Mark Davis: Nikki Haley’s slavery gaffe is baffling but not damaging | Opinion

Since no one is perfect, public figures are going to get in trouble sometimes for the way they phrase things. And since today’s political environment is particularly predatory, opportunities will abound for assessing whether anyone catching grief for a perceived gaffe really deserves such a rough patch.

Which brings us to how Nikki Haley has ended her campaign year, mere days before voting in Iowa and New Hampshire that she hopes will reveal a plausible shot at the Republican presidential nomination.

In Berlin, New Hampshire, Wednesday, the former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor fielded a brief question that has launched days of damage control: “What was the cause of the U.S. Civil War?”

She paused, turned away, and looked back to the audience nervously joking, “Well, don’t come with an easy question …”

The question was an obvious act of mild mischief from someone who is not a fan, posing what some have called a “trap question.” There is a simple rule for such situations for anyone in public life: have a good answer.

Haley did not. “I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run,” she began clumsily. “The freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.” Even if one extends maximum charity to someone stumbling through the multiple layers of states’ rights that had been stoking tensions between North and South through the first half of the 19th century, it had to occur to her that the questioner was seeing how she would address the issue of slavery.

She chose in the moment to sidestep it, continuing a word salad rivaling Kamala Harris: “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. 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.”

That answer is garbled but defensible. But any Republican who has campaigned for more than a week should have been able to recognize that this was an attempt to smoke out a slavery quote. It should not have been hard to supply one.

Multiple conflicts led to the various secessions; the overarching moral question of the day was obviously slavery, and one wonders what made that so hard to say. We can spend endless hours assessing how much of the Civil War was about slavery. While that amount is impossible to quantify broadly, it is worth remembering that for the roughly 4 million slaves, the war was about nothing else.

So again, why the hesitancy to include a sentence or two that would have avoided such a rhetorical bear trap? Haley is a profoundly smart person, so there is only one likelihood — she saw a negative aspect to mentioning it.

Why? Are there appreciable numbers of voters distancing from the historical fact of slavery as a major accelerant in lighting the fires of the Civil War? There are not. So in an additional granting of grace, another possibility might deserve consideration.

The current flood of social justice extremism contains the savaging of our nation as systemically racist in the modern day. It embraces the critical race theory precepts, which lead kids to disparage the country and each other. It entertains discussions of reparations, whereby blameless Americans are billed for national sins of the past. One of the saddest byproducts of these needless agitations is the diversion of time and energy away from what should be a unifying good-faith search for real racism.

Did Haley sense the public fatigue over such activism and decide on the fly not to play along with a question designed to troll her toward the subject? No one can read minds, but we can hear what she has said since —emphatic assertions that she is indeed aware of slavery’s role as a Civil War catalyst.

Everyone knows she knew that. We can only guess about the fog that kept her from making that clear. So now we are left with the matter of how damaging this is.

The best guess is that it’s not, for two reasons. First, Iowa and New Hampshire do not appear to be teeming with primary voters burning with curiosity about how each candidate views the causes of the Civil War. But most notably, political damage is defined by how much support the candidate loses. Just as the fateful questioner was obviously an anti-Haley troublemaker, the only people making a big deal out of this are those who do not intend to vote for her anyway.

Mark Davis hosts a morning radio show in Dallas-Fort Worth on 660-AM and at 660amtheanswer.com. Follow him on Twitter: @markdavis.