Nikki Haley is two degrees of separation from Tulsi Gabbard

Nikki Haley’s campaign tried hard to prove the pundits wrong about her Presidential chances when she made her first major campaign stop in New Hampshire.

At first glance, Haley accomplished this goal. She spoke to a full room of about 300 people, who responded enthusiastically to her early stump speech and was warmly embraced and endorsed by General Don Bolduc, a far-right darling in New Hampshire and the GOP nominee for US Senate last fall. 

But this is a campaign event, where the aura of strength and momentum are often constructed of paper. In New Hampshire, building early crowds for president candidates is not hard. There are party activists who will attend almost every event. They love to be courted and they can’t get their ass kissed if they don’t show up. Secondly, the Haley campaign played it safe and picked two locations that would attract more moderate GOP and unenrolled voters. The event I attended was in Exeter, NH, home of Philips Exeter Academy (PEA). The next night, Haley spoke at Saint Anselm College, which has a long history of hosting campaign events. 

So, it was a “diverse” crowd of PEA students and faculty, party stalwarts and Bolduc’s network of supporters that filled the room for Haley. The audience applauded during much of Haley’s stump speech, but never stood with enthusiasm. Which begs the question: Were they responding to the speech, which was a potpourri of red meat conservative issues, or the candidate?

Having listened to way too many political speeches on both sides of the aisle, I’ve learned it’s easy for candidates to generate Pavlovian responses from a hyper-partisan crowd. Haley played all the current GOP hits: CRT, school choice, term limits, Voter ID, gun rights, demanding both fiscal responsibility and increased defense spending, and blaming liberal self loathing for our problems today. My favorite was a medley-mix of Securing the Border > To end our drug problem > By stopping the smuggling of Fentanyl From China > Being Tough on China > Strong Foreign policy > Getting tough on North Korea and Iran > That’s why we moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem. With that kind of playlist, any self-respecting conservative would be clapping to the beat.

At best, this event showed Haley can be a “contender,”…IF Trump and DeSantis falter in the next year. While that could happen, Haley showed there was nothing unique or authentic about her message. Altough she’s high up on everybody’s GOP Presidential list, it’s not first or second choice.

If Trump and DeSantis do cut each other’s throats in a political knife fight and Haley starts getting serious scrutiny, her attempt to position herself as a mainstream Republican that can appeal to the hard-right base will trip her up. This is best illustrated by the Bolduc endorsement. Bolduc’s far-right supporters are suspicious of anything remotely RINO (Republican in Name Only) and Haley will not pass their smell test.

For example, when someone ask Haley about Ukraine, I perked up because six months earlier I attended a Don Bolduc campaign event with Tulsi Gabbard. At the time, Tulsi and Don where warning voters about Biden’s reckless Ukrainian policies that could result in a nuclear war and the crowd loved it.

But not this night. First Haley gave unequivocal support for Ukraine. Then she warned that the US can’t give Ukraine a blank-check, and the crowd. Then she split the difference and promised to work with allies to evaluate give the Ukrainians the weapons to win on their own.

Bolduc supporters maybe ill-informed with regards to appeasing European aggression, but they aren’t stupid. They did not appalled that word salad. They wanted more Tulsi Gabbard fear mongering, isolationist views and less of Nikki Haley’s muscular foreign policy positions. In the new Trumpian GOP, that puts Haley in an impossible spot: Not crazy enough the America First MAGA crowd, but Haley’s two degrees of separation from Tulsi Gabbard, doesn’t sit well with what remains of a sane GOP.