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UPDATE (Dec. 28, 2023, 10:56 a.m. ET): This post has been updated to include comments Nikki Haley made on Thursday addressing the backlash to her Civil War explanation a day earlier.
Typical presidential candidates spend months on the campaign trail, interacting with voters, fielding questions at town-hall-style meetings, and sharpening their message over time. As is true with most things, more practice leads to better results, and White House hopefuls learn how to give compelling answers.
But every once in a while, candidates hear a question they haven’t fully prepared for — and it becomes a problem. NBC News reported early Thursday:
GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley on Wednesday declined to say slavery was a cause of the Civil War, arguing instead that it came down to “the role of government.” At a New Hampshire town hall, a voter bluntly asked Haley, “What was the cause of the Civil War?”
The South Carolina Republican certainly said a lot of words in response to the question, but Haley never got around to mentioning slavery.
“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,” the former U.N. ambassador said at the beginning of her response. Haley added, “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people.”
As part of the same answer, the GOP candidate told her New Hampshire audience, “Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom,” she said. “We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”
Evidently, the man who asked the question was unimpressed. “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery,” he said.
Haley replied, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”
Not to put too fine a point on this, but what I think some wanted her to say about slavery is that it was the central cause of the conflict. Indeed, in her own home state, South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession referenced slavery in its opening sentence and pointed to the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” as a reason for leaving the Union.
Complicating matters, there’s some recent history to keep in mind. As Associated Press report noted that during her 2010 gubernatorial campaign, Haley described the Civil War as between two disparate sides fighting for “tradition” and “change,” adding that as far as she was concerned, the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.”
The former ambassador obviously knows why the Civil War happened, which makes it all the more notable that at this New Hampshire event, she spoke at great length about the role of government in society without offering the obvious answer to a simple question.
It’s difficult not to wonder whether Haley failed to reference slavery as the cause of the Civil War because she feared a backlash from her party’s base — especially with the South Carolina primary less than two months away.
What’s more, her comments served as a timely reminder that those looking for a centrist figure in the GOP’s presidential field should look past the former ambassador. As Paul Waldman wrote for MSNBC a couple of weeks ago, “Nikki Haley’s greatest trick is convincing voters she’s a moderate.”
We’re occasionally reminded that she is not.
Update: Hoping to undo some of the political damage done by her answer, Haley appeared on a New Hampshire radio program a few hours ago and said, "Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that. That’s the easy part of it. What I was saying was what does it mean to us today. What it means to us today is about freedom. That’s what that was all about.
"It was about individual freedom. It was about economic freedom. It was about individual rights. Our goal is to make sure, no we never go back to slavery but what’s the lesson in all of that. ... I’m from the south. Of course you know it’s about slavery."
The Republican presidential hopeful added that she believes the person who asked the question was "a Democrat [sic] plant."