Nikki Haley, a Question, Slavery, and the Human Interest Story You're Not Hearing About

Q: Where's investigative journalism now that we need it? A: Writing the ten zillionth follow-up about George Floyd.

It’s old news by now that, at an appearance in New Hampshire last week, Nikki Haley was asked about the cause of the Civil War. Here’s a decently full accounting of it:

Nikki Haley was confronted on Wednesday by a voter in New Hampshire who called her out for not mentioning slavery in her response to his question about the cause of the Civil War.

Haley — who, as governor of South Carolina, ultimately called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds — told the crowd that the war was about government interfering in people’s freedoms.

“I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley said in a visit to Berlin [N.H.]…as she attempts to close the gap with Republican front-runner Donald Trump ahead of next month’s primary.

The former UN ambassador then asked the voter what he thought the cause of the Civil War was, to which the voter responded, “I’m not running for president.”

“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley added. “I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people,” she added.

The voter criticized her for not mentioning slavery in her answer. “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery,” the voter said.

“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Haley asked.

“You answered my question,” he responded.

That exchange was the news of the week in Republican presidential politics, and Haley took quite a pasting for not mentioning slavery as the main cause of the Civil War. One might think that the identity of the questioner would get at least a look-see from an inquiring press, no?

At long last I discovered a story about him:

The man who asked the question, 44 year-old Hal Sharpten, said he was deputy director for human resources at a non-profit. He identified himself as a political independent who since high school had been interested in presidential campaigns. Sharpten said he was a single father of two daughters who, after a stint with the Peace Corps distributing humanitarian aid in Africa, obtained his degree from Dartmouth College, roughly eighty miles away.

OK, time to start the New Year with a confession. I made all that up.

Oddly, or as I will suggest not so oddly, I haven’t been able to find a single story — not in the NYT, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, PBS, CNBC, CNN, Time, Newsweek, etcetera, etcetera — about the identity or background of the questioner. This seems particularly curious since it is, to say the least, not obvious why the cause of the Civil War would get asked about in connection with the 2024 New Hampshire primary, 159 years after the War ended.

I mean, how the questioner thought to ask about that particular subject would be a small but neat human interest story, right?

Wrong! And that’s why it’s gone into The Cone of Silence. It’s not a human interest story. It’s a political story the Democrats want deep-sixed.

As I always tell younger people, including my students: listen for what you’re not hearing. When a medium dominated by your opponents goes blank, it’s not because the people running it are out on vacation or are dumb or forgetful. It’s because they don’t want it talked about. You need to ask yourself why.

In this case, the best guess strikes me as pretty obvious. In a recent WSJ poll, Haley beat Biden by 17 points. Assuming as I do that such a result is an outlier, and not something you’d entirely rely on, it still tells us something, namely, the Haley would very likely beat Biden and it’s not that close. It also tells us, therefore, that the Democrats have a strong interest in nipping any Haley momentum in the bud. As things stand, a much weaker and baggage-laden Donald Trump will be Joe’s November opponent. The Democrats prefer to keep it that way. So you send a plant to the next Haley campaign event, armed with a question neither she nor any normal person would expect and hoping (this time, with results) that she’ll flub it. But the flub story loses much of its punch if it comes out that the whole thing was a dirty tricks-type political ambush rather than a concerned New Hampshire citizen, so the identity and agenda of the questioner needs to go blank.

Voila!

As I say, listen for what you don’t hear. It always tells you something.

P.S. The secondary reason for the question is that Democrats are in love with the notion that all of America’s wretched history is just a footnote to slavery, so the more time you get the word “slavery” in the papers, the better off you are.