Nikki Haley Is Masquerading as a Moderate

Indeed, from the outside, her governorship was marked by quaintly conventional scandals, such as cronyism; The New York Times led a story about her by noting her iPod playlist. Her smartly bland camouflage has withstood the test of time to put her in the running to steer the Tea Party’s grotesque progeny, which is to say, the Republican Party writ large.

Most recent coverage has centered on how she talks about abortion. Haley says that the nation needs “consensus.” Naturally, many media outlets are doing some of the work for her, transmuting her soft rhetoric into some actual change in policy, but let’s be clear: To say that you want consensus on an issue when you have also been passionately fighting for a specific policy just means you want people to agree with you. The sentimentality of her claim, “I don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice, any more than I want you to judge me for being pro-life,” is a smokescreen in front of the hard facts of abortion access. There are millions of women who would happily be judged for getting an abortion, if they only could get one. Nikki Haley isn’t judging me, yay. Feelings aren’t facts, I heard someone say once.

Perhaps Haley’s sneakiest maneuver has been to poke at the easily poked Mike Pence over his stated goal of a national abortion ban. During the August GOP debate, she scolded him over floating the ban as a political promise. “When you’re talking about a federal ban, be honest with the American people,” she said, pointing out that the filibuster threshold means (for now) that such legislation could never pass. Her admonishment, “Do not make women feel like they have to decide on this issue,” sounds almost like advocacy for women, except that she’s hiding the truth: Whether a candidate wants a national abortion ban—regardless of their power to impose it—very much matters when deciding who to support! Yet we have seen a flurry of credulous headlines: her “search of common ground,” she “seeks a New Path on Abortion for G.O.P,” she argues “the need for a broad middle ground.”