It doesn’t take a genius to recognize it’s hard being a presidential candidate in our day and age, with the political system so damaged and fractured that it’s almost undoable to find new and novel concepts to separate oneself from the proverbial herd.
Donald Trump didn’t encounter any such difficulty making himself distinct in 2016. He was unique from the get-go. But not every individual can boast of decades’ worth of coverage in the news tabloids, host his own reality TV show and possess a fascinating gift for bonding with a large segment of voters – in Trump’s case, the “forgotten Americans” of our nation’s small towns and other victims of bad policies emanating from Washington for a long, long time.
This year, 2024 Republican candidate Nikki Haley appears to have adopted a different tack to gin up attention and support for her own establishment-supported bid. Haley’s out campaigning using noxious Vice President Kamala Harris as her punching bag and main reason for being. Will it serve to push Nikki into serious competition with Trump for the party nomination?
In an article titled “Will GOP attacks on Kamala Harris stick as 2024 campaign ramps up?”, Max Thornberry reported at the Washington Examiner:
“In her 2024 Republican presidential bid, Nikki Haley verbally jabs Vice President Kamala Harris nearly as much as President Joe Biden.
“Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, contends backing Biden, age 81, is effectively a vote for Harris as president. Biden, in Haley's view, isn't likely to make it through a second term, and Harris is incompetent and a failure as vice president...
“’I believe Kamala was set up for failure,’ Amani Wells-Onyioha, a Democratic strategist, told the Washington Examiner. ‘Harris was given tasks that in my opinion are not suitable for one person to solve. Like being in charge of immigration. That's a heavy lift for the VP. Also, being thrown into the press and being the mouthpiece for some of Biden's most controversial plans/opinions. She’s done well despite the position she’s been put in, but I wish she had been utilized differently.’”
Most Democrats likely share Wells-Onyioha’s opinion. Rather than representing the administration’s border policies, fighting for the Democrats’ inane and phony “voting rights” legislation in Congress and being sent to deliver commencement speeches where she made headlines for how badly one can flub a no-brainer assignment, cackling Kamala should’ve been given the all-important job of carrying Joe Biden’s spit buckets from the Oval Office and dumping them in the White House Rose Garden.
But getting to know Harris over these two and a half-plus years as Biden’s errand girl, she’d almost certainly screw up that task, too. “Well, the presidential limo looks like a Rose Garden, doesn’t it?”
The debate over Harris’s influence over senile Joe Biden’s electability will continue, the more salient point of Thornberry’s report being that GOP super woman (NOT!) Nikki Haley’s using the country’s first female vice president as a cudgel for her own contentions as to why she deserves a shot at being the Republican nominee and also America’s first woman commander in chief.
Thus, Haley becomes the infamous “other woman” in the great political tug-of-war for outright possession of identity politics-land. Praise be.
Who would’ve thought when the 2024 GOP presidential primary debates started that they would’ve been viewed as the personal platform for Nikki Haley’s candidacy. I’m not sure it was intentional – even on the establishment’s part – but the only Republican contender who’s benefitted, even a smidgen, from the two primary forums thus far is Trump’s former U.N. ambassador and chief executive of the Palmetto State.
Here's guessing most conservatives are racking their brains attempting to figure out why Haley’s the one, since she hasn’t done anything in either event to merit the adulation (small and insignificant that it is). Nikki’s basically just put a different gender and face on the same old Bush-era policies that Republican voters roundly rejected in 2016. She talks a good game on spending and most elements of the traditional GOP establishment platform – meaning Haley’d ignore basically everything she promised if she ever ended up in office – but one really must wonder how much substance is behind the forced smiles and finely tailored business suits.
Not only that, Nikki has unleashed a nasty side that I don’t recall ever seeing from her prior to the past couple months. It’s true, every politician tries their darndest to appear “serious” and “tough” and “uncompromising” and “principled”, but Haley’s done this primarily through singling out fellow Indian American Vivek Ramaswamy (who is nearly a decade and a half younger than her) while still maintaining that it’s time for a “new generation of leaders”.
