'This Is My Face! Get Used To That Face!' Says Serious POTUS Candidate Nikki Haley
Nikki will never come back wack on an old-school track.
Nikki Haley is doing well in her bid to humiliate Ron DeSantis, and while we’re all looking forward to the tiny fascist’s public pantsing, Haley seemingly has even higher ambitions, such as becoming the actual Republican presidential nominee.
“Get used to this face, I’m not going anywhere,” Haley said at an Iowa town hall Friday. “Our goal was I’m trying to one, earn your trust, earn your vote. The way this will happen is this is not 2016 all over again.”
What Haley’s getting at there, in the least eloquent way possible, is that she’s riding Haley-mentum straight to a distant second place, where she’ll achieve permanent political stardom as an answer to a mid-level “Jeopardy!” question.
This weekend, Haley reminded voters that she’s not old and decrepit like Joe Biden but just sad and middle-aged like your humble narrator, when she dropped a spot called “This Is How We Do It” featuring the 1995 Montell Jordan jam of the same name.
Haley is pitching electability even though she’s losing badly pretty much everywhere. Her brother from another South Carolina mother, Sen. Tim Scott, dropped out of the race last week with little impact. According to Brianne Pfannenstiel, chief political reporter for the Des Moines Register, Scott’s piddly little support in Iowa breaks down almost evenly among Trump, Haley, and DeSantis (28, 25, and 23 percent respectively).
But Haley has a plan for ultimate victory, and it’s laughable in its absurdity.
“We started with 12 candidates,” she said. “The first debate was eight candidates. The second debate was seven candidates. The last debate was five candidates. This debate next month, it’ll be December 6 in Alabama, I expect there to be three candidates on the stage. So going into Iowa, we’re going to see three to four people fight for Iowa. Couple people are going to drop, and then we’re going to go on to New Hampshire and then we’re going to fight for Granite Staters. Then more people are going to drop, and then I go head-to-head with Trump in my home state of South Carolina and we take it.”
The candidates who have dropped out the Republican primary so far were averaging 0.003 percent (*not an exact figure but these losers don’t deserve my math). This imagined two-fascist race with Trump would still have her losing by double digits. Sweet Christ, this is “2016 all over again.”
Here’s a relevant passage from the January 2016 Politico article, “Behind Marco Rubio’s survival strategy.”
“Marco’s goal all along has been to survive, wait for other people to get kicked off the island and pick his moment — and that’s what you’re seeing in Iowa,” said one Republican familiar with the campaign’s approach. “The only thing that has changed is the staying power of Donald Trump. And that might be a good thing for Marco.”
Trump’s staying power was not in fact good news for Marco Rubio, who had a similar “lose on the way to winning” strategy as Haley. It was known as “3-2-1” (No Contact With The Oval Office).
Vox’s Dara Lind discussed the Rubio campaign’s strategy, presumably with a straight face, after the 2016 New Hampshire primary.
Rubio would finish third in Iowa — and would do well enough to surprise many of the pundits who'd dismissed him as an also-ran behind Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. This would win him support among New Hampshire Republicans, who are both more moderate than Iowans (bad news for Cruz) and famously late to decide, which would be good news for someone getting good press coming out of the Iowa caucuses.
Then, having placed second in New Hampshire, he'd go to South Carolina with more momentum still — and manage to win the state outright from under Donald Trump’s nose.
Although Rubio placed third in Iowa — with a 23 percent showing, he landed with a thud in New Hampshire, managing just 10 percent of the vote for a sad fifth place. He obviously didn’t win South Carolina. Haley could nudge out DeSantis in both Iowa and New Hampshire. However, she’s the former governor of South Carolina, so an ass whooping there is downright embarrassing. The irony here is that Haley boasts the MSNBC Republican country club appeal that doesn’t resonate anymore with her MAGA-fied home state.
Who is going to campaign for Haley against Trump in South Carolina, where current Gov. Henry McMaster has already endorsed him? She can’t possibly imagine that DeSantis will wise up and quit by then, and if he does, we all know he’ll crawl on his face to Trump.
We rightly talk about how deranged and unhinged Trump is, but what I generously call his primary “competitors” are perhaps even more delusional if they genuinely believe they can wrest control of the MAGA cult from its mad king.
That said, my early Christmas gift to our Editrix is to stress that anything could happen between now and South Carolina. I would happily celebrate a Haley victory if it meant Trump was no longer a concern. Then I’d start worrying about my fellow Gen-Xer Haley, because she’s a different kind of terrible.
[Mediaite]
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A prediction:
If Trump drops dead before the nomination is sewn up, there will be a non-negligible part of his base that believes he's NOT REALLY DEAD and that he will RETURN AND TAKE REVENGE at a time and place of his choosing.