Gotcha! Then and Now Part II

Members are reminded to abide by decorum of the House.

That little bit of irony was brought to us last year by none other than the queen of decorous behavior herself, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who while temporarily presiding over a session of the House of Representatives, admonished her colleagues to remain quiet during a speech. Her remark led to an outburst of laughter from the Democrats in the chamber, and no doubt several muffled guffaws from her fellow Republicans as well. You may remember it was Greene along with her partner in chaos Lauren Boebert who loudly heckled the President of the United States, interrupting his State of the Union Address last year, calling him a liar and chanting "Build the Wall!"

In the previous post I brought up how times have changed, politically speaking, in my life. When I was a child in the early sixties, there was anger and divisiveness among Americans to be sure. But the political divide among Americans today is perhaps at its greatest, most impervious point since the Civil War. Consider this: from a recent Economist/YouGov Poll, 38 percent of Americans responded they would not approve of one of their children marrying a member of a different political party. In 1960, that number was only about 4 percent, which also happens to be the percentage of current marriages between a Republican and a Democrat. 

Perhaps this explains why the deep-down respect Americans once had for the institutions of this country spelled out in the U.S. Constitution that made certain behavior, such as that of Greene and Bobert out of bounds, is sadly a thing of the past. 

All of that was thrown out the window during my life as a pall of cynicism, distrust and even outright hatred of fellow Americans with different opinions, has replaced the respect for those institutions meant to bring us all together.

That's not to say that as a society we don't respect anything anymore. I also pointed out in the post certain issues that are held sacred to many of us today such as equal rights for women. That in particular was a fringe issue sixty years ago, barely considered at all and when it was, it received the same kind of response then, as MTG calling for decorum on the floor of the House does now.

I guess we have to take the good with the bad.

Still, I have to say, where has all the decorum gone? 

The inspiration for this duo of posts was two recent incidents where public figures got into hot water over their inadequate responses to what could be considered "gotcha questions", that is to say, inquiries that are designed by the questioner specifically to discredit the respondent.

Many sources regard one of the first such questions directed at a public figure, thereby launching the era of the gotcha question, to be the one I mentioned in the previous post where in 1992 President George H.W. Bush was asked if he ever had an extra-marital affair. Such a question of a sitting president would have been unthinkable before.

We haven't looked back since. 

Neither of the two gotcha questions I speak of were asked by members of the press. One was made by a congressperson at a congressional hearing, the other by a private citizen. I'll start with that one.

A few weeks ago at a public forum in New Hampshire, Nikky Haley, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, was asked the following: 

What caused the Civil War?

Haley responded ironically:

Now don't come with an easy question or anything...

Unless you're a Republican candidate for president from South Carolina (where the first shots of the Civil War were fired) as Haley is, this is not a difficult, let alone a gotcha question. It's not like asking for example, what caused World War I. 

No matter how much the good folks south of the Mason-Dixon Line want to claim that the causes for the American Civil War were complex, it is not a hard question at all, and indeed the question is possible to answer in one word:

Slavery.

After her comment about the difficulty of the question, Haley went into a familiar talking point saying the Civil War was:

basically [about] how the government was going to run [and] the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.

She did not mention slavery as a contributing factor to the Civil War. 

Nikky Haley knows better. Unfortunately, many of her constituents whose votes she's depending upon in order to win the Republican nomination, are those folks in Dixie, many of whom don't take too kindly to folks upsetting the apple cart by trashing the Confederacy and making claims that what they learned all their lives in school is a misrepresentation of history. 

So for Haley this was a question with no good answer, a classic gotcha question. Had she answered honestly that yes, the Civil War WAS about state's rights and that the right they were fighting for was the right to own people, she may have just as well thrown in the towel as she would have certainly lost any momentum she might have had in the Southern primaries, especially the one in her home state whose primary takes place on February 24th. 

Instead, she followed the line of the Cult of the Lost Cause, the movement that took place in the post-reconstruction period in the south, where among other things, history was re-written to paint a rosier picture of the Confederacy. It was no doubt what she was taught as a young person in South Carolina herself and that line of reasoning probably served her well as a Southern politician, until that fateful evening in New Hampshire.

