Opinion | Nikki Haley’s 5-Inch Heels – By Kimberley A. Strassel (Wall Street Journal) / Nov 9, 2023
She is what the GOP needs to take on Trump and Biden: a conviction politician
Rare is the primary debater who lands a true zinger, and wiser participants know the risk of attempting a lame or canned dig. Then there’s Vivek Ramaswamy. Nikki Haley might thank the political naïf for helping highlight the extent to which she’s indeed running in those 5-inch heels—and leaving stiletto marks on a few competitors along the way.
Mr. Ramaswamy tried mightily in Wednesday’s GOP debate to pass off his clearly preplanned slur of Ms. Haley as “Dick Cheney in 3-inch heels” as a passing quip—and bombed enough to elicit a collective audience groan. It mainly served to provide the former South Carolina governor another opportunity to draw distinctions between her own muscular foreign policy and her opponents’ bobs and weaves. Leadership is becoming the central theme of the Haley campaign, and that helps explain her marked rise in national and state polls.
Growing global disorder thrust foreign policy to the forefront of this debate, and it is quickly separating the men from . . . the woman. Donald Trump caters to the “America first” contingent, vowing to end the Ukrainian war in 24 hours and reward Vladimir Putin’s onslaught against civilians with whatever land Russia has seized up to now. Mr. Ramaswamy goes further left, resurrecting a 1930s-style isolationism that envisions abandoning even allies like Israel and that smears Ukrainians as “Nazis.”
