GOP's Nikki Haley: Breaking Through Barriers in South Carolina Governor's Race

CHARLESTON, S.C. – As the front-runner in Tuesday's Republican gubernatorial primary, 38-year-old Nikki Haley is writing the most improbable political success story of 2010. In a state defined by church, flag and family, the once little-known state legislator is transcending such barriers as her Indian-American heritage (her parents are Sikhs who emigrated from the Punjab in 1963).

But in the final two weeks leading up to Tuesday's four-candidate primary, Haley has faced down the worst accusations that can be hurled at a married woman politician – unproven public charges of adultery. Smear attacks like this are supposed to prove fatal in a state that has elevated dirty politics to an art form. But even when a Republican state senator called her a "raghead," the immediate reaction appeared to be not secret nods of agreement but public embarrassment.

Haley, in her first statewide campaign, has proven a master of boomerang politics – making every attack seem like a vindication of her conservative populist outrage.

"When you threaten the establishment's money, power and corruption, they fight back," Haley told me in a Saturday interview as we stood in the scorching sunlight at a small-town Tea Party rally in Hartsville. Dressed in a peach Chanel-style suit with fringe that was designed by her mother's clothing firm, Haley is an on-message candidate who tempers the anger in her rhetoric with a quick smile and ample hugs for supporters. "The only way we will ever change the system is when we let them know we won't stop," she said. "When they tried to distract me, they made me more determined to fight back."

South Carolina has been a political laughingstock since philandering Gov. Mark Sanford gave new meaning to hiking the Appalachian Trail. With battles over flying the Confederate flag above the state capitol still fresh (and the flag still in a prominent position on the capitol grounds), it is also easy to portray the state as the last bastion of the Old South.

"Think of South Carolina as South Africa 30 years ago," said Alex Sanders, the losing 2002 Democratic Senate candidate and the former president of the College of Charleston. Even though Sanders concedes that his description is a "vast overstatement," he quickly adds, "We still live in a parallel universe where race is still the prevailing theme. Strom Thurmond isn't dead. He's only sleeping."

But despite this state legacy, Haley has used her own ethnic heritage to underscore her conservative free-market values. While not dwelling on the exoticism of her family background in South Carolina, she did stress in a Friday speech in Rock Hill, "I am the daughter of immigrant parents who reminded us every day how lucky we are to live in this country. They love the fact that you could start something, grow it as you want, be as successful as you want to be and nothing would get in their way."

While Haley claims that she anticipated a rough campaign (there was an anti-brown-skin undercurrent in her 2004 primary race against an entrenched GOP state legislator), she admitted in our interview, "I don't think anybody could have predicted it would be like this." It all began in late May when Will Folks, a minor-league Republican operative turned blogger, claimed that he had a sexual relationship with Haley in 2007. The dignity that Folks brings to journalism is encapsulated in his latest blog post: "I have purposely refrained from discussing the physical details of my relationship with Rep. Haley. Believe it or not, I am a Southern gentleman."

Larry Marchant, a controversial state lobbyist in Columbia, then came forward to claim a one-night stand with Haley at a 2008 school choice convention in Salt Lake City. Marchant's credibility was undermined by his role as a paid consultant to Andre Bauer, the state's lieutenant governor and a GOP gubernatorial candidate. Bauer, whose contribution to issue-oriented politics was to demand that both Marchand and Haley take lie detector tests, said in a phone interview Sunday, "It was said that I was doing this to harm another candidate, but I didn't have anything to do with it."

The latest pre-primary poll from South Carolina, with Haley holding a 20-point lead over her nearest rival (Gresham Barrett, a four-term congressman), underscores her political resilience. The automated telephone survey by Public Policy Polling found that only 13 percent of likely Republican primary voters believe the charges against Haley. Bauer, by the way, is running last in the poll and tellingly only 29 percent of GOP voters hold a favorable impression of him. As Lachlan McIntosh, a top Democratic South Carolina strategist unaffiliated with any gubernatorial candidate, puts it, "They could have proof of these things against Haley -- and at this point it wouldn't stick because voters hate nastiness."

Before Nikki Haley spoke at the Hartsville rally on Saturday afternoon, Phillip Lowe, a state representative from nearby Florence, cracked, "All these charges are Lee Atwater coming back from the dead." Atwater, who personified brass-knuckle South Carolina politics before becoming George H.W. Bush's top strategist in the 1988 presidential race, died in 1991. But close Atwater associates reject the comparison by arguing convincingly (but not for quotation) that the legendary GOP dirty-tricks artist would never had done anything as amateurish as leaving fingerprints all over a smear attack or promoting accusers of such dubious credibility.

