[Nikki Haley’s political career has been great for corporate
executives and campaign donors. For everyone else, particularly
workers and the poor, it’s been terrible. ]
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THE LONG, DISASTROUS CAREER OF NIKKI HALEY  
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Branko Marcetic
January 14, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Nikki Haley’s political career has been great for corporate
executives and campaign donors. For everyone else, particularly
workers and the poor, it’s been terrible. _

Republican presidential candidate and former UN Ambassador Nikki
Haley takes a question during a town hall in Rochester, New Hampshire,
on October 12, 2023. , Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

 

Nikki Haley’s pitch is simple: She’s capable. She’s levelheaded.
She gets things done. She’s not Donald Trump.

In a pool of anti-Trump also-rans whose challenges to the former
Republican president have one by one fizzled out, Haley has run a
surprisingly effective campaign, drawing oodles of money from
establishment Republicans wary of the Trump circus, while coming
shockingly close
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in the polls to the man who has spent the past year proving he has a
stranglehold on the GOP base. She’s won the reluctant support
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prominent liberals, who view her as a vehicle to halt the march of
Trump. All the while, she’s carefully left the door open for a
possible future as vice president, deftly threading the needle between
running as the antithesis of Trump and his possible future partner.

Haley appears as the Republican Party’s road not traveled in living,
breathing form, a throwback to an older style of GOP politics that the
2016 election seemed to smash apart: when politicians weren’t
borderline con artists selling conspiracy theories and plagued by
outrageous scandals, when they seemed to be rooted in some semblance
of decency and exuded basic, professional competence. “If you want
something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman,”
Haley memorably said four months ago, in a line typical of her
political brand.

She’s gotten away with this, because her actual record as an elected
official has largely escaped close scrutiny.

The reality of Haley’s twelve years in South Carolina as a state
legislator, then governor, contains much to give the US public pause.
Far from a competent executive, Haley was accused of shocking
mismanagement and scandals as governor, sometimes costing public
money, sometimes costing lives. She waged a relentless, six-year-long
war on workers, the poor, and the unemployed that left the
poverty-stricken and broke state and its people in numerous
difficulties, all while doling out endless favors to corporations and
the rich. And all of it was underwritten by a shameless practice of
pay-to-play that made a mockery of her pretensions as a champion of
ethics.

If Haley really is the future of the Republican Party, it’s a bleak
future indeed.

The Giant Slayer

For a long time, Haley was viewed as the American right’s answer to
Barack Obama — the classic immigrant story, the American dream, and
the US melting pot all rolled into one.

Haley’s parents were Sikh immigrants who ended up in the United
States in 1969 after leaving the northwest Indian city of Amritsar.
They settled in Bamberg, South Carolina, where Haley’s mother
started a women’s clothing company out of a motel room in 1976.
Haley, born four years before the business opened, became the firm’s
chief financial officer after graduating college with an accounting
degree, and the company blossomed into a $1.8 million business soon
after — the crux of Haley’s initial political pitch.

As Haley pounded the pavement for a state House seat in 2004, pressing
flesh in the winter armed with a fur-collared coat, coffee, and Krispy
Kreme donuts, she vowed to bring the same approach to elected office.
“If we run our state like a business, with that same urgency, then
we can get South Carolina back on the right track,” she told voters.

Neither a dog-whistling opposition campaign that pointedly used her
full maiden name, Nimarata N. Randhawa, nor the realities of Bush-era
South Carolina — which still proudly flew the Confederate flag, and
where only 0.2 percent of the population was of Indian descent and
fewer than one tenth of its lawmakers women — were enough to stop
Haley from trouncing her more established competition for the
Lexington County seat. That included the state House’s
longest-serving member, whom she defeated by ten points, winning even
in his home precinct.

Haley — her husband Michael and her parents in tow — represented
“New Lexington,” part of a surge of out-of-towners and
out-of-staters that flooded the county’s quickly spreading
subdivisions in the 1990s, transforming it from its rural, small-town
roots into a sprawling suburbia. Not everything was “new,” though:
Haley, a Sikh who had converted to Methodism, heard ugly comments on
the campaign trail directed at Hindus and Buddhists.
 

The “giant slayer,” as she was dubbed in the press after her win,
quickly established a public profile as a champion of good government.
A prolific fundraiser, she nevertheless cosponsored a bill to ban
campaign donations from leadership PACs (“I’m one of those people
who think you can’t put enough sunshine on the process,” Haley
said) and joined the South Carolina New Statesman Society, a nonprofit
created by a Republican colleague to promote “ethical and
enlightened leadership.” Lawmakers “can’t work hard enough at
public confidence,” Haley said of the initiative.

She had less to say about the foundation’s generous funding by
wealthy individuals and corporations — many of whom were actively
lobbying lawmakers, and who could give and give without heed to state
limits on campaign donations. This contradiction between Haley’s
apparent passion for ethical government and comfort with obvious
corporate influence peddling would remain a theme throughout her
political career.

