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Sparkle (1)
The Atlantic has an interesting profile of Governor Nikki Haley. Written by Hanna Rosin, who also writes for Double X, the piece focuses on the rise of Haley and how conservative women are working to reform government.
Rosin captures the cesspool of South Carolina politics, such as this conversation with State Senator Jake Knotts. He made the infamous "raghead" comments about Haley, and his comments to Rosin aren't much better:
Knotts later claimed that his comments had been “intended in jest.” But when I caught up with him just before the November election -- which Haley won, becoming the state’s first Indian American governor and first female governor —- his complaints, though less coarse, had if anything grown broader in scope. “Let me say this: people going into politics these days are different than the people I always served with. Strom Thurmond, Fritz Hollings -- one Democrat, one Republican, but they had mutual respect for one another,” he told me. “You had to be one of us to get elected. Now we’ve gone so far down the ladder and backwards. We don’t know who it is, or what it is. As long as it’s got an R in front of its name, we vote for it.”
Ew, ew ew ... how can people like him still exist? I'm not just working to fight socialist liberals, but Neanderthals in my own party. You can promote the values of limited government, free markets and family values without being a racist or a misogynist.
One of the remarkable factors about Haley's victory, and even Governor Bobby Jindal's win in Louisiana, is how racist the South was towards Indians. Haley downplayed her ancestry, but her success is remarkable. Some of the experiences from her childhood were terrible, such as the time she and her sister entered a beauty pageant. Rosin writes:
Like Palin, Nikki Haley had a beauty-pageant moment, but one with a more discouraging outcome. When her sister was 8 and she was 4, the two of them entered the Little Miss Bamberg pageant, Singh told me. In previous years, the judges had crowned one white and one African American winner, but they were baffled over what to do with the two Indian American girls. At intermission, they called all the contestants on the stage: white girls on one side, black girls on the other, with the Haley sisters standing alone in the middle. The judges then announced that they had to disqualify the sisters, and handed each of them crayons and a coloring book. Before ushering them off the stage, they let Nikki sing the song she had prepared, “This Land Is Your Land.”
How could you do that to little girls? Not only is there the issue of segregation, but kicking out two girls of Indian-descent because they don't fit into the pre-selected categories of segregation? So, so wrong!
More than a "mama grizzly," Haley fits the mold of reformer, which is actually a better description of women within the Tea Party. We want to reform this country starting with corruption within our own parties. Many conservative women have had to take on the good ol' boy network before moving onto actual policy debates. I agree with Rosin's assertion here:
It is no accident that the rise of the Tea Party has coincided with the rise of conservative women. According to a Quinnipiac poll from last March, 55 percent of voters who identify with the Tea Party movement are women. The movement’s scattered national leadership is largely female as well: four of the seven board members of the Tea Party Patriots group are women, for example, as is the chairwoman of another group, the Tea Party Express. One of the three main sponsors of the seminal 2009 Tax Day Tea Party event was Smart Girl Politics, a group founded by mothers blogging about politics. “For a long time, people have seen the parties as good-ol’-boy, male-run institutions,” Smart Girl Politics spokeswoman Rebecca Wales told me. “In the Tea Party, women have finally found their voice.”
One way the Tea Party has benefited female candidates -- and the conservative movement generally -- is by consciously steering clear of social issues. When I asked one activist at the Smart Girl Summit about the role of abortion in the movement,
