No place for Haley in Trump's party
Jerry Brown and Gary Hart did it. So did Ted Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Also Henry Jackson and Jesse Jackson. Nelson Rockefeller did it and — going way, way back — so did Oscar Underwood. There's also Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, the only ones who eventually became president, though not the first time they tried it.
Now, conducting a presidential candidacy likely to move her into the honorable group of candidates who didn't win the White House but who nonetheless hung in and fought is … Nikki Haley of South Carolina.
Welcome, Madam Governor, to the assemblage of presidential candidates who continued to campaign, often inexplicably and mostly against insurmountable odds, relentlessly, bravely and consequently — and now we summon the signature motto of one of them, the Rev. Jesse Jackson — keeping their hopes alive.
Those presidential hopes are fading fast for Haley. Fervently but probably futilely, she's campaigning in her native South Carolina, where she twice ran statewide (and won both times) but where former President Donald Trump is riding a wave of momentum from triumphs in three states that, together, give him victories in the Northeast (New Hampshire), Midwest (Iowa) and West (Nevada). Combine the three, and Trump has won states that comprise 2.98 percent of the population of the country.
It may not be fair that the 292,636 votes that Trump harvested in those three states should constitute momentum. But, as John F. Kennedy said, life isn't fair. It's also not fair that fumbling into the end zone results in a touchback for the opposing team, but that's the NFL rule. Haley knew the rules; Trump exploited them.
(Footnote: Trump's team helped shape the 2024 rules, but that's another column for another day.)
Hanging on — hanging in — is a political tradition, practiced in some election cycles but ignored in others.
Former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey dropped out in 2000, though not as quickly as Gov. Ron Desantis of Florida did last month. Hart had a legitimate chance of triumphing in 1984 when the campaign came down to the last primaries in New Jersey and California, and Ted Kennedy took his campaign all the way to the 1980 convention in New York, where in Madison Square Garden he gave perhaps the greatest convention speech since his brother unveiled the New Frontier in his 1960 acceptance speech in the Los Angeles Coliseum. Indeed, the younger brother's campaign valedictory encapsulates the hope of all the contenders who fell out of contention:
“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
Haley likely won't get to deliver a speech like that nor feel that sentiment, given that, with her new persona as an unforgiving critic of Trump, she now is an outlier in her own party.
When she was elected governor in 2010, she was the very model of the Republican establishment of the time. Sen. John Mccain of Arizona had been the party's nominee two years earlier; by July 2015, Trump would savage Mccain and demean his time in a Hanoi prison. Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts would be the party's nominee two years after Haley won the right to live in the governor's mansion in the Arsenal Hill neighborhood of Columbia; Trump poured scorn on the Romney campaign, and Romney eventually would vote twice to impeach the 45th president.