Puff piece published with the intent of giving South Carolina governor Nikki Haley a timely boost for her re-election bid? Maybe! But you can’t deny that Susan Page’s USA Today profile of Haley was fascinating nonetheless — and revealed a more humanizing and compassionate side of the feisty politico.
She was bullied. Haley tells a morning assembly of students at a middle school 20 miles northeast of the state capital that she was bullied when she grew up in her hometown of Bamberg, SC, adding, “They didn’t know if I was black or white.”
But she’s actually a trailblazer. But that bullying didn’t faze her — as Haley successfully launched and won a campaign that allowed her to become the state’s first minority governor. She’s also the state’s first female governor. If that’s not enough firsts, she’s also the first sitting governor to have a spouse deployed on combat duty overseas, with her husband Michael in Afghanistan.
Her husband is currently deployed in Afghanistan. However, it was when he left for a second time that Gov. Haley “realized how much she had missed him…I realized how lonely I had been and realized how much a part of life he really was. That’s when it got really hard. I just realized how easier life was when he was there and how empty it is when he’s not.”
A frenemy of the GOP. Believe it or not, Gov. Haley is “often at odds with the state’s GOP establishment.” In fact, relations between Haley and the GOP have always been a little strained.
An unlikely yogi. From Page herself comes news that Gov. Haley’s preferred method of stress relief consists of “regular hot yoga classes.”
Page dodges hard-hitting issues — like a hacking fiasco into South Carolina’s tax database last year that compromised the financial data of nearly 4 million citizens and 700,000 businesses — in favor of lobbing easy softball questions to Haley. Sure, it’s refreshing to see Haley humanized, but at the expense of talking about her political accomplishments doesn’t really help the case for her re-election bid, does it?
Rohin Guha is a contributing editor at The Aerogram. Find The Aerogram on Twitter @theaerogram.
