Opinion | Nikki Haley Has the Perfect Presidential Résumé. It Might Not Matter – By Jessica Grose (The New York Times) / Mar 11, 2023
Last month, I listened to my former colleagues on Slate’s “Political Gabfest” podcast discuss Nikki Haley after she declared her run for president. John Dickerson, also of CBS News, explained that in a pre-Donald Trump world, you could make a strong case about Haley’s credentials for the job:
She comes from an important primary state. She has experience as a governor. She did well by the standards of the Republican Party as governor of South Carolina in terms of regulations and taxes. [She has] executive branch experience as ambassador to the U.N. She’s got a foreign policy piece — that’s, you know, that’s a pretty good place to start if you’re a Republican in the old days.
But now, because the Republican Party continues to orbit the rogue planet of Trump, Dickerson explains, the path of a more traditional candidate is more complicated. “If you want this turf, you’ve got to grab it,” he said, but “that’s not her inclination.” Or as the journalist Rosie Gray has observed, Haley “probably isn’t the kind of candidate who can get through a Republican presidential primary. Shrewd as she has been, she can’t plausibly reinvent herself as a 2023 outrage merchant.”
I was thinking about this when I saw Axios report this week that Trump is considering a female running mate and that he “sees Kari Lake as a model for his vice-presidential pick, according to people who discussed the topic with him.” Lake, you’ll recall, is a former TV anchor who’s never held elective office and who ran for governor of Arizona in 2022. She lost, and has spent months contesting the election results without evidence to back her claims of voter fraud. My colleague Michael Bender described her as “a polished and ruthless communicator,” when he interviewed Lake in February.
