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Meet South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, Who Might Just Be The Republicans’ Barack Obama

JUSTIN WM. MOYER

 

 

 





A politician with a diverse background who doesn’t exactly fit in among colleagues gives a high-profile speech that seems to open a road someday to the White House. U.S. President Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention -- or South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley giving the Republican response to Obama’s final State of the Union Tuesday night?

Haley’s response, well-received in some quarters, brought a five-year-old New York magazine question to mind: “Could Nikki Haley be the GOP’s Obama?”

Its answer: “Yes, she can.”

“Haley has suddenly gone from being a three-term state legislator to a nationally prominent politician,” Jennifer Senior wrote back in 2010. “She speaks well and looks terrific on TV. She’s young and has two young, telegenic children, and she stands out in a party of dreary white men. Sound like anyone else you know?”

Nor have parallels in Obama and Haley’s personal lives been missed. Whatever Obama and Haley are, they’re not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

“Haley, like Obama, has an extraordinary ethnic heritage, which was both a liability and an asset during her campaign,” Senior wrote. “Born Nimrata Nikki Kaur Randhawa -- her parents emigrated from Amritsar, Punjab, in 1963 -- Haley often heard her full name on the campaign trail, just as Barack Hussein Obama did, when someone wanted to make the not-so-subtle point that perhaps she was insufficiently American for the job.”

Indeed, attacks on Haley’s faith -- she was raised a Sikh -- were a fundamental part of her opponent’s strategy in her ultimately successful gubernatorial run in 2010.

“We’ve already got a raghead in the White House; we don’t need another raghead in the governor’s mansion,” one state senator said at the time. And, like Obama, Haley was compelled to emphasize that she is Christian.

“I was born and raised with the Sikh faith, my husband and I were married in the Methodist Church, our children have been baptized in the Methodist Church, and currently we attend both,” she said in 2010.

Some in the GOP have even questioned whether Haley is too much like Obama -- stressing compromise when her base wants a standoff. After the State of the Union, Ann Coulter, the conservative gadfly who thrives on extreme rhetoric, unleashed a punishing tweetstorm targeting the South Carolina governor during her moment in the spotlight.

“Nikki Haley: ‘No one who is willing to work hard should ever be turned away,'” Coulter wrote, blasting Haley’s relatively moderate -- at least compared with Donald Trump -- views on immigration. “That’s the definition of open borders.”

And: “Haley: Let in unlimited immigrants ‘just like we have for centuries.’ Has she read a history book? Coolidge shut it down for 1/2 a century.”

And: “Nikki Haley: ‘The best thing we can do is turn down the volume.’ Translation: Voters need to shut the hell up.”

Coulter tweeted, “Nikki Haley says ‘welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of religion.’ Translation: let in all the Muslims.”

Coulter’s takeaway: “Trump should deport Nikki Haley.” For some on the right, the governor was just a mouthpiece for the GOP establishment. She even dared blame Washington dysfunction on Republicans.

“We need to be honest with each other, and with ourselves: while Democrats in Washington bear much responsibility for the problems facing America today, they do not bear it alone,” Haley said. “There is more than enough blame to go around.”

This is not what some of the Republican Party faithful wanted to hear.

“65 percent of conservative voters say the United States should not let in any refugees from the entire Middle East – the point of view Republican leadership is presumably attacking with its State of the Union rebuttal,” Julia Hahn wrote at Breitbart. “Yet Ryan’s strategy for the Republican Party’s State of the Union response seems consistent with GOP leadership’s longstanding practice of demeaning its own voter base.”

Yet, many appeared to embrace Haley’s tone. And some weren’t content to discuss Haley as a possible VP choice, despite her implied slam of Trump’s immigration policies. Given her skilled handling of last year’s mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Confederate flag imbroglio that followed, it appeared to some that Haley might have the right stuff for the top spot at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“She’s in the odd position of being the ideal vice presidential candidate who should have run for president,” South Carolina journalist Isaac Bailey wrote in an opinion piece published early Wednesday, January 13, 2016. “If the tragedies during which her leadership abilities shined most had happened in 2014 and not 2015, maybe she would have.”


[Courtesy: The Washington Post. Edited for sikhchic.com]

January 14, 2016
 

Conversation about this article

1: Ajit Singh Batra (Pennsville, New Jersey, USA), January 14, 2016, 10:44 AM.

"Bin sahjae sabh andh hae maya moh gubaar" [GGS:68]. -" Without state of ease, everything seems to be complete darkness due to attachment with worldy affairs." Nikki Haley, though born in USA and married to a Christian, was raised under the tutelage of Sikh parents. In contrast to her fellow Republican, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, who had a Hindu upbringing and only recently demeaned himself trying to out-Trump Trump, Nikky could not accept the pronouncement of Donald Trump that Muslims should not be accepted in USA for immigration by the American government. She had the courage to stress the universal truths of a moral and spiritual nature because of her roots in Sikhi, even when those values appeared to go against the grain of the current Republican view of the world.

2: Mohinder (Pembroke Pines, Florida, USA ), January 14, 2016, 11:37 AM.