The questioner followed up by mentioning his surprise at her omission of slavery.

At that point Haley threw gasoline on the fire by defiantly responding:

What do you want me to say about slavery?

To which the questioner said triumphantly: "Thank you, you've answered my question." 

Ouch.

Nikky Haley is a consummate politician which is perhaps her biggest weakness. In a previous post I wrote about her tendency to speak out of both sides of her mouth, taking the most convenient path depending upon whom she is trying to reach. That makes it difficult to know exactly where she stands on the issues.

Her grievous omission in New Hampshire probably won't be much of a factor in her unlikely bid to become this year's Republican nominee for president, but it will come back to haunt her if she ever finds herself on a national ticket, either as candidate for president or vice president.

It's hard to know the motivation for asking a presidential candidate what has to be considered an off-the-wall question about a historical event that was settled 159 years ago. On the other hand, the reaction to Haley's gaffe proves one thing, we're still fighting that war to this day, which makes the question quite relevant. 

Well played Mr. Private Citizen. 

By contrast, there is no question about the motivation of U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik's classic gotcha question to the presidents of three major American universities at a congressional hearing looking into antisemitism at American universities, as illustrated by rallies that took place in the days following the Hamas attack on Israel this past October 7.

Similar rallies across the planet celebrating that attack as a legitimate act of protest, drew the ire of every reasonable citizen of the world who was paying attention, as their timing immediately following a despicable act of brutal terrorism, quite reasonably called Israel's 9/11, displayed (quoting myself here) remarkable "heartlessness, ignorance, stupidity and yes, antisemitism."

Many of these rallies took place on American campuses and while protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, nothing in that cherished document protects them or their participants from being criticized which sadly, few university presidents chose to do in the ensuing days.

In their defense I'd say that the October 7th terrorist attack took nearly the entire world by surprise, so the lack of preparation to deal with the reaction to it, regrettable as it was in a way, understandable.

Somewhat less understandable was the lack of preparation of the three presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, when it came to answering what they had to know would be tough, politically charged questions at the congressional hearing in December, two months after the attack. 

Here's the gotcha question Stefanik posed to each of them, demanding a yes or no answer:

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your school’s] rules on bullying and harassment?

Like the question about the Civil War, on the surface this shouldn't be too difficult to answer. After all, American universities tend to bend over backwards in protecting their students' rights to not be harassed, bullied or just made to feel uncomfortable. It's obvious that Jewish students would feel harassed when confronted by a group demanding that they, their relatives, and every person on earth who identifies with the same ethno-religious group as they do, should be exterminated. Therefore, the answer to this question, if the universities in question are truly honest about protecting students' "safe spaces", should be an unqualified yes.

But here's where that tricky little thing called the First Amendment gets in the way. Hate speech, which is really what Stefanik is referring to here, reprehensible as it is, is protected by the Constitution, so long as it doesn't represent a direct threat to someone. This is something that every school administrator understands and that is why the three university presidents equivocated when answering the question. "It depends" they all said in one way or other. 

Elise Stefanik, herself a Harvard alumna also understands this and knew exactly how the three would have to respond. She phrased her hypothetical question in as vague terms as possible so that it could cover, depending upon one's point of view, anything from Nazi skinheads carrying baseball bats while chanting "all Jews must die", to a group of students wearing Keffiyehs, chanting "Free Palestine." 

Understanding that the job of an administrator is to consider the minutiae of everything that comes her way along with the big picture, Stefanik preaching to the masses looking only to the convenient sound bite, set a trap for the three, into which they all fell.

Despite the prepared statements of Gay, Magill and Kornbluth on the evils of anti-Semitism, (excerpts of which can be found below), and their commitment to eradicate it and all other forms of racial and ethnic hatred at their institutions, all the general public heard was their failure to put calling for the genocide of Jews at least up there with, (borrowing a line from Sam Harris), other "crimes students at college campuses lose sleep about such as cultural appropriation and using the wrong pronoun."

