t be long before you hear someone talking about “those people” – people who look different from white America but are just as American.  

It sounds good when you say, “The moment we reject the principles at America’s heart and accept the lie that our country is racist and rotten to the core, we throw away any chance of national progress.  Instead, we go in the wrong direction, toward no freedom, no equality and no rule of law.”

Hogwash.  You are pandering to the conservative masses to make them feel like past discrimination wasn’t all that bad. We no longer live in the 1950s.  By not accepting the inequities of the past and dealing with them in a positive way, we continue two Americas – one of privilege and another rooted in the plantation culture.  By not accepting that racism drove the deaths in North Charleston of Walter Scott or in Charleston of nine worshippers at Emanuel AME Church, you are pushing nothing more than a political fairy tale just to be seen as more appealing by conservative voters in the off-chance that you run for president.  .

And your solution:  To trust you.  “Take it from me, the first female governor of South Carolina and the first minority female governor in the United States, America is not a racist country.”

Yet paragraphs earlier, you don’t want your readers to trust the American government. You conveniently say, “On both sides, the argument can be boiled down to this: We can solve any problem by putting our trust in government.  My response is ‘no thank you.’ I put my trust in the American people instead.”

Governor, the “government” is people – living people like Tim Scott, Pat Toomey, Dan Sullivan and Newt Gingrich, as well as convenient targets like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.  All of them are members of a governing class who strive to lift up the nation, not make it devolve into a sinister America.

It’s sad that as a past government public servant that you don’t trust the very government in which you served.  If you truly want to stand up for America, please stop dividing it with fear and platitudes.  Rather, bring people together – not as conservatives, moderates and liberals – but as Americans seeking solutions to nagging problems.

Andy Brack is publisher of the Charleston City Paper.  Have a comment?  Send to: editor@charlestoncurrents.com.