Blame S.C. good ol’ boy system for Haley’s loss

Nobody watching the GOP primary in South Carolina could have been surprised by Donald Trump’s victory over the state’s own former governor, Nikki Haley. Yet despite Trump’s victory, Haley has reason to continue. Trump has been indicted, faces multiple trials and owes millions of dollars in punitive damages that will probably move him toward bankruptcy, his preferred mode of business.

Even so, South Carolina has long been seen as a bellwether state. With just one exception, every winner of the state’s primary has gone on to become the nominee. The exception was Georgian Newt Gingrich in 2012, who won the primary but lost the nomination to Mitt Romney.

Trump’s long lead has kept pundits busy trying to figure out how this New York braggart could yank the nomination away from a homegrown gal twice elected governor. My first response is to recall Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day.” A TV weatherman, his character can’t disguise his boredom as he sarcastically explains to his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell), why the Punxsutawney locals are so excited about the annual groundhog celebration.

“Yeah, they’re hicks, Rita.” Apologies to the easily offended.

Suffice to say, a certain type of South Carolinian loves Trump not despite but because he’s so awful. Also — no small point — the mainstream media for the most part despises him. If the “fake news” doesn’t like Trump, then he must be doing something right, goes the “thinking.”

Trump can’t stop being offensive, which some apparently also find alluring. He has said “the Black people” like him because they identify with his plight as a person falsely arrested for doing nothing wrong. Haley, a selfmade success story who grew up managing the accounts of her parents’ retail clothing business, was forced to concede to a spoiled, abusive misogynist.

Then again, there’s no mystery about the good ol’ boy system. I feel comfortable saying this because I hail from this culture and could tell some stories.

The ironies of this deeply disappointing mess are rich. South Carolina for all its mannered society is in large part a cultural desert. There are islands of sophistication, but the rest of the state is a rural, potholed, economically depressed and uneducated network of poor people whose long-ago families used to be somebodies. Many whites in these areas feel left out, marginalized and are often despairing. They have little to hope for, yet they feel immigrants barge into their country illegally and take what belongs to them.

When Big Deal Don rolls into town and shakes hands at the Waffle House, folks feel suddenly noticed and important — and that’s magic. That’s power.

Haley, for all her polish and political skill, lacks the same ability to engage such people, even though she herself came from the tiny nothing-burg of Bamberg, which I can say because my people came from Barnwell 20 miles away. Haley, a first-generation American of Indian descent, grew up brown-skinned in a Southern-white culture. Her face should be on billboards as the quintessential American story. She should also be the next president.

And she could be if she were the GOP nominee. Polls have repeatedly shown she would defeat Joe Biden. Trump will lose against Biden, just as in 2020.

Some say Haley didn’t do enough to maintain relationships in her home state. Others say she got too uppity after she joined Trump’s Cabinet as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. One thing white Republican men of the Trump variety can’t stand is a woman smarter than they are who lets them know it.

That, my friends, is what happened in a nutshell. The good ol’ boys did it again.