Elise Stefanik may or may not be sincere in her concern about antisemitism, I have no idea. But as a newly minted MAGA culture warrior on the short list of candidates as Donald Trump's running mate in the upcoming election, she made no bones about the fact that she was gunning for these three administrators who represent in the minds of the Americans she's trying to connect with, the woke, elite enemy who must be put down at all costs. 

Shortly after her testimony to the Congressional Committee and the evisceration she received for her response to Stefanik's line of questioning, Liz Magill stepped down as the President of Penn. Responding to that, Stefanik commented on social media: "That's one down and two to go."

Meanwhile up in Cambridge, the Harvard Community as well as the university's governing board the Harvard Corporation, threw their support behind Claudine Gay until reports of sloppy research work in her past became public. Facing tremendous pressure and harassment, Dr. Gay stepped down shortly thereafter. Annie Karmi of the New York Times, wrote that Stefanik, taking full credit for the administrator's demise, took a "victory lap" after Gay's resignation.

So far Stefanik has been denied the opportunity of dancing on the professional grave of Sally Kornbluth who remains president of MIT. Perhaps Stefanik's claim that Kornbluth is an antisemite has fallen upon deaf ears since Kornbluth is Jewish while Stefanik is not.

Crazy world we live in, no?

The good news in all of this is that the principle actors of this story with the exception of the guy who asked the Civil War question, are all women of tremendous influence, something that would have been unthinkable 60 years ago. 

Ever since I was a child, I've been told that the world would be a much better place if women were in charge. That always comforted me as the writing had been on the wall that women would be gaining more and more influence as time went on.

The bad news is that despite women of influence being eminently capable of leadership, strength, wisdom and insight, they are also just as capable of messing things up as men.

I guess that's what equality is all about. 

Happy 2024.

CODA: 

It would be a grave injustice for the three university presidents to be remembered primarily for the soundbites of their responses to a question designed specifically to discredit them. 

What follows are excerpts from each of the prepared statements of Claudine Gay, Liz Magill and Sally Kornbluth that were read before the House committee's hearing on antisemitism on December 5, 2023. 

Claudine Gay:

The free exchange of ideas is the foundation upon which Harvard is built, and safety and well-being are the prerequisites for engagement in our community. Without both of these things, our teaching and research mission founder. In the past two months, our bedrock commitments have guided our efforts. We have increased security measures, expanded reporting channels, and augmented counseling, mental health and support services.

We have reiterated that speech that incites violence threatens safety or violates Harvard’s policies against bullying and harassment is unacceptable. We have made it clear that any behaviors that disrupt our teaching and research efforts will not be tolerated, and where these lines have been crossed, we have taken action.

We have drawn on our academic expertise to create learning opportunities for our campus community. We have begun examinations of the ways in which anti-Semitism and other forms of hate manifest at Harvard and in American society. We have also repeatedly made clear that we at Harvard reject antisemitism and denounce any trace of it on our campus or within our community.

Antisemitism is a symptom of ignorance, and the cure for ignorance is knowledge. Harvard must model what it means to preserve free expression, while combating prejudice and preserving the security of our community. We are undertaking that hard, long term work with the attention and intensity it requires.

Liz Magill:

To ensure that our Jewish students have a direct channel to share their experiences with me, I’ve created a student advisory group on the student experience. Today’s hearing is focused on antisemitism and its direct impact on the Jewish community, but history teaches us that where antisemitism goes unchecked, other forms of hate spread, and ultimately can threaten democracy.

We are seeing a rise in our society in harassment, intimidation, and threats toward individuals based on their identity as Muslim, Palestinian, or Arab. At Penn, we are investigating all these allegations for members of our community and providing resources to support individuals experiencing threats, online harassment, and doxing.

We will continue to deploy all the necessary resources to support any member of the community experiencing hate. As president, I am committed to a safe, secure, and supportive educational environment so that our academic mission can thrive. It is crucial that ideas are exchanged and diverse viewpoints are debated.