In 2008, she started a months-long and very public campaign to force
the state legislature to adopt on-the-record voting. South Carolina
was one of only five states granting lawmakers the luxury of casting
their “ayes” and “nayes” free of public scrutiny, which they
had used to give their pensions annual cost-of-living increases
earlier that spring. Haley paid for her efforts with a vindictive
demotion by a bitter House speaker but vowed that it wouldn’t
“slow me down or stop me from fighting.” By January 2009, the
resulting public pressure led both chambers to change their rules on
the matter.

It proved to be good timing. Only four months after forcing the rule
change and one month after sponsoring a bill to codify and expand it,
Haley announced she was running for governor. Depending on whom you
asked, it was either a firsthand demonstration of Haley’s skill in
mobilizing and harnessing public outrage, or of her skill at
strategically cultivating publicity.

Haley was less keen to play up her role in another major fight, this
one to reregulate the payday lenders that lawmakers had legally sicced
on South Carolina consumers back in 1998. With the largest payday
lender, Advance America, headquartered in Spartanburg, the industry
was keen to halt a state-by-state crackdown over the preceding years
that had now made it South Carolina — and they seemed to find an
ally in Haley.

After clearing the state Senate, the bill was watered down by the
banking and consumer affairs subcommittee she chaired. “Our job is
to not choose a side,” she said, as she insisted the industry that
had only been legally unshackled for a decade needed to continue to
exist — so consumers had options in a pinch, of course. Within a
month, the bill was dead.

Haley, who had taken at least $4,000 worth of campaign donations from
payday lenders while chairing the subcommittee, was far from the only
culprit in a legislature and subcommittee awash in payday lender
money. State Rep. Harry Cato, whose PAC had received $5,000 from the
industry, was responsible for ultimately killing the bill and insisted
he, not Haley, had been the one blocking reform.

But several others blamed Haley, including fellow Republican state
Sen. John Hawkins, who accused her of looking out for the industry
instead of working people. (Hawkins’s motives were suspect, Haley
hit back, since he was a lawyer representing people suing the
unscrupulous industry.) Hawkins stuck by his criticism two years
later, labeling Haley “the chief obstructionist in the entire
General Assembly of any reform to payday lending” and the
industry’s “no. 1 apologist.”

“We couldn’t get anything through the House of Representatives
because Nikki Haley killed it,” he said.

Within a couple of years, as she ran for governor, Haley would be
embroiled in an ethics scandal (and, later, a probe) that clashed with
her image as a crusader for ethical government. Haley’s failure to
disclose the hefty consulting fees she was pocketing from businesses
with interests before the legislature was bad enough, as were the
peculiar details about her six-figure fundraising job with a local
hospital: that the job was created specifically for her, that its CEO
and not its board approved her hiring, that she was paid far more than
fundraisers at similar nonprofits, and that emails contradicted her
claim that she had left the position voluntarily.

But what made it especially scandalous was that while in the position,
Haley had fundraised $10,000 from two payday lenders, including
Advance America, not long after she had allegedly torpedoed attempts
to regulate them. The industry continued to show its appreciation,
giving her campaign another $10,500 in 2010. And you can see why: with
meaningful reform having been nixed, to this day
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the average payday loan interest rate in the state is nearly 400
percent
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and nearly half of all short-term loans aren’t paid off.

The Face of the New South

“I started doing books for [my parents] when I was thirteen, and one
of the things I learned from them was the value of the dollar,”
Haley told one audience during her first gubernatorial campaign.
“Every issue that we face on the state level and on the national
level, in every aspect of government, all centers around spending.”
If the government cut “wasteful spending” by only 3 percent, she
predicted, it would send masses of jobs and businesses rushing into
the state.

Haley bear hugged the growing Tea Party movement, going to rallies and
urging attendees to make their representatives support her
on-the-record voting bill. She boasted during a debate that she’d
signed a “no new taxes” pledge that she’d never actually signed,
and which she’d denounced as “closed-minded” when first running
for the statehouse six years earlier. (Once the debate was over,
Haley’s campaign quickly sent through her inked pledge.)

At almost every turn, in fact, similar incidents came up begging the
question of Haley’s sincerity. She campaigned on transparency, but
slow-walked and partially withheld the release of her legislative
emails. She touted her accounting work for her family’s business,
which had failed three separate times to pay its taxes. She attacked
her rival for having backed a legislative slush fund for
infrastructure projects from which she’d personally requested more
than $1 million. She called on South Carolinians to “fight back
against the federal government” and say no to federal cash, but
voted to accept $700 million from the Obama stimulus. (She later voted
against the budget that contained the money and claimed the first time
had merely been a “procedural” tally.)

But what proved to be her campaign’s biggest setback was what had
started out as its chief advantage. Haley had allied herself closely
with Gov. Mark Sanford upon entering office, and he had reportedly
been the one who convinced her to run in the first place. But when the
public learned Sanford had been using public money to pay for
extramarital trysts with a secret Argentine lover, overnight he became
political poison at the state level and a punch line at the national
one.

