Stop calling what Nikki Haley said about the Civil War a ‘blunder’ or ‘gaffe’ | Opinion

On Friday, The New York Times ran this headline on the front page of its print edition: “Haley’s Blunder on Civil War Question Puts Her Coalition at Risk.”

The somewhat surging Republican presidential candidate’s supposed “blunder” was her response to a man who’d asked her at a New Hampshire town hall on Wednesday what had caused the Civil War. Only, she answered this question pretty much as she has before, with some blah blah about the role of government. Missing from her answer, once again, was this word: slavery.

A blunder is a stupid or careless mistake. And Haley’s answer was not careless, but calculated.

The Wall Street Journal’s similar headline was “Civil War Gaffe Undercuts Nikki Haley’s 2024 Pitch.” The New Republic went with, “Nikki Haley Somehow Made Her Civil War Gaffe Even Worse.” The Daily Beast, Vanity Fair and The Hill also called what she said a “gaffe.”

But her remarks weren’t blurted in error. Instead, they were the broadest possible wink to MAGA nation that she sees them, as she always has, and is with them, still.

“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” she said on Wednesday. “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people.”

For that, we have Nikki Haley.

On Thursday, she said yeah, yeah, of course she knows that the war was about slavery. But she also suggested that the question could not possibly have come from anyone in her party, which is an insult to her own people, or used to be, anyway. The guy who asked her that, she said, must have been “a Democrat plant.”

“See this for what it is,” she said. “They want to run against Trump.”

I think I do see this for what it is, which is that she wants to be Trump, by madly currying favor with the white supremacists who will never love anyone the way they love him. She also wants not to be him, and will worry about the contradictions later.

As the Civil War has figured prominently in the career of the former governor of South Carolina, it isn’t as though the question could possibly have surprised her.

When she ran for governor in 2010, Haley said the Civil War was fought over “tradition” versus “change.” There, too, her answer was meant not to upset those still waving the flag, quite literally, of the traitors who saw enslaving humans as mere “tradition.”

She also said that year that to her, the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.”

In 2009, she said she had no interest in keeping it from flying in front of her state’s capitol: “There were a lot of hurt feelings” over whether it symbolized hate or heritage, and “I would not want to revisit that issue.”

True to her word, she only changed her mind in 2015, after white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine Black people at the historically Black Charleston church where he’d been welcomed before opening fire and was forgiven even after the devastation he caused.

I have no idea what Haley actually believes about the Civil War, but she has made clear what she believes about the former party of Lincoln, which is that the s-word is better left unmentioned, and in fact could not have been uttered by any Republican voter.

This view is now so orthodox on the right that under her fellow candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his state’s 2023 social studies curriculum said “slaves developed skills” that could be used for “personal benefit.”

So her remark was not even a “Washington gaffe,” as Michael Kinsley called what happens when a politician forgets himself and tells the truth by accident.

It was anything but careless. Whether or not it was stupid depends on what happens now.