 Sally Kornbluth:

I strongly believe that there is a difference — between what we can say to each other. That is what we have a right to say and what we should say as members of one community. Yet as president of MIT, in addition to my duties to keep the campus safe and to maintain the functioning of this national asset, I must at the same time ensure that we protect speech and viewpoint diversity for everyone.

This is in keeping with the Institute’s principles on free expression. Meeting those three goals is challenging and the results can be terribly uncomfortable, but it is essential to how we operate in the United States. Those who want us to shut down protest language are in effect arguing for a speech code.

But in practice, speech codes do not work. Problematic speech needs to be countered with other speech and with education. And we are doing that. However, the right to free speech does not extend to harassment, discrimination or incitement to violence in our community. MIT policies are clear on this. To keep the campus functioning, we also have policies to regulate the time, manner and place of demonstrations.

A Quick Post Mortem

In the "I watched it so you won't have to category", here are some quick thoughts on the winners and losers of last night's Republican Presidential Debate:

A winner, sort of: Tim Scott, who sleepwalked through the first debate last month, woke up last night and scored a few points by directly going after some of his rivals on the stage. He took swipes, as did practically everyone else, at Vivek Ramaswamy on his business dealings with China, and at Ron DeSantis on his state's controversial guidelines for history education. That exchange produced the highest moment of gravitas in the evening when Scott who is black said: "there is not a redeeming quality in slavery." He said that because the Florida guidelines put in place by DeSantis suggest there was.

This led to a brief discourse by the junior senator from South Carolina on how despite the injustice and depravity of the institution, black people in this country survived slavery, discrimination, poll taxes and literacy tests "woven into the laws of our country." He went on saying that black people have had a much harder time surviving Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" and the welfare system it produced which according to Scott, did much to destroy the black family and create a permanent underclass. This is a classic, traditional conservative argument that will certainly win him some votes as much as bring out the the wrath of the left.

Scott looked downright silly though when he challenged his former mentor Nikki Haley about expensive curtains she supposedly bought for her office at the UN when she became the U.S. Ambassador. Haley correctly pointed out that the curtains preceeded her. "Did you send them back?" was Scott's response.

A loser: I was less than impressed with Mike Pence this time, perhaps because I over-estimated him after his last debate performance. While he thanked the moderators for every question sent his way, more often than not he refused to answer those questions. He is however the surprise winner of my bat-shit crazy idea award, when he proposed as a solution to mass shootings, a fast track to execution for the perps.

Runner up to that award and clear-cut winner of my constitution schmonstitution award is Ramaswamy's plan to eliminate birthright citizenship in the United States, something that is guaranteed in Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment.  

Best line of the evening goes to Nikki Haley for this response to Vivek Ramaswamy: "honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say." Second best line goes to moderator Dana Parino. I don't remember the exact line but after one of Mike Pence's many end runs around one of her questions, she interrupted him saying, "yes that's great Mr. Vice President but what about (then she restated the original question)", which again, he failed to answer.

Biggest lost opportunity of the evening goes to there being not one mention of the exPOTUS's recent comment about executing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Oh, wait a minute, this debate was hosted by FOX News, how silly of me. As if...

OK the biggest lost opportunity goes to Ron DeSantis for once again failing to man up and just, as Tim Scott suggested, drop the line that suggests that people benefited from slavery from his school guidelines. Instead, while intentionally mispronouncing her name, DeSantis claimed the whole issue was dreamed up by Kamala Harris. No, it wasn't Ron, it's right there in black and white, if you'd only bother to read the guidelines you insisted forcing upon the schools in your state.

The lamest attempt at humor goes hands down to Chris Christie for two clunkers. First was his comment that went something like this: "Trump ducks out of these debates so much we're gonna start calling him Donald Duck."  If he had said it like that it may have sounded a little funnier but he added a lot of words between the ducking out part and the punchline so that if you were drifting off like I was, you might have missed the connection. "Oh I get it!"  I  said to myself this morning when I heard it replayed on the radio 10 hours after the fact, once again proving that in comedy, timing is everything. 

