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Like a political version of a veteran sports writer, as the presidential primaries approach I have been expecting some hapless candidate to throw out the first major gaffe.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley now has achieved that dubious prize.
Asked at a recent New Hampshire town hall what she believed had caused the Civil War, she should have knocked that ball out of the park.
After all, since the first shots of the War Between the States happened to be fired in South Carolina, her home state where she used to be governor, surely she knew the answer to the historical question.
Yet, oddly she replied like a somewhat flustered high school student who had forgotten to study for her history exam.
She offered a cluster of words to say the war was sparked by questions of “how government was going to run.” She, of course, curiously had left out by far the most important issue.
“In the year 2023,” the questioner said, “it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery.’”
“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Haley retorted before abruptly moving on to the next question.
Suddenly you could almost hear the rush of Haley’s once-promising political future like the air out of a punctured balloon.
Haley blamed “definitely a Democrat plant,” which seemed to make bad matters worse for her.
I was reminded of an elderly white Southern gentleman who patiently explained to me how the Civil War, which he preferred to call “the War of Northern Aggression,” never really ended in 1865.
“That was just intermission,” he said.
His words came back to me during, among other occasions, the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on Capitol, where the Confederate flags were plentiful.
Too bad, I thought. Although Haley is more conservative than I am, I have long viewed her as smart and reasonable in our otherwise often-loony political era, especially in her 2015 response to the racist mass killing at the historically Black Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston.
Despite polls that showed strong support for the Confederate flag remaining over the State House grounds, she called for its removal. To the astonishment of many, the state soon did so, with legislators voting in favor of the move by overwhelming margins.
But even with Democrats as prominent as President Barack Obama praising her “eloquence on the subject” in his eulogy for the victims, the issue has remained a touchy one for her and numerous others with political ambitions in the region.
In the years since the disaster, she often has lamented the killings for sullying a flag that for many hardcore traditionalists represents, as a popular bumper sticker in the region says, “Heritage, not Hate!”
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Yet, as unappealing as such stickers may be to African Americans like me, whose ancestors were liberated by that war, polls and interviews show Donald Trump dominating as the GOP’s front-runner and, just as surprising, making more gains with Black voters than he did in 2020.
Although President Joe Biden’s campaign claims to have gotten the message and they have almost a year to whip up some enthusiasm in the Democratic base, a lot of his supporters are understandably nervous.
Frankly, I, too, never thought Biden would have this much to worry about from an opponent facing four indictments and more than 90 federal felony charges. But voters will often surprise you, even when they seem to be worried about the wrong war.
This isn’t baseball or ancient history that we’re talking about now. We’re talking about the future of our republic and whether, as Benjamin Franklin once asked, we can keep it.
Now that’s still a hard question to answer.
Twitter @cptime