Haley’s campaign rushed to scrub all trace of the governor’s
images and praise they’d plastered over her website, and the
candidate distanced herself from Sanford — to a point, anyway. They
still shared the same kingmaker political consultant, and a
pro-Sanford nonprofit formed by one of his former staffers, three of
whose board members maxed out to Haley’s campaign, spent hundreds of
thousands on ad buys supporting her candidacy. Sanford later disclosed
that Haley had repeatedly asked him for financial help. Upon securing
the nomination, Sanford was the first person she thanked in her
victory speech.

After lagging behind on fundraising for much of the race, Haley ended
it in a tie, helping set a state record for chasing money. Roughly a
third of it, or more than three times that of Democratic rival Vincent
Sheheen, came from outside the state. Another $900,000 was spent on
ads in the final weeks by the Republican Governors Association (RGA),
itself boosted by donations from several tobacco companies.

In the end, what sealed Haley’s win more than anything may have been
timing: November 2010 was the date of Obama’s infamous
recession-driven midterm “shellacking
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which saw Republicans seize back the House, twenty state legislatures,
and ten governorships. Conservatives were positively giddy.

Here, it seemed, was their reply to America’s wildly changing
demographic realities. As _Newsweek_ declared Haley “the face of the
New South,” Newt Gingrich wondered, “could you pick a more perfect
symbol of change?” Even Democratic apparatchik Neera Tanden declared
that, as an Indian American herself, she was “proud of [Haley’s]
accomplishment.”

State Government, Sold — To the CEO in the Back

Sanford left his successor a mess. State lawmakers had spent the 2000s
bingeing on tax cuts, and Haley was walking into the governor’s
mansion during the hangover.

When the 2008 financial crisis sent hardship soaring, increasing South
Carolina’s public assistance rolls, the state faced a budget
shortfall of more than $800 million. Everything from colleges and
welfare to the agency in charge of maintaining state-owned office
buildings was looking at deep cuts, after having already drastically
reduced services. The state’s Department of Health and Human
Services — its Medicaid program — alone faced a whopping $228
million deficit despite scaling back services.

What was Haley’s solution to this desperate crisis? To double down
on everything that had caused it.

First, she set about directly handing the reins of government over to
big business — or, in her words, to those who “understand that
time is money” and “know what it’s like to be on the other side
of the red tape.” During the campaign, Haley had organized meetings
to reassure local business leaders; they’d been so fed up with the
gridlock caused by Sanford’s rocky relationship with the legislature
that the state’s Chamber of Commerce — which Haley had earlier
labeled a “big fan of bailouts and corporate welfare” — had
endorsed Sheheen, her centrist Democrat opponent. Now, she was making
good on those assurances.

Haley stocked her fourteen-member transition team with business
leaders who picked others like them to head departments overseeing
everything from insurance to revenue: an ex-BMW executive, a former
Royal Bank of Canada CEO, a seasoned manufacturing industry CFO, and a
Morgan Stanley principal, to name a few. She shunted all but one
person off the Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC),
in charge of environmental protection, and put largely businesspeople
in their place.

A previously wary corporate world began bombarding Haley with
generosity. Within months of taking office, her campaign had raised
$50,000 from business interests, while another $700,000 flowed into
the inauguration fund; seventy-nine of its eighty-six donors were
businesses, many of them part of the very industries being regulated
by the agencies Haley was busy appointing. It wouldn’t have been
right to use tax money for the festivities, her spokesman explained.

Haley would never again have trouble raising money like she did during
that first campaign, spending the rest of her tenure zipping around
the country for fundraisers, breaking state campaign haul records, and
easily outpacing all rivals. When she ran for reelection in 2014
against Sheheen, whom she had barely beaten in 2010, she at first
outraised him by 70 percent, then more than double, then nearly
triple. The state’s Chamber of Commerce switched its allegiance to
her, as businesses effectively became her most enthusiastic and
reliable base.

Haley’s benefactors showered her personally with expensive gifts —
jewelry, art, concert tickets, trips, ritzy accommodations — that
reached their highest volume as she soaked up national publicity in
her final year.

Name a big corporation or a _Forbes_-listed billionaire, and it’s
likely that, between her 2010 win and 2016 exit, their money slithered
over to Haley at some point: to her campaign coffers, to her
charitable foundation, to the political organization she’d founded
to push her causes and candidates, or to her leadership PAC, all of
which received a seemingly constant stream of largesse from a who’s
who of powerful interests. That included Walmart, Verizon, Koch,
Adelson — even then–reality TV star Donald Trump, who must’ve
seen something in the young Republican, donating to both of her
gubernatorial campaigns as well as her advocacy organization. When
they weren’t doing that, they showered her personally with expensive
gifts — jewelry, art, concert tickets, trips, ritzy accommodations
— that reached their highest volume as she soaked up national
publicity in her final year.

