South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s star has maintained a rather controlled burn across America’s conservative galaxy in the lead-up to the 2012 elections, and the national narrative providing much of its thrust has focused on her personal biography and the hypnotic allure of a new kind of identity politics in the Old South.
Increasing talk of this rapidly rising Tea Party governor—at 39 the youngest in the nation, and South Carolina’s first female and ethnic minority chief executive—as vice presidential timber is no surprise. Indeed, it’s been an easy sell: a suburban, stiletto-heeled daughter of Sikh immigrants from India takes on the good old boys, and, presto, we have a fresh-faced free-market force for the conservative cause. “I think I am very aware that I am the flavor of the month,” Haley said on a recent radio show when the talk turned to the GOP veepstakes.
And why not? Even before she moved into the governor’s mansion five months ago, the three-term state legislator had charmed the national press, earning hagiographic coverage in many of the nation’s leading magazines. Newsweek put Haley on its cover before her election as “The Face of the New South.”
But Haley has been navigating a series of land mines—IRS disputes, questionable business deals and appointments, multiple adultery allegations—any one of which threatens to blow up her political career. “I believe she is the most corrupt person to occupy the governor’s mansion since Reconstruction,” declared John Rainey, a longtime Republican fundraiser and power broker who chaired the state’s Board of Economic Advisers for eight years. A 69-year-old attorney, Rainey is an aristocratic iconoclast who never bought the Haley myth. “I do not know of any person who ran for governor in my lifetime with as many charges against him or her as she has had that went unanswered,” he told me on a recent afternoon at his sprawling horse farm outside the small town of Camden. “The Democrats got Alvin Greene; we got Nikki Haley. Because nobody bothered to check these guys out.”
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Source: The Nation
Increasing talk of this rapidly rising Tea Party governor—at 39 the youngest in the nation, and South Carolina’s first female and ethnic minority chief executive—as vice presidential timber is no surprise. Indeed, it’s been an easy sell: a suburban, stiletto-heeled daughter of Sikh immigrants from India takes on the good old boys, and, presto, we have a fresh-faced free-market force for the conservative cause. “I think I am very aware that I am the flavor of the month,” Haley said on a recent radio show when the talk turned to the GOP veepstakes.
And why not? Even before she moved into the governor’s mansion five months ago, the three-term state legislator had charmed the national press, earning hagiographic coverage in many of the nation’s leading magazines. Newsweek put Haley on its cover before her election as “The Face of the New South.”
But Haley has been navigating a series of land mines—IRS disputes, questionable business deals and appointments, multiple adultery allegations—any one of which threatens to blow up her political career. “I believe she is the most corrupt person to occupy the governor’s mansion since Reconstruction,” declared John Rainey, a longtime Republican fundraiser and power broker who chaired the state’s Board of Economic Advisers for eight years. A 69-year-old attorney, Rainey is an aristocratic iconoclast who never bought the Haley myth. “I do not know of any person who ran for governor in my lifetime with as many charges against him or her as she has had that went unanswered,” he told me on a recent afternoon at his sprawling horse farm outside the small town of Camden. “The Democrats got Alvin Greene; we got Nikki Haley. Because nobody bothered to check these guys out.”
Full Article
Source: The Nation
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