Nikki Haley is probably the best Governor out there. Maybe a very good presidential candidate. But should she be on a Sikh site?

3: Sandeep Singh Brar (Canada), January 14, 2016, 12:49 PM.

For anyone not familiar with Nikki Haley: Many years ago she was given an award by a Sikh organization (The Centennial Foundation of Canada) when she was a junior member of the State Legislature. I was there on the night she accepted the award and heard her proclaim how proud she was 'to be a Sikh-American’. Fast forward a few years and things changed completely. When running for Governor, she removed all references to the word ‘Sikh’ from her biography on her website that used to be there and went out of her way during the election to proclaim that she was a Christian and member of the board of a local church and made clear that Jesus Christ was the only path to salvation. When elected governor and during President Obama’s election she identified herself as an extreme right-wing Tea Party Republican member and Sara Palin supporter. I remember she defended the Confederate flag flying in the state legislature when questioned. Now this political chameleon, seeing that Sara Palin is long gone from the public stage and the popularity of the Tea Party extremists is no longer what it was, has now re-marketed herself as a centrist republican, now talking about immigrants and removing the Confederate flag, clearly setting herself up for a future presidential run (she campaigned hard to be the Vice Presidential candidate during Mitt Romney in the last campaign). Anything for the vote, I guess, including your principles and your religion.

4: Prabhjot Kaur (Buffalo, New York, USA), January 14, 2016, 1:40 PM.

No politicians today seem to have any values, morality, principles, religion, integrity ... They say and do as the situation dictates, vis-a-vis their personal interest in gaining, retaining or securing power. Given that fact, we as a community need to learn that what is said in election cycles or in a political context needs to be decoded, weighed and then pigeon-holed accordingly. It is imperative that we learn to be thick-skinned when it is necessary to do so and use our intelligence and strategy in responding to such utterances and public pronouncements. Let's liberally use a pinch of salt in such matters ...

5: Sunny Grewal (Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada), January 14, 2016, 1:44 PM.

@3 Sandeep ji: Thank you for that revelation. According to her own biography she claims to have converted during college, if your statements are true then it shows that she is indeed a political chameleon. During my first year of law school I had a fellow Sikh student who interned for her office. He told me as well that her Christian background was most likely a ploy for votes.

6: Sarvjit Singh (Millis, Massachusetts, USA), January 14, 2016, 1:48 PM.

Nikki Haley is a great Governor and may good Lord bless her! Her rebuttal on CNN also deserves kudos. However, it is so clear that she publicly denies her Sikhi because that would make her an outsider in her party, and impossible to survive politically in the Christian South.

7: Onkar Singh (Chandigarh, Punjab), January 14, 2016, 3:01 PM.

I lean towards Prabhjot Kaur's position (above, #4) on the issues raised here by some of the readers. We as Sikhs are by intrinsic nature (nurtured by our Gurus) honest and forthright and wear our hearts on our sleeves, and make short shrift of fools and knaves. May it always remain so. However, we do have an Achilles' heel in that we do not learn to play the realpolitik game well, which always puts us at a disadvantage in the political miasma that we live in today. We'll have to learn these crucial skills if we do not want to be going round and round in circles. There are ways of dealing with the real world without compromising our principles. I'm grateful to sikhchic.com for being a catalyst in encouraging this discussion. Can I ask the commentators above and other readers as well to please stop for a moment and try thinking out of the box and see if we can find another, more productive approach to the dilemma posed by the very valid comments above?

8: Tony Singh (Canada), January 14, 2016, 7:04 PM.

I had read that Nikki Haley broke down into tears when visiting the Harmandar Sahib last year as she was overcome with emotion. That speaks volumes to her true feelings about Sikhi. She already has white racists attacking her at every turn and we don't need to start yelling at her from our pedestals. Do people here know that during the last session of parliament in Canada under the Harper Conservatives that every Sikh member voted against an official apology for the racist treatment of Sikhs in the Komagata Maru Incident?

9: Bikram Singh (San Francisco, California, USA), January 14, 2016, 7:43 PM.

The prestigious journal, The New Yorker, has an article on Nikky Haley today on its online edition, and carries the following bit: 'Haley has also spoken about the prejudices she encountered as part of the only Sikh family in Bamberg, South Carolina, which was “not white enough to be white, not black enough to be black.” Three months after the shooting in Charleston, Haley, addressing the National Press Club, described seeing her father, a botany professor [who was and is turbaned and bearded] at a historically black college, racially profiled at a farmers’ market when she was ten years old.'

10: Garry Nollins (Chicago, Illinois, USA), January 15, 2016, 1:35 AM.

Can Sandeep Singh please point to the evidence as to when Nikki Haley defended the Confederate flag?

11: Hardev Singh (Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada), January 15, 2016, 3:42 AM.

I resonate with Sandeep Singh Brar's comment. Bobby Jindal totally alienated South Asian support as he was loath to have his subcontinental origin appended to his background. His bleached skin portraits drew both derision and laughter. For Nikki Haley to change her religion is her prerogative, but she cannot efface her parental background or the hue of her skin for political expediency.