It was good to give. One campaign donor, private prison operator GEO
Group, was in the mix when Haley considered privatizing state mental
health services, despite the company’s history of being sued over
inmate deaths and mistreatment. Another donor, the American Insurance
Association, saw its longest-serving head lobbyist picked to run South
Carolina’s insurance department, despite one witness at his
confirmation hearing warning that the industry was targeting the state
as a “honey hole” because of its lax regulations.

Sometimes, the money chasing got Haley in hot water. In November 2011,
only two weeks after raising $15,000 at a Georgia fundraiser hosted by
a well-connected state Republican who sat on the RGA’s finance
committee, Haley intervened in a DHEC decision rejecting the state’s
permit application to dredge the Savannah River over water quality
concerns. Georgia’s governor had asked her to get him a hearing with
the DHEC board, which she appointed, and soon the decision was
reversed.

The whole incident became a full-blown scandal, further fueled by
Haley and her staffers’ refusal to cooperate with an official
inquiry into the matter, necessitating subpoenas. More than anything,
it was simply a bad idea “on every single level — environmental,
competition wise, expansion, the cost,” as one Republican lawmaker
put it, to the point that the House voted unanimously to disapprove of
the move.

The Senate ultimately undid the permit, but only by overriding
Haley’s veto first. “Why the governor persists in being the sole
person in the state of South Carolina who is intent on helping Georgia
gain an advantage over South Carolina is baffling,” said another
Republican. Despite the optics, Haley went back to the Peach State for
another lavish fundraiser a few years later.

She drew another round of bad headlines in 2015, when in her quest to
create a “business-friendly” DHEC, Haley nominated as its chief
Eleanor Kitzman, an insurance industry executive and former Goldman
Sachs lobbyist. Kitzman was a rare triple threat: a donor, fundraiser
host, and personal friend of Haley. Within days, as senators
questioned Kitzman’s lack of experience and background in the field,
the fact that she was the only candidate considered for the position,
and that she’d been put forward after telling Haley privately that
she was looking for a job, Kitzman withdrew. One newspaper called it
“a ‘how-to’ manual on bad governance.”

Homicide by Budget Cut

Next, Haley embarked on a program of pitiless austerity that she
claimed would turn around the state’s economy.

“Nearly two years ago, the federal government in Washington decided
to transfer its irresponsible fiscal practices to the states. And our
state, just like every other, accepted it,” she said ominously in
her inaugural address. “When we produce this year’s budget, we
will see the heavy price for having done so.”

With Haley’s veto hanging over the process, legislators crafted a
budget in her first year that slashed $5.2 billion from state
spending, largely targeting welfare, Medicaid, public schools, and
colleges, while tapping into unused reserves to help fill any fiscal
holes left over — all for the sake of clinging to the $3.7 billion
worth of sales and service tax breaks the state had enacted in
previous years. “We could not raise any tax,” said Republican Dan
Cooper, the House Ways and Means chair at the time, noting that there
was nowhere near the two-thirds majority needed to override a
potential Haley veto of a tax hike.

In fact, within months, Haley would sign _another_ tax cut: this time
for real estate, citing “a problem with second home ownership that
was starting to fall terribly” and the need to get business activity
and “the real estate market across the state churning again.” A
year later came a two-point small business income tax cut that lowered
the rate to 3 percent. For the rest of her tenure, not a year went by
that Haley didn’t propose massive tax cuts as the cure for the
already revenue-starved state’s ills, whether phasing out the
corporate tax entirely as she’d campaigned on, or merging South
Carolina’s seven personal tax brackets into three. Another
Republican, then–Senate finance chair Hugh Leatherman, criticized
her for trying to “do tax relief to build a political resume.”

The other part of that resume was Haley’s chief executive role, as
she saw it, to “hold everything down [so] we are not running
deficits.” Almost no program was immune for those five years to
Haley’s veto pen or the cost cutters she’d put in charge of her
administration. Arts, parks, seniors, homeless youth, raises for
teachers, HIV and AIDS prevention, disabled services, rape crisis
centers — all of them and many more were deemed unworthy of public
investment by Haley over the course of six budgets, and only some of
them were saved by a GOP-dominated legislature determinedly overriding
her vetoes.

“What we saw was the rebirth of earmarks,” she said as she vetoed
$100,000 for a playground for kids with disabilities. “It is not for
state tax dollars to go to. Let the taxpayers decide if they want to
give to a playground.”

At a time when South Carolina’s unemployment was consistently among
the country’s highest, and in a state where more than four in five
taxpayers reported income less than $50,000, the brunt of Haley’s
cuts often fell on the jobless and poor. South Carolina’s welfare
agency faced $5 million in cuts, and Haley imposed a further $7
million by completing Sanford’s plan to pare down the already paltry
family welfare payment of $270 a month — already a fraction of the
poverty line — by a fifth.

Her attacks on the jobless seemed especially petty, given the
state’s 10 percent unemployment rate when she took office, and the
fact that many of South Carolina’s unemployed had, like their
counterparts across the country, been pushed out of work by a global
recession. Haley chopped jobless benefits from twenty-six to twenty
weeks, limited them for seasonal workers, and stripped South
Carolinians of up to seventeen weeks of the federal extended benefits
they’d been granted under the Obama stimulus law. For good measure,
Haley undermined another stimulus provision meant to help people cope
with the crisis, ignoring its work requirement waiver for food stamps
and slapping the requirement on anyway.