The other was his rather cringy line reacting to the problem with education in this country: "Joe Biden is literally in bed with a member of a teachers union" (his wife).

Bad humor plus a real slap in the face to union members including this new union member, makes Christie in my book, the biggest loser of the evening.

The I still can't remember his name without looking it up award goes to, wait a minute...oh yeah, goes to Doug Burgum.  

Once again I have to say the overall winner of this race to second place in the Republican primary goes to Nikki Haley who so far at least, seems able to run circles around the rest of the competition in a debate. In marked contrast to her last appearance where she appeared to be looking ahead to the general election by talking about consensus and reasonable goals, this time she went all in on the issues Republicans want to hear such as border security and energy independence (there is no such thing by the way). She went in lockstep with DeSantis and his idea to send troops into Mexico to stop illegal immigration and the flow of fentanyl. She even out-flanked DeSantis to the right when she challenged him on his resistance to fracking and off-shore drilling in his state. In characteristic fashion, rather than reasonably explaining his position, DeSantis huffed, puffed and shrugged it off, claiming Haley was wrong. 

She wasn't.

Many pundits are claiming that these candidates slugging it out against each other in a race they know they can't win are auditioning for vice president. Some of them perhaps are, such as Ramaswamy whom I imagine would be thrilled to be Donald Trump's second fiddle. I'm betting that DeSantis is still going for all the marbles in this go around, and sticking to my call in a previous post that Haley is running for the 2028 nomination. Trump would be wise to pick her as his running mate if he wants to actually win the general election fair and square, but I think he's looking for more of a toady, someone without a shred of integrity like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Goetz to do his bidding and nothing else. 

For her part, being Trump's running mate would be a lose-lose proposition for Nikki Haley. If a Trump/Haley ticket should lose in the general election, that probably would not bode well for her future aspirations. If they win, she would more than likely end up being the next Mike Pence, which would be even worse.  

As for Mike Pence, well I don't think he's looking to be the next Mike Pence either.                                

Nikki Haley certainly understands that things have not worked out well for anyone who has ever gotten close to Donald Trump, and she'd be foolish to accept the offer if it comes her way.

I think she's way too smart for that. 

But I wouldn't bet money on it, I could be wrong, I certainly have been before.

Let the good times roll.

And Then She Raised Her Hand

A couple weeks ago I said to a co-worker that the night before I had done the geekiest of things, I watched the Republican Presidential Debate in its entirety. "Why would you do that?" she asked.  Siting a bit of ancient wisdom filtered through Michael Corleone I responded: "because it's good to keep your friends close and your enemies closer."

But in all seriousness, while I may never vote for any of these candidates for anything, ever, I always find it a good idea to keep an open mind because as I've pointed out in this space time and again, I might actually learn something.

There were a few surprises for me this go around. Perhaps the biggest was the number of times the word "woke" was mentioned by Ron DeSantis in the debate, zero. It seemed clear in this reboot of his campaign, the third or fourth (I've lost count), his handlers must have advised him that his incessant use of the term had become tiresome. That bit of advice was sound. 

I do question his general approach to the debate however. He seemed like a carnival automaton, whenever called upon by the moderators, it was as if they were putting coins into the slot, and out would come a diatribe on one the of talking points near and dear to the hearts of the limited scope of Americans he hopes to attract. 

You could tell he was playing to the crowd with lines such as leaving drug cartel members "stone cold dead."

Unfortunately, for the Americans whom he is not trying to attract, stone cold dead best describes the feelings they have for him. To them, me included, Ron DeSantis is Donald Trump without the charm. 

Vivek Ramaswamy's star both rose and fell, depending upon which side you're on. He was certainly the most visible and audible of all the folks on the stage in Milwaukee that night, in both the number of words coming out of his mouth, and those coming out of his opponents attacking him. As his hero the exPOTUS, Ramaswamy understands that any attention, good or bad, works in his favor. 