Michael Haley – the candidate's husband whom she met during their freshman year at Clemson University – appears fleetingly in campaign commercials and stands quietly in the background at campaign rallies. When I asked how their two children (Rena and Nalin who do not travel with the campaign) were handling the furor, Michael Haley, who works as a technician for the South Carolina National Guard, replied, "My daughter's eleven and my son's eight. She's at an age where she likes to get involved in our lives. We keep the TV off as much as possible. At the same time, as far as everything else, you say to her, 'If you hear anything bad, it's all because of the opposition to your mother.' She understands."

There will be a run-off primary June 22 if no candidate hits the 50-percent mark on Tuesday. With Haley at 43 percent in the latest poll, the GOP battle, in essence, is a fight to make it into the runoff with her. The three other GOP candidates -- all vying to prove their conservative credentials -- each suffer from a near-fatal flaw in this topsy-turvy political season.

Gresham Barrett, whose Citadel education and Army service is an asset in this military-minded state, entered the race as the winter-book favorite. "Barrett is the one everyone looked to," said GOP consultant Chip Felkel, who is not working for a gubernatorial candidate. "This should have been his race, except for two problems – being in Congress in an anti-incumbent year and voting for TARP." In an interview, Barrett conceded the political difficulties caused by his vote for the bank bailout, but added, "It was a very different situation in 2008. We had the national economy, we had the global economy, on the brink of disaster."

State attorney general and former state GOP chairman Henry McMaster, who has been running for office since the 1980s, suffers from a hard-to-shake image as a career politician. A bland candidate, prone to endlessly repeat catch phrases like "a new day for South Carolina," McMaster seems out of step with the angry anti-establishmentarian mood in South Carolina.

Andre Bauer, whom Mike Huckabee champions in a TV ad as "Tea Party before there was a Tea Party," has developed a frivolous reputation partially based on a series of high-profile speeding stops (once clocked at 101 miles an hour) as lieutenant governor. There was a fatalism in Bauer's tone as he said during our interview, "The vast majority of people voting in this election won't really know the real issues and who stands for what because it's all sound bites...If they did, Andre Bauer would win hands down."

There is also (ssshhh) a little-noticed Democratic gubernatorial primary in which state Sen. Vincent Sheheen is heavily favored over state Superintendent of Education Jim Rex. A third long-shot candidate, African-American state Sen. Robert Ford, may win enough support to force a runoff between Sheheen and Rex.

Even though South Carolina is a staunchly Republican state in national politics, Democrats have elected three governors since the 1960s, mostly recently in 1998. As Trav Robertson, Sheheen's campaign manager puts it, "When you're endorsed by the state Chamber of Commerce, it signals that the business community has gotten tired of Republican shenanigans."

But if anyone dared to handicap the weirdest South Carolina gubernatorial race in memory, the signs and portents suggest that Nikki Haley is well on her way to becoming the first woman governor of this good-ol'-boy state and the nation's second Indian-American governor (Bobby Jindal in Louisiana is the other one).

Political insiders are still trying to make sense of her gravity-defying rise.

"It's been a complete surprise to me," says former Republican Gov. David Beasley, who is supporting Henry McMaster for governor. "In the traditional analysis of politics, I would have told you that she would not be a viable candidate in the traditional sense."

An accountant from Lexington (near Columbia), Haley was elected to the legislature in 2004 and quickly became an ally of Mark Sanford, who has been constantly at war with the GOP legislature. Aggressively championing a few largely symbolic reforms (particularly automatic recorded votes in the state house), Haley was stripped of a plum committee assignment by House Speaker Bobby Harrell.

The downside of her maverick reputation in the legislature was cited by the Greenville News in a Monday editorial endorsing Barrett: "She was closely linked to Gov. Sanford and his rigid ideology until last summer when he destroyed his own political career with an affair. South Carolina cannot afford another four years of a Sanford-like administration - one where the state's chief executive is a rigid ideologue and likely cannot work with the Legislature."

If Nikki Haley finishes far ahead of the pack in Tuesday's primary, armchair analysts will point to the endorsements of Sarah Palin (who appeared in person at a Columbia rally for Haley) and Jenny Sanford (the ex-wife of the disgraced governor).

But, in truth, she will owe her victory to voters like Gary White ("I'm not Joe the Plumber, but I am an average Joe"), an emergency medical technician in Hartsville. "I think the good-ol'-boy system in Columbia is trying to put down a newcomer," he said at the Saturday Tea Party rally. "If Nikki Haley was this bad, it would have come out long before this. I just don't believe the charges."