After I got home from the first day of Erick Erickson’s Gathering in Atlanta, a friend of mine texted me to ask who surprised me the most. I had gone into the day thinking I knew what to expect from each of the guests, including the GOP presidential hopefuls, but I thought about it for a few minutes, and I realized that former S. Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley was a refreshing surprise.*
I’ve been a fan of Haley for a long time, and to an extent, I knew what she was going to talk about. But what surprised me the most was the level of passion she brought to her interview with Erickson.
Erickson led off with a question about Haley’s husband, who is an officer in the South Carolina National Guard who recently deployed to Africa for a year. She tied her husband’s military service to her idea of serving as a civilian.
“I watched him and 230 soldiers pick up their two duffel bags of belongings to … go to a country they’ve never been, all in the name of defending and protecting America,” she told Erickson. “They are willing to sacrifice their lives and their families because they still believe in this amazing experiment that is America. And so I say all the time, ‘If they’re willing to fight for us there, shouldn’t we be willing to fight for America here?'”
Haley then talked about how our federal government is failing the nation’s veterans. She cited heartbreaking statistics about the state of mental health treatment for veterans, and she shared her husband’s struggles upon returning home from Afghanistan.
“We can’t just love our military members when they’re gone; we have to love them when they come back, too,” she stated. “And so the way that I think we deal with it is we should make sure that they have telehealth so that they can get the mental health help they need, and maybe we should make sure they can go to the doctor in the hospital of their choice.”
She followed up with a discussion of how we need to reduce wasteful spending in our defense budget while modernizing the tools our servicemen and women use to defend this country.
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After sharing the story of how she led the fight to remove the Confederate Stars and Bars flag from the South Carolina Capitol grounds and talking about growing up Indian-American in the South, Haley answered Erickson’s question of why she is running against her former boss Donald Trump.
“I think President Trump was the right president at the right time,” she declared. “I agree with so many of his policies. But at the end of the day, we have to win in November. And it is time to put that negativity and drama behind us. We can’t keep talking about the past. We have got to talk about how we are going to take America to a new future that is full of peace and law and order and opportunities for our children. And in order to do that, we have to have a new conservative leader.”
Later in the interview, Haley touched on the values that the left has foisted on the country, the hatred of all things American. She maintained that it’s the responsibility of patriotic conservatives to counter that narrative.
“What we have right now that we have to overcome is this national self-loathing that has taken over our country, the idea that they say America is bad or that it’s rotten or that it’s racist,” she asserted. “I was elected the first female minority governor in history. America is not racist.”
She added:
We have to go back to that national purpose and the values that made our country great. And so I don’t think we need to pat ourselves on the back… We basically are focused on how to lift up everybody; that should be always what we do. And so I’m going to continue to talk about the blessings of America. Are we perfect? No. But every day we should strive to be more productive. And I think that that’s what the Republican Party is doing, and that’s what we’ll continue to do.
To another question of why Republicans should consider her, Haley quipped, “I’m an accountant, not a lawyer.” She discussed the border crisis, the problem of far-left influences on our institutions, and even her friendship with Clemson University head football coach Dabo Swinney. It was a wide-ranging interview with Haley answering questions thoughtfully, gracefully, and with good humor. But above all else, her passion was the biggest and most pleasant surprise of the day.
*A close second surprise, albeit not a pleasant one, was Mike Pence. He was so listless and boring that I didn’t bother to write about his interview. It was a marked contrast to his animated and engaging speech here in 2019, so much so that I wonder if his heart is really in this presidential bid. Although, I was sitting in the press room, and Pence was the candidate the mainstream media types obsessed over.
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