Cross her off the list.
Just when Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was beginning to look like a viable alternative to You-Know-Who, the South Carolina contender tried to explain the Civil War without using the word “slavery.”
That’s like trying to explain the Super Bowl without talking about football.
I get that she comes from one of the states that lost the war, but other southerners — Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton — managed to get over the defeat, and find their way to the White House.
But not Haley. When a voter in New Hampshire — the site of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary — asked her what caused the Civil War, the former governor of the state where the war’s first shots were fired in 1861 blamed government interference.
“It was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley said at a town hall event.
“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” said Haley, who was also the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under former President Donald Trump. “And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people.”
After Haley went into a lengthier explanation about individual freedom and capitalism, the outraged questioner called her out.
“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery,’” he said.
It’s hard to believe that this is the same woman who, as governor in 2015, had the controversial Confederate flag removed from the state capitol grounds.
But it is also telling that it took a mass shooting that killed nine Black churchgoers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., to finally bring her around.
“We cannot sit here and pretend like slavery was ancient history,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement. “For many of us, it’s only a generation or two removed.”
Over the summer, Sharpton took his daughters to the former Edgefield, S.C., plantation where his great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave.
It was Sharpton’s first visit to the plantation since 2007, when Austin Fenner, a Daily News reporter, discovered that Sharpton, a civil rights leader, had a family link to former U.S. senator and staunch segregationist Strom Thurmond.
Sharpton ran for president in 2004 on a ticket promoting racial justice.
Recent polling has placed Haley in second place to Trump among Republican voters in New Hampshire.
Haley isn’t as dangerous as Trump or Thurmond, who was also a former South Carolina governor.
But she is running to be the standard bearer of a party that has gutted affirmative action in higher education, undermined voting rights for African Americans, and chipped away at diversity, equity and inclusion commitments within corporate America.
“The GOP has gone from the party of Lincoln, which once pushed him to emancipate all slaves, to one that unabashedly celebrates the Confederacy,” Sharpton said.
Among those criticizing Haley’s omission was her rival Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida.
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But DeSantis made his own slavery gaffe this year when he said that slaves had “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Haley did try to walk back her remarks a day later, but the damage had already been done.
The question is likely to come up again, so Haley and the rest of them would do well to bone up on the subject.
Here’s a primer: The Civil War was rooted in slavery. The North won. The South lost.
Get over it.
Leonard Greene is a New York Daily News columnist. ©2024 New York Daily News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