Perhaps it’s because of Ramaswamy’s youthful presence and vigor exhibited in the debates, but Haley seems to have dropped (or at least altered) her initial leg to stand on – that both senile Joe Biden and Donald Trump were too old, and that every pol over the age of 75 should be given a cognitive test to determine whether they’re still “with it” enough to perform the duties as president. We don’t hear much about this topic any longer from Nikki, who instead has shifted to talking a lot about Kamala Harris and also her passionate defense of continuing to send American resources to Ukraine, even if the vast majority of Republicans are against doing so.
I’ve said it before, but if Haley could get away with wearing a sign that said something like “Vote for me, I’m the only woman in the field full of men”, she would, because it’s the only immutable trait she possesses. It’s not necessarily Nikki’s fault that no other Republican women chose to run this year, but she’s definitely benefitting from the field’s absence of estrogen. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem certainly could’ve gotten in the scrum, and if she had, Nikki Haley would’ve been pushed to the background as an afterthought, since Noem’s governing style is much more in line with the type of populist fire made popular by Donald Trump, and, let’s be shallow for a moment, Noem has much more political eye appeal. We shouldn’t pretend that’s not important in some circles, should we?
I think Nikki’s gender alone is responsible for her couple point bump in the polls and the fact she allegedly rates even higher in potential head-to-head matchups with senile Joe Biden, since a woman candidate automatically seems more “moderate” than a man does. Couple this fact with the establishment media’s willingness to let Nikki roam the political wilderness without much discernible resistance, and you’ve got your next story!
It may seem a tad hypocritical for Haley to be going after cackling Kamala so savagely, especially since they’re both relying (or having relied) on gender to get them where they are. Everyone knows the story of how Harris was the last woman standing in the spring and summer of 2020, when senile Joe backed himself into a corner by promising to select a woman for his running mate – and then having the candidate pool narrowed even further by the leftist freakout over police brutality and George Floyd mass protests.
Haley does not enjoy any similar assurances from Donald Trump. Trump has been coy about who he’s looking at for his veep, from time to time hinting that choosing a woman would be advantageous. Nikki has been widely rumored to be on Trump’s vetting list, but her odds of getting the life-altering phone call from the former president have dropped significantly in the past few months.
The former Trump U.N. Ambassador’s on-again, off-again relationship with Trump is currently on a down cycle. She’s been outwardly critical of Trump, boldly stating he’s the most disliked politician in America, which, is not a good thing to say if you’re hoping the person will opt for you from among a large list of qualified men and women.
As hinted at above, Kristi Noem would appear to be a good partner for Trump if he’s looking to make gender a top consideration for his second vice president. Noem announced that she wouldn’t run this cycle if Trump was in the field, so she looks “loyal” to the Trump people. And unlike her neighbor to the southeast (Iowa’s Gov. Kim Reynolds), Noem abandoned her “neutrality” in the 2024 party race – she came right out and endorsed Trump.
As for Kamala Harris, it’s completely fair game for Haley – or any Republican – to employ the specter of her possibly ascending to the vacated office of the presidency as a legitimate campaign issue.
With more and more reports coming, almost daily, about Biden’s dilapidated mental and physical condition, there’s never been a more urgent case of needing to look at who is the nominee’s running mate. It’s been said in the past that the vice presidency isn’t worth much, but it could be worth a future spot in the hall of the presidents this year – especially for Democrats.
It’s safe to say just about everyone fears a corrupted and unqualified dunce like Kamala Harris being handed the keys to the White House. After all, Kamala could never win them on her own, only as an Affirmative Action choice of the biggest idiot ever to be called, “Mr. President”. There’s a good argument saying every Republican candidate at all levels should be making the same case.
No matter how it’s packaged, Kamala Harris amounts to a political liability for senile Joe Biden and the Democrats. The liberal party is stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to figure what to do with Harris, a dilemma that makes the ongoing controversy over the House Speaker seem like kid’s play. Kamala is the gift that just keeps on giving for Republicans – they should take advantage.
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