San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
They’re trying to topple Trump without uttering his name
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Nikki Haley’s campaignstyle speech Wednesday formally announcing her bid for the Republican presidential nomination included a solitary reference to her former boss, Donald Trump.
At the same time, her repeated calls for a new generation of Republican leadership — “to move past the stale ideas and faded names of the past” — left a message for those voters who wanted to hear it: The GOP must move on.
But the former South Carolina governor’s hits at the president who made her ambassador to the United Nations were subtle, underscoring how difficult it will be for many Republican candidates to convince the party’s base that they should bear the standard for the GOP, not Trump, who maintains the loyalties of so many voters.
One of her introducers was Cindy Warmbier, whose son Otto died after apparent mistreatment in custody in North Korea — a country whose dictator, Kim Jong Un, exchanged with Trump what the former president gushingly called “love letters.” John Hagee, an evangelical pastor and staunch ally of Trump who has been criticized as anti-gay, antiMuslim and antisemitic, delivered the invocation.
Haley, 51, pointedly did not name names when she repeatedly pleaded for voters to turn away from the politicians of older generations, even when she reminded a packed crowd behind the visitors’ center in Charleston, S.C., that the Republican nominee had lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential contests.
“We have failed to win the confidence of a majority of Americans,” said Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, born in the vanguard of Generation X. “Well, that ends today. If you’re tired of losing, put your trust in a new generation.”
Instead, her pitch seemed calculated to appeal to Republican voters who are ready to turn the page from the Trump era without burning the book of Trump’s presidency.
“We won’t win the fight for the 21st century if we keep trusting politicians from the 20th century,” she said, clearly a dig at President Joe Biden but one that would include Trump for those inclined to hear it that way.
Haley’s conundrum about how to approach Trump will surely apply to other potential competitors. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who shares Trump’s pugnacious instincts and is the only Republican within striking distance in early polls of the field, has nevertheless been reluctant to trade insult for insult with the former president. Like Haley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Vice President Mike Pence served in the Trump administration. Overt critics of Trump, like Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Larry Hogan of Maryland, both former governors, risk not being taken seriously by Republican voters.
But the Trump campaign has signaled no reluctance to challenge Haley. In a mass email castigating “the real Nikki Haley,” the campaign tied her to Hillary Rodham Clinton and said Haley wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare, would escalate the war in Ukraine and was weak on border control.
Haley has time to devise a strategy for challenging Trump, but moving on from the last Republican presidency will be tricky, said Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican consultant in South Carolina and a critic of Trump. Since leaving his administration in 2018 and making halting efforts to criticize him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Haley has tacked back into his orbit.
“She’s got a pretty bad tightrope to walk,” Felkel said.
In fact, her arrival in the Republican primary — and the expected entry of another South Carolinian, Sen. Tim Scott, as well as of Hutchinson, who is leaning hard on his degree from the state’s evangelical conservative Bob Jones University — could make it easier for Trump to win the state by dividing Republican voters who want to move past him.
“They are fighting over non-Trump conservatives who’d like to see the party win elections and who are tired of the chaos,” Felkel said. “I’m not sure in South Carolina that’s a majority.”
Difficulties lie ahead for candidates who choose not to take on Trump directly in hopes that they can create distance from him without going too far in the eyes of Republican voters. And if DeSantis can consolidate a bloc of voters, it remains to be seen whether the other rivals can make an affirmative case for their own candidacies beyond hoping DeSantis struggles.
Every dig Haley leveled at older politicians, including a call for “mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old,” could have applied to Trump, who will turn 77 in June, but the partisans in the audience clearly saw them directed at Biden, who is 80.
One of her introducers Wednesday, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, an ardent conservative, praised Trump as one of the “great leaders of all time,” saying, “During the Trump years, folks, the American people recognized what qualities we needed in a leader. Nikki Haley has those very qualities.”
Even Haley’s resume seemed like a credential to tread on lightly. In her announcement video Tuesday and her speech Wednesday, she pointed to her experiences in the governor’s mansion in Columbia, S.C., and to her time as a U.N. ambassador. But she was light on listing accomplishments to burnish a claim to the highest elective office in the land.
Still, Haley’s biggest advantage will be her deep connections in the state, the third to vote in the primary season next year. Retail politics and local organization matter in South Carolina, and regardless of the results in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, its results have a track record. Victory in the state propelled Biden to the Democratic nomination in 2020 and vaulted George W. Bush ahead of John McCain in the 2000 election.
Chad Connelly, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party, said that Haley remained “wildly popular” in the state but that so did Trump, Scott and DeSantis — an unpredictable situation that he said he had not seen in his 25 years in South Carolina Republican politics. But Trump has never paid attention to organization, and DeSantis has little connection to the state.
“People expect retail politics here,” Connelly said. “People expect you to meet them at Bill and Fran’s in Newberry for waffles.”
Even at Haley’s event Wednesday, supporters expressed skepticism that she could win the nomination. Lonnie Knight, a Charleston small-business person, said he would probably vote for her but predicted that DeSantis would win the nomination, then choose between Haley and Scott for his running mate.
Haley’s disinclination to attack Trump by name could be about keeping a Trump-Haley ticket as an option as well. In 2016, Pence, then Indiana’s governor, helped shore up Trump’s appeal with conservative evangelical Christians, who had been leery of him. In 2024, with many of those voters still loyal to Trump, Haley might help Trump with perhaps his biggest weakness: suburban Republican women.
An adviser to Scott, who insisted on anonymity to discuss preliminary campaign preparations, said that because Haley worked for Trump, she would have a harder time separating herself from him. While Scott can fly above the fray, the adviser said, Haley will be under more pressure to confront the former president headon.
“It’s going to be one of the most fascinating things to watch that I’ve ever seen in politics,” Connelly said.