It sounded to me like, “Hey I just answered your question about the Civil War, what the hell does slavery have to do with it.”
Exactly. If she would have continued to answer, we’d probably have heard more about how slavery taught slaves valuable skills they were able to use after the slave owners granted them freedom.
To me, asking how to “frame” a discussion of slavery is just a fancy way of asking how you want to be pandered to. The “framing” of slavery and the US Civil War is so blindingly obvious that any politician in the US should have a textbook answer ready to hand. Hell, she even got it right(ish) in her feeble attempts to deflect this criticism (see above posts), so why didn’t she give that answer? The obviously correct answer?
It’s because in her head, she knows this is a losing question for any Republican, because if she gives the wrong answer, she loses anyone not a full-bore GOP fanatic, and if she gives the easy, correct answer, she loses the GOP fanatics.
And we saw which answer she gave, which tells us which voters she considered most important in that moment.
Wasn’t a lot of it because the south needed the slaves for their agricultural products?
The north was turning into a manufacturing powerhouse (or soon would).
There were also a lot of issues about Western expansion, and whether those new States and Territories would allow slavery or not. The existing slave states demanded that there be a mixture of both, because they feared that if all the new states were non-slavery, then the people in favor of abolishing slavery would eventually have a majority in the US Congress, and be able to ban slavery in the whole country. Abolitionists, of course, wanted the new states to be free, because they already considered the existing slave states an abomination, and didn’t want to see new abominations springing up across the west.
There were attempts at compromises that of course pleased no one, but did postpone the inevitable conflict between two mutually exclusive positions.
Agee it wasn’t an invitation to parrot.
In general the “right” answer by a politician to any question is
Thanks for asking about [whatever]. Now here’s what I think about something else tangentially related kinda maybe a little but that I’ve wanted to talk about and have a prepared position for.
Blah blah blah etc.
By that standard she failed to deflect into safe ground and ended up in the verbal rough. Which is why all the attempts to triangulate today. In ways she knows the RW media will ignore, so she can get away with a more centrist tone while doing her mini-penance for the now vestigial non-racist wing of her party.
This. It’s a poisoned question for any R.
Past the Hill Country of Texas, the West didn’t get enough rain to support plantation slavery anyway. “Here’s a gun and a horse. Take the herd to market in Missouri but you better come back or else!” The San Fernando Valley could’ve been farmed with slaves, so California realistically was in doubt.
Haley got herself into the same trouble as Claudine Gay and Liz Magill did in front of a Congressional committee a few weeks ago. She was asked a loaded question that demanded only a one-word answer, and she just couldn’t say one word and shut up. She couldn’t even throw the question back with something like, “There were several contributing factors. Which one would you like to discuss?”
The ability to give context while answering a suspiciously simple question is the sign of an intelligent question. It is not, however, a virtue for a political candidate whose job is to give voters a reason to support them, not to teach a history lesson.
Maybe Nikki Haley is just too smart to run for President.
Nick Wilde: Okay, press conference 101. You wanna look smart? Answer their question with your own question, and then answer that question. Like this: “Excuse me, Officer Hopps. What can you tell us about the case?” “Well, was this a tough case? Yes, yes it was.”
Good gawd.
(BTW, she’s running.)
No, that is untrue. Sure a good number of Whites in the North cared, but the South left the Union because they thought Slavery was threatened. If the South has not Seceded 0ber slavery, there would have not been a Civil War.
True, the North’s primary reason for going to was was to unite the Union.
Exactly.
Yep, the South left the Union due to slavery. Period.
Mostly for Cotton. The cotton gin brought Southern slavery back to life. The Founders thought slavery was dying off on it’s own, but they could not have foretold the cotton gin and “King Cotton”.
And, the whole point of Secession is how foolish it was. Lincoln had no plans to outlaw slavery, just to limit it’s expansion. Perhaps get rid of the Fugitive Slave act
I think this is right, and I think Haley was offering those voters a particular characterization of the South versus the North that any reasonable person would find offensive. Specifically, I think Haley was consciously and deliberately saying that the cause of the Civil War was the evil North’s determination to impose its evil oppressive will–i.e. government–on the noble, freedom-and-liberty-defending South.
The entire exchange is worth reading. This post (from the Pit) has a gift link to a WaPo article that gives more than just excerpts from her answer:
NEW Stupid Republican Idea of the Day (Part 3) - #2735 by Sherrerd
Here are Haley’s words (as reproduced in that post):
It’s not just boilerplate blather. She’s saying that the cause of the Civil War was a clash of the philosophy of “liberty” versus the philosophy of “government getting in the way.” And she frames this as the South versus the North.
You can be certain that many Republican voters will embrace her words. No matter how many tsk-tsking news stories there may be about this incident, Haley’s poll numbers are almost certain to rise as a result of it.
After all, outlawing slave-owning is just another form of job-killing regulation. Always with the nanny state taking away our freedoms to oppress others as much as we have the power and personal psychopathy to perpetrate.
Miserable amoral bastards.
Be careful–some GOP candidate is going to forcibly employ you as a speechwriter.
I think the word “successfully” was implied though not stated.
One who is too smart to do something successfully is a real icon of fail.
She was lobbed a softball tantamount to: How come a ball drops to the floor when I let go of it?
And today she’s claiming that the question was asked by a “Democrat plant”. Too smart, she ain’t.
Those wiley Democrats - always outsmarting those Republicans! How is that possible, I mean, with the whole stolen election thing - how’r the evul Dems able to pull the wool over the GOP contenders’ eyes so well and so often??
Ref @Sherrerd’s cite to the WaPo article (thank you!) the actual question was:
What was the cause of the United States Civil War?
If we’re all so smart, what is the answer to that question that improves one’s standing as a staunch right-winger able to unseat trump in the race to the R nomination?
Because her goal is not to answer the question factually correctly. This isn’t a classroom where she’s a student regurgitating the text to some professor’s satisfaction. Her goal is to say whatever gets her more votes in the R primary.
Viewed from the correct POV, the one that matters to her election and her party, that is anything but a softball question.
I think she did a pretty good job of providing fan service to her base, and her party’s base, with that one. The problem here is way, way upstream of Haley’s answer. The problem is the attitudes of her target audience. Which was not us folks here.
As explained so ably by @sherrerd six posts up from here.
Seriously. But even if the question was asked by a Dirty Democrat (sic) Plant, she still should have had a serious answer. But I guess she’s too smart for that. Ha ha.
I agree (and thanks). As I mentioned, I’m convinced her poll numbers will get a noticeable boost from this.
And then we’ll have the prospect of DeSantis, Christie, and Ramaswamy maneuvering to get their own ‘the Civil War was about the noble South defending freedom’ moments.