He spent an endless amount of time talking in circles uttering nonsense, proving himself to be the true heir apparent to the former president. I must say though, he was slick, he handled the barbs coming his way from Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and especially Chris Christie with aplomb with perfectly timed comebacks. But I suspect his comment that Climate Change is a hoax didn't win him any support outside of the MAGA base, or even inside it with younger voters. It was certainly a deal breaker for a large segment of Americans. 

I thought Mike Pence gave a solid performance, perhaps because I didn't have particularly high expectations for him. He had the best one-liner of the evening when asked if presidents over a certain age should be required to take a mental competency test. Pence dispensed with that thought by saying perhaps everyone in Washington should be asked to take one. He made a good case convincing at least some of the MAGA faithful that he did the right thing on January 6th. When confronted by the question of Pence's actions on that fateful day, most of the candidates on the stage talked around the issue but at least grudgingly paid lip service to the former vice president. The exception was Chris Christie who said unequivocally that Americans owe Pence a great deal of gratitude. He's right.

Speaking of Christie, his role along with Asa Hutchinson (interestingly positioned together on the far left of the dais) as flies-in-the-ointment, attacking the former president, made them persona-non-grata among the highly partisan MAGA audience, drawing jeers and boos every time they opened their mouths. Christie was a little disappointing, probably because the opportunities to address the issue were few and far between. He had to interject his Mike Pence comment because the moderators were ready to move on to another topic before he got a chance to respond. In what seemed to be an obvious attempt by the FOX News moderators to limit Christie's time slamming the exPOTUS, late in the debate, Christie was asked about UFOs. The most memorable Christie moments were his jabs at Vivek Ramaswamy, at one point saying the 38 year old entrepreneur and presidential wannabie sounded like "ChatGPT". That made me feel really old and out of touch because I had to look up a contemporary cultural reference made by a Republican presidential candidate. 

The real disappointment of the night was Tim Scott who didn't manage to set himself apart from the pack in any way, shape or form. The biggest response to one of his remarks came when he stridently proclaimed that his first act as president would be to fire Attorney General Merrick Garland. Of course, being a Cabinet position, every new president appoints a new AG, so saying that is like saying the first thing he would do after being sworn in is give a speech. Duh.

North Dakota Governor Doug Bergum seemed like a nice and reasonable guy. His biggest moment came when it was revealed that he had suffered a torn Achilles tendon while (at 67), playing in a pickup basketball game in Milwaukee earlier that day. He made it through the debate, standing the whole time and turning in a respectable if not particularly memorable performance. He may not exactly be the Willis Reed of politics, but his calm demeanor was a welcome relief from all the noise and the fact that he made it through the two-hour ordeal enduring what must have been incredible pain was impressive by itself. The dark horse candidate made himself known to everyone who watched the debate. Unfortunately, most of them have forgotten him by now. 

I've given up trying to predict the future, especially the outcomes of elections. There's plenty of evidence in this space that practically right up to the 2016 election, I didn't think Donald Trump had a snowball's chance in hell of ever becoming president.

Recalling that, I'm not going to bother to predict what will happen in November, 2024.

Instead, I will offer an opinion that you can easily discount but can't possibly prove wrong which is this:  if a general election for president were to be held in the coming few weeks between Joe Biden and any of the men standing on the stage in Milwaukee (and the one who didn't show up), Joe Biden would probably win.

The woman is another story.

In my book, the hands down winner of the first Republican presidential debate was Nikki Haley. I'll add this: if a general election were held today between her and the president, she could beat Joe Biden, perhaps handily. 

Obviously, that's a moot point because she would have to win her party's nomination before she could run in a general election. And at least judging by the way things look now, that ain't gonna happen because A) Donald Trump is leading the polls by a whopping margin and B) Haley said little in the debate that would sway anyone in the Trump base away from him and towards her.

So how could Nikki Haley have possibly won the debate? 

It's simple, because she and the dudes who participated in the debate, with the possible exception of DeSantis, are running for the 2028 nomination, not the current one. 

There's the answer to the question many of us have which is why so many Republican candidates are running in an election they know they have no chance of winning.