Two years later, citing “foot traffic,” Haley’s administration
closed in-person, one-on-one unemployment services in seventeen rural
counties with high jobless rates, seven of them among the state’s
ten worst for unemployment. The eight positions eliminated in the
process saved around $400,000, yet legislators couldn’t help but
notice the agency had simultaneously given nearly seventy other
employees raises totaling nearly $440,000. In the ensuing controversy,
the agency’s director — a board member on one of Haley’s
political organizations — resigned, now firmly a pattern in
Haley’s governorship.

The tragic consequences of South Carolina’s many years of austerity
became manifest in 2014, when several child deaths under the state
Department of Social Services’s (DSS) watch triggered a sprawling
scandal that threatened Haley’s reelection. While she was boasting
about how many people her DSS — meant to be responsible for the
well-being of vulnerable children — had shifted off welfare rolls 
(“we take care of children in lots of ways,” she gushed), it soon
turned out the agency had failed to report more than 150 deaths of
children and wildly misled federal authorities about both its shortage
of caseworkers and the absurd number of cases that each handled.

In the face of mounting calls for Lillian Koller, Haley’s pick to
run the agency, to step aside, Haley implacably defended Koller, even
after she became yet another appointee to resign. The DSS had closed a
$28 million deficit and moved more than 20,000 people from the welfare
rolls into jobs, Haley insisted, and she remained “proud of Lillian,
the work she’s done at DSS, and most of all, that I can call her my
friend.”

The rot went deeper. Not only was the agency chronically underfunded
and overburdened, with state government warned as recently as 2006
that caseloads were too high, but the decision under Haley to
outsource the handling of child abuse cases to contractors two years
prior had been a shocking failure. An audit found that the agency’s
investigations into child abuse complaints dropped 34 percent after
taking up the outsourcing, while the number of kids that were
subsequently abused in their families more than doubled when they were
assigned to contractors.

Haley’s competence as a manager was widely questioned. But she
sailed to victory a month later anyway, in an election that saw the
lowest voter turnout in four decades and every incumbent keep their
seat. Her winning margin had actually widened since 2010.

Medicaid, Medican’t

As the parade of brutal cost cutting marched on, Haley rejected what
should have been an elegant solution to both the budget crisis and the
recession-era hardships endured by South Carolinians.

“We will not expand Medicaid on President Obama’s watch. We will
not expand Medicaid ever,” she vowed.

She was referring to one of the virtues of Obama’s largely
underwhelming health care law, namely the provision paying for states
to make more people eligible for Medicaid — specifically, anyone
making 138 percent of the federal poverty level or less, instead of
the 50 percent figure that the state was currently covering. For South
Carolina, that would mean adding roughly half a million people to the
federal program, making it responsible for insuring a third of the
state’s population.

Contrary to Haley’s claims that adopting it would “bust our
budget,” the expansion was a good deal for South Carolina. The
federal government would pick up the full tab for the first three
years, then gradually lower its share of the cost burden to a still
hefty 90 percent by 2020, where it would stay indefinitely. At one
point, Haley badly garbled these details to an audience, claiming the
federal government’s share for those first three years was only 90
percent, after which point it would stop paying altogether —
suggesting she either hadn’t bothered to brush up on the policy she
was vehemently opposing, or was cynically lying about it.

Why would someone in Haley’s position oppose this? For one, besides
the chilling prospect of headlines declaring Haley had taken federal
money, Obamacare in general had become a poster child for “big
government” overreach in the eyes of the GOP establishment and the
Tea Party. And Haley had already started building a national brand
opposing the law, traveling to Washington before she was sworn in to
tell GOP leaders that “we need you to help us fight these mandates
like health care.”

Emails later showed that, as they fought Obamacare, Haley and her team
were intensely concerned about the political optics. “They’re not
looking at the merits of the legislation and whether it advances the
cause of South Carolinians. They care about ‘whose side we appear to
be on’ and keeping an arm’s length from anything to do with the
Affordable Care Act,” was how a disappointed Frank Knapp, president
of the state’s Small Business Chamber of Commerce, summed it up.
“They’re still running a campaign.”

There were also the governor’s ties to the insurance industry. In
2010, insurance interests had given Haley three times what they’d
given Sheheen, while health insurers like BlueCross BlueShield had
also donated to her inaugural fund. In turn, Haley had made several
industry-backed appointments, including former insurance agent Tim
Scott, whom Haley appointed a US senator in 2012.

Haley spent the next five years resisting Obamacare’s successful
implementation in the state, including by stubbornly refusing to enact
the Medicaid expansion despite the obvious, dire need.