12: Kulvinder Jit Kaur (Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada), January 15, 2016, 9:22 AM.

We can be so judgmental because each of us thinks that we are such good/loyal Sikhs! Just because we look like Sikhs or carry Sikh names, we automatically assume that we are contributing towards Sikhism. "Let us walk in someone else's shoes" for a change. Also let us be a bit more accepting of others' choices. I have been disappointed in many a full fledged gurdwara-going Sikh by the way they conduct themselves and treat others. Frankly speaking, the way our gurdwaras are run will drive away many young Canadian/American born Sikhs to seek spiritual solace elsewhere. It is happening already. I know of some Sikh families who adopted Christianity as they received comfort, counseling and genuine help from the church goers when in distress. They were the subject of gossip, ridicule and discrimination (according to them) when they had approached the gurdwara members. I think we have to pay serious attention towards spiritually nurturing the Canadian/American born children to keep them in the Sikh fold. Gathering from the comments, it seems Nikki Haley's family were the only Sikh family in the town she grew up in. How do you think a Sikh child could possibly identify herself with the Sikh community at large? Most likely all her friends were Christian and she gravitated towards what was available and comfortable. Not everyone lives in largely Sikh populated cities like Brampton, Surrey, etc. It is hard for these children growing up as Sikhs. Also just teaching our kids to play the harmonium/tabla and doing kirtan in our gurdwaras is not enough. Our history, heritage and Sikh values are more important. If people leave the Sikh fold it is not their weakness as much as it is our failure. As for politics, yes one has to be politically smart enough to know which card to play when, without compromising one's principles. Even Guru Gobind Singh Ji chose to disguise as a Muslim Pir to hoodwink the Mughal soldiers who wanted to capture and kill him. It was not an act of cowardice or an act of opportunism, but a smart move to stay alive and contribute further to the Sikh Panth.

13: Dr Birinder Singh Ahluwalia (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), January 15, 2016, 10:24 AM.

Separation of Religion (Church) and State is a fundamental pillar of the mature, successful American democracy, and in fact every other truly functional democracy. Hence removal of references to one's religious/ethnic background, identity/identification, by any politician (including Nikki) should not be construed as opportunistic or demagoguery or political expediency or something nefarious. One should applaud her (Nikki's) abilities and skills that make her the great leader that she is.

14: Sandeep Singh Brar (Canada), January 15, 2016, 11:40 AM.

As requested (in #10 above), here is Nikki Haley's earlier defence of the Confederate Flag and her refusal to remove it when requested by the NAACP: NY Times, July 26, 2011- “But Mr. Jealous (President, NAACP) said at the group’s convention in Los Angeles that “one of the most perplexing examples of the contradictions of this moment in history is that Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s first governor of color, continues to fly the Confederate Flag.” Ms. Haley’s parents came from India. Her spokesman said Tuesday she had no plans to revisit the issue.” Statements from Nikki Haley regarding calls to remove the Confederate Flag from the SC State Legislature: “It was settled and it has been put away. And I don’t have any intentions of bringing it back up or making it an issue,” she said in a recent interview with the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Instead, Haley said her focus is on making state government more transparent and more business-friendly. “If the people aren’t focused on the flag, it’s hard to see why the governor and General Assembly should be,” said Rob Godfrey, Haley’s spokesman. Haley implied in the Sons of Confederate Veterans interview that she would work with the NAACP and others who want the flag removed from the State House grounds to address the NAACP boycott. “I’m the perfect person to deal with the boycott. Because, as a minority female, I’m going to go and talk to them and I’m going to go and let them know that every state has their traditions ...” (http://www.bradwarthen.com/2010/07/haley-sheheen-offer-clear-choice-on-confederate-flag/)

15: Sarvjit Singh (Millis, Massachusetts, USA), January 15, 2016, 4:35 PM.

#13: your comment about "separation of Church and State in USA' is exactly what Republicans would like to undo and disagree with.

16: Harinder Singh (Punjab), January 15, 2016, 8:15 PM.

It is but natural for a Sikh to run for the post of President of the United States. Its constitution is akin to Sikh philosophy.

17: Ajit Singh Batra (Pennsville, New Jersey, USA), January 16, 2016, 8:31 AM.

Re #15: No party, candidate or elected official can go against the Constitution of the United States. Do not be misled by the willy nilly pronouncements of Trump and Cruz.

18: Arjan Singh (USA), January 16, 2016, 9:04 PM.

I have traveled around the USA, including the Carolinas, and I can assure the readers of this article that bigotry and discrimination still exists in the South, where Nikky Kaur Randhawa grew up. I do admire her courage to be elected as a Governor in a southern state and commend her parents for educating her. Deep down I am sure she did not want to give up her Sikh identity. Let this be a wake up call for all of us that we must give our future generations the confidence to retain their identity. As they say, "the mob always wins". It is hard for a lone Sikh family to preserve their way of life among a group of people who have barely gotten over the Jim Crow southern policies. All in all, we have done a poor job of educating the rest of the American citizens of the beauty of the Sikh faith and culture.

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