It's the future stupid (I'm talking to myself here), and the road to the White House is a long haul that typically spans several election cycles. I can't count the number of times Joe Biden ran for president before he won in 2020*. Donald Trump was publicly talking about running for president (albeit as a pro-choice Democrat) all the way back in the eighties. His predecessor Barack Obama, while a relative newbie in the public eye, gained national attention four years before his election as a newly elected senator from Illinois in 2004 when he introduced himself to the nation by giving this inspirational keynote address to the DNC in Boston.

The cold reality is that it takes more than public support to become president, it takes money, gobs of it. The candidates we saw on that stage in Milwaukee beyond trying to get the public's attention, are all vying for funds to build up their campaign treasury. The folks with gobs of money on hand willing to contribute to a political candidate, do so because they expect some kind of payback in the end. That payback only comes if the candidate they support can actually win the general election, not just the party nomination.

Naturally the big contributors not only look for candidates who might give them something they want, but they also hedge their bets on the candidates they feel have the best chance of winning.

It was clear from her performance during the debate that Nikki Haley was looking beyond the Republican primary to the general election.

For example, Haley understands that the draconian anti-abortion stance Republicans have taken is not a winning strategy, not at the state level, even as we recently discovered in red-trending states like Kansas, Wisconsin, Ohio and others, and certainly not at the national level. 

Despite classifying herself as "pro-life", Haley advocated in the debate for consensus and above all compassion on the issue. I have not heard that kind of nuance advocated by any major candidate, Democrat or Republican. She focused on the issues all Americans "should agree upon" such as contraception being readily available, the promotion of adoption, not punishing women for having abortions, not forcing doctors with moral objections to perform abortions and banning late term abortions.** She dismissed the idea of a federal ban (even though she claims to support one), because the necessity of finding 60 votes in the Senate to make that happen is simply not attainable. In response, Mike Pence said that "consensus is the opposite of leadership" implying a more authoritarian approach he would take on that issue. That stance is music to the ears of the far right and may help him in the Republican primary but will prove fatal in the general election. 

Haley's personal highlight from the debate came during the topic of our Ukraine policy. Vivek Ramaswami advocated becoming closer to Vladimir Putin, suggesting we give up Eastern Ukraine to Russia, as if it were ours to give. Single-handedly taking a direct swipe at Ramaswami and an indirect swipe at her former boss the exPOTUS, his foreign policy and his love affair with the Soviet dictator, Haley said this:

You don't do that to friends. What you do instead is you have the backs of your friends. Ukraine, it's a front line of defense... Putin has said… once Russia takes Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next. That's a world war. We're trying to prevent war. Look at what Putin did today. He killed Prigozhin. When I was at the U.N., the Russian ambassador suddenly died. This guy is a murderer. And you are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country. 

Haley's schooling of Ramaswami and her implicit dig at Trump were noteworthy indeed. 

It was in fact, she, not Hutchinson nor Christie who delivered the harshest blows against Trump. When the economy, especially the debt and the natural Republican impulse to blame Joe Biden and the Democrats came up, Haley said this:

Donald Trump added 8 trillion to our debt and our kids are never going to forgive us for this. And so at the end of the day, you look at the 2024 budget, Republicans asked for 7.4 billion in earmarks, Democrats asked for 2.8 billion. So you tell me who are the big spenders.

Later in the debate, she laid it all on the line for any Republican willing to listen:

We have to look at the fact that three-quarters of Americans don't want a rematch between Trump and Biden. And we have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can't win a general election that way.

So consensus building was her debate performance that the conservative Haley garnered the notice and even the tepid praise of many liberal commentators. That is, until she raised her hand in the affirmative when the question was posed of the candidates if they would support Donald Trump were he the 2024 Republican nominee AND was convicted in one or more of the 92 felony counts he's facing. That was too much to handle for most of the left of MAGA tribe where the general consensus in the end was that Nikki Haley is a hypocrite. 

Is she? 

Cynical as it may sound, Nikki Haley is a traditional politician, and a damned good one. Show me a politician who could never be charged with hypocrisy, and I'll show you a losing politician.