More than 800,000 South Carolinians were already benefiting from the
law’s provisions in Haley’s first term, like those letting young
adults stay on their parents’ insurance plans, and nearly 19 percent
— more than a million — were uninsured in 2011, facing the abyss
of potential medical catastrophe. In a state where 16 percent lived
below the poverty line, the downturn and years of budget cuts,
Haley’s included, threatened the chronically ill and disabled who
relied on government programs to stay alive and healthy, while the
state’s dying hospitals resorted to layoffs and hiring freezes in
the face of dwindling patients. Some simply filed for bankruptcy or
closed.

As time went on, Haley’s opposition to Medicaid expansion made less
and less sense. One by one, other Republican governors went along with
the policy, while more and more voices within the state clamored for
it: hospitals, newspapers, majorities of older residents, and voters
more generally — even the state’s Chamber of Commerce, whose
president warned that the foot dragging hurt businesses, including via
a $2,000-per-worker fine for large firms in states that refused
expansion. Studies and analyses tipped expansion to create 44,000
jobs, boost GDP 1 percent, bring $16 billion into the state, add $9
million worth of tax revenue, and provide a lifeline for the state’s
cash-strapped hospitals.

It was all in line with Haley’s ethos of fiscal responsibility,
economic growth, and job creation. Still she refused. Headlines showed
the human cost of her obstinance: an uninsured flu patient left with
an $800,000 medical bill; hundreds queueing for hours at a free
two-day dental clinic; a pizza delivery man, dead from cancer, who had
delayed seeing a doctor after falling into the infamous coverage gap,
one of 123,000 South Carolina adults in the same position.

It’s not as if there weren’t alternatives that could have
alleviated some of this suffering — Haley just dogmatically rejected
them all. As she planned out her painful first term cuts, hospitals
offered to voluntarily pay higher fees to the state Medicaid system to
fix the budget crunch; no, said Haley, because that was technically a
tax and would be “immoral.” When a bipartisan group of senators
suggested using government funds to help the working poor buy
_private_ insurance in the federal health care marketplace, as other
red states had done, Haley declined; the idea was a backdoor to a
mandate in the style of Obamacare, which, lest anyone forget, was “a
budget-busting, job-killing disaster.”

By the time she left office, the state’s health care conditions were
dismal. Anywhere between 10 to 12.3 percent still lacked health
insurance, one of the worst rates in the country, and with one of the
lowest rates of public health spending, South Carolina led most of the
nation on metric after metric that no one wants to lead in, from
infant mortality and premature death to diabetes and lack of dentists.
Ranked the ninth most unhealthy state in 2016 by the United Health
Foundation, it had barely budged from the sixth place it had recorded
in Haley’s first year. South Carolina remains one of only ten states
that have still not expanded Medicaid.

Union-Buster-in-Chief

It wasn’t just the poor, uninsured, or unemployed. Anyone could be
sacrificed so Haley could claim she hadn’t hiked taxes or taken part
in a “bailout” — including those who had a job.

Leading the five-member State Budget and Control Board (SBCB) — a
powerful entity unique to South Carolina that is responsible for
setting government policy and administration — Haley took aim at
teachers and other government workers, cutting cost-of-living raises
for retirees and repeatedly hiking their health insurance premiums,
after workers had already had to eat more than a decade of premium
hikes. It was a nuisance for workers, but proved a boon for Haley
donor BlueCross BlueShield, which happened to administer the state
employee health plan.

Particularly outrageous was when she raised those premiums a second
time in 2012, further fattening her own corporate donor’s profits
with worker pay. The move was entirely unnecessary: lawmakers had
specifically budgeted that year so state employees wouldn’t have to
face another premium hike, part of a delicate budget deal that Haley
had already signed into law. But Haley persuaded two other SBCB
members to overrule them, infuriating Republican leadership. A year
later, the state Supreme Court ruled the board had been in the wrong,
undoing the hike. Haley insisted she had simply been “making a
statement for the taxpayers.”

“Ask anybody in the private sector if they get the benefits that
state employees get, because they don’t,” she said. “And ask
anyone in the private sector if they have the extra money to pay for
state employees to have benefits. They don’t.”

You didn’t have to read between the lines to sense a quiet antipathy
for workers in Haley’s words and deeds, one that often took the form
of a virulent opposition to labor unions.

“There’s no secret I don’t like the unions,” Haley once said.
“We are a right-to-work state. I will do everything I can to defend
the fact we are a right-to-work state.”

She made that dislike vocally clear wherever she could: at Tea Party
rallies, at her annual State of the State addresses, at a rotary club
visit, at an automotive conference, or while accepting an award at the
US Chamber of Commerce, where she vowed to “get rid of the influence
that [unions] have on the system.” She discouraged businesses from
moving to the state if it meant they’d bring a unionized workforce.
“I think they are job killers. If you bring a company to South
Carolina, I’ve got your back. I’m not letting [unions] in,” she
said.

