One of the reasons the American colonials were able to defeat the British forces and gain their independence during the Revolution was that they refused to fight like gentlemen.
The British entered battlefields in neat, orderly lines, dressed in bright red coats that proudly announced their arrival. The colonists, on the other hand, hid in the shadows, wearing nondescript clothes that blended in with the trees. They ignored the so-called “rules of combat.” The King’s forces were appalled by this behavior, but they never changed how they were engaging with their enemies. The British officers complained about how the colonists were fighting but were adamant against stooping to the colonists’ level. In the end, it did them in.
Now that Nikki Haley has bowed out, it seems a foregone conclusion that the 2024 race will be a replay of the 2020 election. There are still primaries to go, but without Haley in the mix, the Republicans will almost certainly back the former president.
President Biden lost the primary in American Samoa to a guy from Baltimore named Jason Palmer. Despite that loss, President Biden seems to be a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination.
As an aside, Palmer has never stepped foot on the island of Samoa. He campaigned via Zoom. Out of a total of ninety-one ballots, Palmer got 51 of them, leaving the president with only forty. Going into the Democratic Convention, each of them will bring in three delegates. In 2020, Biden lost the American Samoan primary to Michael Bloomberg. It was the only race Bloomberg won.
While American Samoa sends six delegates to the convention, like other U.S. protectorates, it is unrepresented in the Electoral College. 50,000 people are living in American Samoa. It is a crystal-clear measure of how disenfranchised they all feel from the American legal system that only 91 of them even bothered to vote.
So, where are we now?
This past Thursday, President Biden delivered what will be his final State of the Union Address before the November elections. He was strong, coherent, and focused.
In the past, there has been a tendency among the Democrats to behave as if the former president was a normal candidate who follows the rules of engagement. They debate with him as if he makes sense and understands what he is doing. He does not. He does not care about the rules of engagement at all. He makes things up as it suits him. He seems to have no moral editor to keep him from behaving in any way he chooses.
In his address, President Biden gave the impression, as we would say these days, of having zero f%$*ks to give. He was relentless in his denunciation of his predecessor. It was, I have to say, a relief.
This election, far more than it was in 2020, is giving our country a choice between moving forward as a representative democracy or changing into something else. What that something else might be, I am not clear about yet. Whether a Republican win means we devolve into a dictatorship, or an oligarchy, or probably a combination of the two remains to be seen.
That Nikki Haley is a Republican is somewhat surprising. She seems to be everything that the party doesn’t like. She’s a woman to begin with and not a rich straight white man. Haley’s parents are Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India. Her birth name is Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She added the Haley when she married her husband, Michael Haley. She was born in South Carolina and served as their representative in Congress for three terms. In 2010, she was elected Governor of South Carolina. In 2017, she resigned from that position to become the U.S. representative to the United Nations under our former president.
I don’t care for Nikki Haley’s conservative policies. She has fought against women’s rights regarding abortions. Her record on LQBTQ legislation is spotty at best. She argued against removing the Confederate flag from the State House saying that it represented “service and sacrifice and heritage.” She got in trouble last year for failing to mention that slavery played a part in the Civil War. That said, she is a qualified politician. She has the education and the experience to do the job.
She serves on the corporate boards of both Boeing and the United Homes Group.
Were Nikki Haley elected to the Presidency, I don’t doubt we would be as fine as we’ve been under any of the other Republicans (except for the last one) in my lifetime. I believe that whatever else she might stand for she does respect the office and the institution that is our government. She’d make policies that would then be undone by the Democrat who followed her in, just as she’d undo, or try to undo, the policies of the Democrat who preceded her. I fully believe that under a Nikki Haley administration America would lurch forward essentially as it always has.
There are also clearly still Republicans out there who are looking for a leader to govern the United States responsibly. Haley beat the former president in both Washington D.C. and Vermont. While she lost the other races, she didn’t lose most of them by much. Many people chose her over the other guy.
Who will all those people who cast ballots for Nikki Haley in the primary elections now choose in the main one? That is the question. Will they stay loyal to their party, or will they switch sides?
The main difference between the last election and this coming one is that we know exactly who the candidates are. We’ve experienced four years under each of them.
One accomplished next to nothing during his term in office and has a list of criminal indictments as long as my left arm. The other, during his occupation of the office, now has a list of remarkable political accomplishments as long as my right arm.
Neither of those lists appears to matter. Those against the former president are horrified by him. Those against the current president are horrified by him. The election of 2024 is not going to be your parents’ election.
Nikki Haley gave the Republican rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in 2016. It was an important stepping stone for her into the national spotlight. On Thursday, Katie Britt, a Republican Senator from Alabama, was the person chosen to counter the President’s address. I am sure that Saturday Night Live is going to skewer her in a few hours. Bless her heart, as they say in the South, she was just not up to it.
These days everything is about everything. What you wear, what you say, who you say it to, who asks you questions, who shakes your hand, who ignores you – all those things create an overall story. Katie Britt spoke to the American people from her kitchen.
That, alone, says more about the Republican party’s attitude towards women than any speech or platform could. Nikki Haley as an educated, independent, and driven woman, never stood a chance.
I hope that President Biden’s speech is an indication of what we can expect from the Democrats moving forward. We must believe that more people are interested in the work of governance being done than there are people who want to sit on the sidelines and watch a clown show.
The former president hired all the “best people” during his first administration. He has turned against almost all of them. Who is left?
For heaven’s sake, let’s not find out.
Amen to that!