Later, when Haley was questioned about that response, she retorted it was irrelevant because she would be the Republican nominee in 2024, not Trump. 

She has chutzpah too. 

Here's my take on Haley's M.O. 

She knows well that Donald Trump is more than likely to be the Republican Party's nominee for president in the 2024 election, regardless of the outcome of his plethora of legal issues.

She also figures that Trump is likely to lose the 2024 general election to Biden, just as he did in 2020. Haley and her team are banking on that and the logic that except for the most steadfast of Trump supporters, most Republicans will have to come to the conclusion that supporting the two-time loser and very likely jailbird Trump is not a good recipe for winning elections or the future of the Republican Party. 

If that comes to pass, Nikki Haley may be very well situated to be the Republican standard-bearer in four years, at least compared to the folks who shared the stage with her in Milwaukee two weeks ago. If the results of the last debate are any indication, Haley proved she is capable of standing up to her opponents, often leaving them in the dust. She may not have said a lot to sway the MAGA tribe to her side, but by not discounting Trump entirely, she's shown that while she may not be MAGA, she's also not a RINO. She's also one of the very few Republican candidates who have not been on the receiving end of the wrath of the exPOTUS, thereby maintaining her street cred among the faithful. That may not be enough to help make her the Republican nominee in this cycle, but it may in the next one where the party will be theoretically focusing on someone who can actually win the general election. 

History almost guarantees that 40 percent of the voters are assured to vote for the Republican candidate in a presidential election and 40 percent are assured to vote for the Democrat.

That means the election comes down to convincing the remaining 20 percent of the voters who could vote either way.

Nikki Haley showed the nation and potential donors that she is willing to look at the big picture beyond the ultra-right wing talking points that might be helpful to win the Republican nomination but won't work in the general election.

Issues like banning books, endless culture wars, climate change denial, embracing Vladimir Putin, punishing women for having abortions, teaching kids that black people benefited from being slaves, and a whole slew of other extreme positions, just won't cut it with the 20 percent.

But won't her gesture showing tacit support for Donald Trump hurt her? 

No, I don't think so. To the 40 percent Republican-or-bust voters, that gesture showed her loyalty to the Party. The twenty percent in the middle, many of whom would vote for a Republican were he or she not so extreme, will have long forgotten it. The only folks who will remember the gesture like me, are in the other forty percent and wouldn't vote for her anyway.

What I just described is only one of many possible scenarios that might take place over the next four years. For one reason or other, I won't speculate which, Trump could drop out of the election and leave the Republican nomination up for grabs. I'm not convinced Haley could pull off a nomination in this cycle, with or without Trump in the race. Or Trump could win the election in November and we may not have any more presidential elections. I say that only partly tongue-in-check. Or Trump could lose and the lunatic fringe could take complete control over the Republican Party. If that happens, all logic gets thrown out the window. 

We'll just have to see.

I strongly believe that our democracy thrives with a strong two-party system. For that to work, both parties have to respect one another, to some degree at least, and agree to play by the same set of rules. Right now, one of those parties has gone off the rails and as a result, we are as divided as a nation as we have ever been. 

I have lots of issues with Nikki Haley. Beyond ideology is her tendency to speak out of both sides of her mouth whenever it's convenient. Sometimes it's difficult to determine where she truly stands.

Given that, I can't see ever voting for her. 

But I could live with a President Haley as someone with whom I could agree to disagree, as I have with all the presidents in my lifetime before the 45th one. The bottom line is I believe she is the best person the Republicans have at the moment to get their party back on track to a semblance of respectability, and perhaps the best person in either party to help bring us back together (as much as that is humanly possible) as a nation. 

And boy would that be a good thing.

CODA

*OK I looked it up, Joe Biden ran unsuccessfully for president twice, in 1988 and in 2008. It just seems like more.

**The idea that there are several issues regarding abortion that all of us can agree upon is a little naive as all Americans do not agree that contraception should be readily available, that women should not be punished for having abortions, or that late term abortions should be banned. But I agree with her that we need to reach some kind of consensus on the issue. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/opinion/nikki-haley-trump-2024.html