It wasn’t just talk. Haley swiftly appointed to run the state’s
labor agency a union-busting lawyer who had attacked United Auto
Worker organizing efforts, because “we’re going to fight the
unions and I needed a partner to help me do it,” a remark that
earned her a lawsuit from the AFL-CIO. South Carolina law barred
striking workers from receiving unemployment benefits, but she signed
an executive order to that effect anyway. She endorsed a GOP bill
allowing businesses not to notify workers about their rights to
unionize, and signed another one forbidding state government entities
from making contractors sign agreements with unions for work on public
construction projects.

Haley’s union-busting energy was focused in particular on the
International Association of Machinists’s (IAM) efforts to unionize
a new Boeing plant in North Charleston. She campaigned relentlessly
against the effort, including taking out a radio ad urging Boeing
workers in the state not to join. When the National Labor Relations
Board (NLRB) issued a complaint against the company, charging that it
had violated federal law by moving operations from Washington state to
anti-union South Carolina, she labeled it a “rogue agency” that
needed to be disbanded, and organized a press conference at the
Chamber of Commerce with other prominent Republicans to call for
governors and businesses to work together to combat it. “When you go
after a corporate citizen in South Carolina, it is personal to me,”
Haley said. The NLRB suit would “chill” firms’ ability to expand
across state lines or bring jobs stateside, she testified to Congress.

In the end, Haley got her way: the IAM decided to delay its union vote
in 2015, blaming Haley in part for “creating an atmosphere of
state-sanctioned hostility toward unions and union organizers” that
had “intimidated workers to the point we don’t believe a free and
fair election is possible.” Two years later, when Haley was gone,
the union vote was finally held. It failed.

For Haley, it was part of a race-to-the-bottom vision that put the
concerns of big business first, and assumed that allowing them to
wring every last drop out of workers was a precondition for creating
jobs. The fact that South Carolina was one of the country’s least
unionized states — on the eve of the union vote, the unionization
rate was at 2.2 percent of the workforce and dropping — was “an
economic development tool unlike any other,” she said.

“We Did What the Company Asked”

It didn’t hurt that Boeing was a donor, of course, pitching in to
both Haley’s campaign and her inauguration. That fact lent an air of
impropriety to the $120 million the state borrowed in 2013 to
incentivize expansion plans by the company, whose revenue was more
than three times the size of the state’s entire budget. Haley signed
that measure only two weeks after it was introduced into the Senate,
while the SBCB that she led planned to approve an added bridge loan
for the firm — all of which came on top of the nearly $1 billion in
tax incentives the state had already thrown at Boeing under her
predecessor.

It likewise added impropriety to Haley’s tireless advocacy on
Boeing’s behalf, which at times was closer to that of a company
pitchwoman than an elected official. At one point, Haley headlined an
aerospace industry expo and declared that “the reason the state’s
aerospace industry is growing is because Boeing is growing.” She was
so eager to promote the company, she made up favors she’d done for
it, falsely claiming one of her appointees had sped up the permitting
process to let its North Charleston plant open six months early. After
Haley left office, Boeing made the relationship official, giving her a
lucrative seat on its board of directors in 2019.

Boeing wasn’t the only firm that got plum treatment. “I don’t
think you just hand over a check to win someone over. I think you
create a business environment that allows them to make money every
day,” Haley said of her approach to attracting firms to the state.

Yet the two often seemed to mean the same thing to her in practice. By
her first sixteen months in office, as Haley slashed spending and
piled burden after burden on struggling South Carolinians, she had
handed out at least $70 million in incentives to various firms. Even
Haley’s political allies at the South Carolina Policy Council
accused her of corporate welfare that helped only a few at the expense
of most of the state’s people — especially as a Pew Center on the
States analysis had found South Carolina was lax in verifying whether
the money it poured into these incentives delivered a good return.

At one point, the state gave $1.2 million to a grifter who vowed to
invest $50 million to reopen a closed textile mill in Pee Dee and
create hundreds of jobs, but instead spent the money on a luxury SUV
and an expensive Palm Beach wedding while wiring hundreds of thousands
to a South American bank account. Haley had called the fake plan a
“big win for one of our state’s rural areas” and personally
turned up to welcome the fraudster to the state, telling him, “you
are taking a chance on us. . . . We are going to wrap our arms around
you.” The whole thing hit the headlines in 2015 when he was indicted
on wire fraud changes and, separately, over a $29 million Ponzi
scheme.

Arguably more notorious was an incentives package for Volvo that Haley
had gotten legislative approval for that same year. Despite having
just tanked a plan to borrow nearly $500 million for much-needed
building projects — Haley urged her irate Facebook followers to yell
at their representatives for supposedly running up the credit card to
pay for “random things,” and made clear she would veto any bill
that borrowed money — she enthusiastically pushed this one, despite
its comically and significantly worse terms, and despite the fact that
the state had enough money on hand to not have to borrow.

