Oh, Nikki...

A Cuttlefish Moment in New Hampshire

I’ve never been a Nikki Haley fan. That’s no surprise to anyone who follows me on Twitter/X/Whatever. I find her cynicism depressing and she is far too quick to pander away on whatever the latest insipid GOP crowd pleasing trope might be. Still, compared to Trump she’s Gandhi, so I’ve been boosting her candidacy. Why? There is no other option. I think she “won” the 2023 GOP pre-season and thereby became on the only real opponent who might upset Trump’s rancid applecart in New Hampshire.

Then came last night’s Hindenberg-esque town hall in Berlin (New Hampshire; though a nice torchlight affair in the Fuhrer’s old stomping ground might be just the trick to really get under Trump’s skin). Anyway, at said town hall Nikki got a softball 101 question about “what caused the Civil War" and turned it into the worst answer pivot in the history of, well, answers.

The Battle of Franklin in 1864 was a picnic by comparison. Though I guess you could argue Haley in fact gave the perfect answer. If she was running for President of the Confederacy. But, hopefully, she is not.

Let’s deconstruct Haley’s magic moment; it’s quite telling. Here is the tape:

1.) Frozen smile in place, Haley listens to an audience member’s question about the cause of the Civil War.

2.) Haley does an immediate 180 degree spin and walks away from the questioner. This is a real tell; for her, it’s fight or flight time. But alas her exit is blocked by a clump of stage-prop town hall attendees. Trapped!

3.) Her CPU spins up. She needs, sadly, a few seconds to think of an answer that won’t offend anybody, since that is the core programing deep inside the Haley-bot.

4.) She spins back toward the questioner, now a bit farther away, and makes a standard lame town hall joke “well, don’t come with an easy question!” The joke dies with an awful thud since — apparently unlike Haley — the audience all got through the 6th grade and knows the answer: slavery. Haley propels herself out of the deadly no laugh zone and starts spraying out a speedy word salad about…

5.) “I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” Huh?

Unfortunately for Haley, this town hall train wreck was a perfect example of her greatest flaw; she is a fear-based candidate. Unlike Trump, Haley is a victim of fear, not a malicious vendor of it. She’s a candidate frozen by fear, trapped inside her own deep terror of offending a single base GOP voter. It’s actually quite tragic; imagine her life living inside a marathon campaign of night sweats, sophistical parsing and exhaustingly neurotic over-calculation.

Her fear is why Haley has become the Cuttlefish Candidate. When she perceives danger, she quickly emits a dense and smoky cloud of garbled Republican cliches and tries to swim away to safety. Last night we saw Haley’s Cuttlefish DNA on fine display; when asked about the Civil War, her instinct was to pivot from a scary — I guess — slavery question into a standard GOP head-nodder about Freedom Good, Big Government Bad and zip away through her opaque escape cloud.

It sure didn’t work. First, the obvious problem with not mentioning SLAVERY in a slavery question is creating an epic, headline driving, stupid blunder. The second less obvious problem is the half-baked argument she was apparently trying to make. If try to find the actual argument inside the black ink cloud of Haley’s answer you get this: big government tried to tell southern folks, y’all, what they could or could not do. Like, say, OWN SLAVES. A little politics advise here Nikki: that’s bad. With that stuff Haley is swimming right down the ol’ “Northern War of Aggression” joke that’s not really a joke alley you can occasionally hear from time to time from southerners.

Oh, Nikki. First of all I’d like a President who actually knows why we fought the bloody Civil War. (hint:) To save the union! Because a group of Southern states tried to secede over SLAVERY! Speaking of secession, got any thoughts on its cousin, sedition? As in... January 6th!?! (I’m sorry I wasn’t there at the town hall.)

Compounding the tragedy of this is that in the all too rare instances where Nikki overcomes her Cuttlefish instincts, she can be quite good. Her attack on Trump’s spending in the first debate was a great beat, and it worked for her. Her slap down of the loathsome Vivek — a non-threatening fish I guess — was another. But unfortunately for Nikki these moments are hopelessly rare.

So what happens now? I’m not sure. The other reason I’ve been pro-Haley is I’ve always thought the physics of the NH primary would be provide the key moment to deeply Trump and I’m curious — and still hopeful — to see how the Haley thing turns out. She has been surging, with a real change to upset the Orange Demon in the Granite state.

Now her epic, stupid fumble will slow things down. And the Haley staff made it worse; they were too slow to deal with this and the new clean-up messaging is half-assed. They should have rolled her out to eat big crow right after her screw up. A blunt, I screwed up confessional would have done wonders to clean up this shit pile up move the focus of the train wreck from the bloody crash site to the heroic rescue attempt by the brave conductor. But making a big move like that would once again, violate the core firmware in the Haley-bot’s brain. Instead, after what I’m sure was a tortured 12 hours inside the Haley campaign — “Governor Sununu is on line two again. I think he’s upset” — Haley jumped on NH radio this am to walk her disaster back, but only with more Cuttlefish smoke; she is still arguing it was all about the Civil War as a case study in “freedoms.” She just cannot let go of a pivot I guess, even a really stupid one.

The second, more cynically helpful part of Haley’s new clean up answer was a new complaint about Joe Biden controlled sinister Agents of Chaos in the audience asking troublesome questions. (Where is the great Siegfried/Bernie Koppel when you need him?)

Still, the ol’ Biden planted troublemakers gibe actually will get some traction with GOP voters, like tribal counter-attacks tend to do.

In fact, I think that whole professional-troublemakers-here-to-destroy-me psychology is what triggered Haley’s disastrous answer. With a seasoned town hall performer’s hawk eye, see sighted the perceived-in-her-mind-to-be-hostile questioner and braced for trouble. She heard his Civil War question through that (simpleton’s) prism and treated it as a liberal trap to be avoided — again the firmware 2.0 says no offending any base voters! — leading her to spray out a cloud of trusty Cuttlefish ink in the form of her wobbly freedom pablum.

Oh well. My guess is she’ll mostly recover, but this is a big speed bump she didn’t need which will squelch her surge, at least for a while. The margin of victory voters in NH (she needs them in Iowa too, though thy are less important there) are independents, not SC style cultural conservatives. She just sent them a very bad, very loud signal that was a lot more Jeff Davis than Nashua moderate.

Haley’s mess will also embolden Chris Christie to keep his silly spoiler’s campaign alive, rationalizing that Haley’s blunder will now open the door to his long pined for surge to the White House. That’s bunk. Haley needs Christie to smarten up and get out, not spin off into an even bigger, more reckless ego fantasy that only helps Trump in the end.

All this said, I’d still vote for Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary. Of course Nikki is a mediocrity. But she’s not Trump, so the gunpoint choice in NH is still grimly clear.