Just Politics

[BullNBear52]

South Carolina Governor Points to Personal Reasons, Not Politics, for Shift on Confederate Flag
By RICHARD FAUSSETJUNE 23, 2015

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Gov. Nikki R. Haley was at home in Columbia last Wednesday night, when the gunman began shooting and killing inside the historic black church here.

At first, she had only partial information, but eventually learned it had happened at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where State Senator Clementa C. Pinckney, a Democrat she considered a friendly adversary, presided as pastor.

She called and left Mr. Pinckney a voice mail message, unaware that he was one of the nine victims of a gunman who witnesses said was motivated by racial hatred.

By Saturday morning, calls were mounting for the Legislature to remove what many consider the state’s most visible symbol of racial animus: the Confederate battle flag, which has flown on the grounds of the State House since 1962. Ms. Haley, a Republican who is the first ethnic minority and first woman to serve as governor of South Carolina, decided to reverse her previous position and tell lawmakers they needed to remove the flag once and for all.

“It came down to one simple thing,” Ms. Haley said in a phone interview Tuesday. “I couldn’t look my son or daughter in the face and justify that flag flying anymore.”

The incendiary issue of the flag was one that Ms. Haley, 43, had sidestepped in her five years in office. At times, she had defended the flag’s presence. During her initial run for governor, she said the flag was “not something that is racist,” but rather, “a tradition that people feel proud of.”

Ms. Haley was elected in 2010 on a cresting wave of Tea Party sentiment, and despite all of her firsts, she is more a product of American conservatism than the civil rights movement. Her focus as governor has been on aggressively promoting economic development more than addressing historical racial wrongs — although her supporters argue that her job-creation efforts have helped all people.

But last week’s killings have, at least for now, upended the political status quo in South Carolina. They have thrust Ms. Haley into the national spotlight, and into uncharted political territory here at home, where she now finds herself leading her party to align, on the matter of the flag, with liberals and blacks with whom she has clashed over many policy issues.

Ms. Haley said her decision to take a stand on the flag was an “emotional” one that she hoped would help heal her state. She spoke of her pride in the way South Carolinians have rallied across the racial divide.

She acknowledged the hurtful racial attacks that have been lobbed at her over the years, but insisted that her career was proof that race relations in this Southern state were, in fact, improving.

“The South Carolina I am privileged to lead today is not the South Carolina I grew up in,” she said. “It has continued to change and it has continued to evolve. It is the people who have done that.”

In the hours before the interview, the Legislature passed a procedural measure that will allow it to consider removing the flag from the State House grounds while lawmakers meet in special session this week.

But victory is not assured. In her news conference Monday, Ms. Haley, who was elected to a second term last year, said the flag was a “deeply offensive symbol” for some. She was also careful to acknowledge the many whites here who view the flag as means of honoring the Confederate dead. “That is not hate,” she said, “Nor is it racism.”

Her language demonstrated the delicate political balance that she and other Republicans navigate in a state where the flag is still revered in some circles.

Yet as the drama unfolds on shifting political terrain, Ms. Haley finds herself in a familiar place: somewhere between the Southern binary of black and white.

She was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa in Bamberg, S.C., a small city between Columbia, the capital, and Charleston. Her parents were immigrants from India’s Punjab State. She has said the locals often did not know what to make of the family’s Indian heritage. When she was about 5, Ms. Haley and her sister entered a “Little Miss Bamberg” pageant, where, traditionally, a black queen and a white queen were crowned. The judges decided the sisters fit neither category, so they disqualified them.

Ms. Haley began working for the family clothing business at an early age, and eventually received an accounting degree from Clemson University. She was elected to the state House in 2004, defeating Larry Koon, a longtime incumbent and fellow Republican. Ms. Haley was the subject of racial attacks during the campaign. Even her name became an issue, with Mr. Koon pointing out that she was enrolled to vote as Nimrata Randhawa.

In the House, she earned a reputation as a fiscal hawk. In 2009, she declared she was running for governor, winning an endorsement from Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate and Alaska governor. In the midst of the primary, two Republicans operatives emerged, making separate and unproven accusations that they had had sexual encounters with her. Ms. Haley, who was by that time married, strongly denied the assertions.

A Republican state senator, Jake Knotts, also went on a radio show and called her a “raghead.” The governor said Democrats, too, dealt insensitively with her, noting that State Representative Gilda Cobb-Hunter once said that voters did not think of her as a minority, but as “a nice conservative woman with a tan.”

Ms. Haley handily won the primary and went on to defeat her Democratic challenger, State Senator Vincent Sheheen, 51 percent to 47 percent.

In office, Ms. Haley focused squarely on efforts to recruit companies to South Carolina, luring them with a combination of tax incentives, the state’s anti-union environment, and a willingness, her admirers say, to work the phones like a telemarketer and sell South Carolina to out-of-state chief executives.

But some of Ms. Haley’s positions angered many African-American leaders, including her support of a law requiring voters to show identification cards at the polls, and her refusal to expand Medicaid under President Obama’s health care law. In 2013, Ms. Haley removed a member of her re-election campaign’s advisory committee after it was revealed that the member had ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that opposes “all efforts to mix the races,” and whose writings resonate in an online manifesto apparently written by Dylann Roof, who has been charged in the killings at Emanuel A.M.E. Church.

During her 2014 re-election bid, her team said that more than 56,000 jobs had been created in, relocated to, or promised for South Carolina since she took office. When asked about the Confederate flag at the time, she said that the chief executives she spoke with did not think it was really an issue.

Ms. Haley’s new stand on the flag may raise her national stature, allowing her to distance herself from a symbol that many are finding increasingly indefensible. Bakari Sellers, a former Democratic state representative who is African-American, said the governor’s national profile had waned somewhat after her election in 2010, but that her stand on the flag had “catapulted her back into a national discussion.”

The governor is often mentioned as a potential presidential running mate or future cabinet member. But Mr. Sellers said he did not think politics motivated her on Monday.

“Knowing Nikki, I know that’s not why she did it,” he said.

“She could have cowered, like many of the people running for president, and punted for a later moment, but she didn’t,” he added. “She took it head on.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/us/politics/south-carolina-governor-nikki-r-haley-points-to-personal-reasons-not-politics-for-shift-on-confederate-flag.html?ref=us