Under the deal, the state would cover only the loan’s interest for
the first six years and then make a massive payment on the principal
on the seventh, adding $87 million to its price tag — known as a
balloon payment, a forte of the kinds of predatory lenders that had
triggered the recession. Hugh Leatherman, a Republican and now the
Senate president pro tempore, called it one of the “most
irresponsible things” and “the worst kind of credit card debt”
he’d ever seen, and lawmakers later lectured Haley on her reckless
fiscal management and the fact that she’d gone around the
legislature to strike a deal with Volvo directly. “Volvo cars wanted
this process to be a certain way,” Haley explained. “They wanted
it through economic development bonds. They did not want it to go
through the legislature.”

“We did what the company asked,” she said.

Similar to Boeing’s campaign donations, Volvo rewarded Haley with
expensive gifts. This was a pattern. Six of the twenty-nine companies
that put more than $10,000 into Haley’s inauguration fund got
incentives packages from her. Others, like Walmart, Michelin, and
Bridgestone, gave to her campaign.

Meanwhile, as commentators pointed out, a similar number of jobs would
have been created, and at a markedly lower price tag, had Haley just
agreed to expand Medicaid — something she objected to out of
supposed concern for the taxpayer.

Roads Not Traveled — Or Fixed

With reelection in the bag — secured thanks to an unemployment rate
that dipped to a thirteen-year low just in time, and an
uncharacteristic election-year cash infusion into education — Haley
turned to what would end up being her final failure as governor.

Fixing South Carolina’s infrastructure — which needed an estimated
$30 billion over two decades to address the 21 percent of bridges
deemed structurally inadequate and an aging drinking-water system
ordered to undergo $700 million in repairs, among other woes — was a
top priority for Haley’s business base. The state’s poor roads
undermined its tourism industry, made it harder to attract businesses
to the state, and cost firms that depended on them millions of dollars
in repairs and lost time, they said. When Haley left office, that was
more or less still the case.

The seeds of failure were planted at the outset of her second term,
when Haley laid out her bottom lines for an eventual infrastructure
package. After having ruled out a gas tax hike in the campaign she’d
just run, Haley had a sudden change of heart, announcing she would be
open to boosting it by 10 cents — but on two conditions: the
legislature had to restructure the Department of Transportation (DoT)
to her liking, and, more contentiously, the state’s highest earners
would receive a two-point tax cut over ten years.

The proposal was breathtakingly regressive. About 1.1 million of the
state’s poorest residents, who already paid no state income taxes,
would in practice see their tax bill rise thanks to the $66 more a
year the average South Carolinian was expected to pay for gas under
the plan. Meanwhile, fewer than four hundred of the state’s
wealthiest taxpayers would enjoy a staggering cut of $145,784 each,
more than two hundred times the savings that the average, nonwealthy
taxpayer would get.

If that wasn’t enough, the reduction would leave a $1.8 billion hole
in the budget — spooking credit agencies, most likely necessitating
cuts to the state’s already revenue-starved essential services.
Haley’s response was pure voodoo economics
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cheerfully assuming that the rockstar economic growth that was sure to
follow would take care of the problem. And besides, she said, “is
South Carolina going to get bloated and grow into all of those
revenues? Or are we going to be smart about it . . . and give it back
to the taxpayers so that they can invest it, and spend it the way they
want?” The Democratic house minority leader called the idea “an
impossible roadblock” to an infrastructure bill.

Sure enough, as the legislature spent the next five months wrangling
over the package, lawmakers complained that Haley’s demands were
making it difficult to find an acceptable compromise. Any proposal
that didn’t include the tax cut or which levied new taxes to raise
revenue was dead on arrival, knocked aside by Haley’s frequent veto
threats.

Haley’s railing against the legislature — publicly attacking
lawmakers, including from her own party, in speeches, on her website
and Facebook page, and at the state Republican Party convention —
couldn’t overcome the political corner into which she’d painted
herself and legislators. The session ended with no infrastructure
bill. While Haley wasn’t the only one to blame, there was broad
agreement that she had been distinctly unhelpful, to say the least.
“Gov. Nikki Haley overplayed her hand,” charged one newspaper. She
had “introduced an income tax cut plan” instead of a roads one,
said one Democrat, “and that poisoned the well.” “When the
governor tied a massive tax reform to the infrastructure issue . . .
that was probably the break point,” agreed the Republican house
speaker pro tempore.

The consequences of this failure, the cream on top of a rising
soufflé of years of determined public underinvestment, were felt
within months, when what came to be called the thousand-year flood, in
October 2015, proved too much for the state’s decrepit
infrastructure. Dozens of its 2,400 dams — many of which had escaped
inspection by the state’s almost comically understaffed and
underfunded, near-worst-in-the-nation dam safety program — crumbled,
sending floodwaters on a path of destruction over hundreds of homes. A
canal that provided half the drinking water for Columbia residents
collapsed, leaving South Carolina’s largest city bereft for more
than a week. Nineteen people were killed and twenty thousand
displaced, with a total of $1.2 billion worth of damage. The state
faced a $114 million bill for its share of the cleanup and rebuild, on
top of the $1.5 billion a year still needed to get its infrastructure
up to snuff.

Yet none of this seemed to move Haley an inch. Especially hard-hearted
was her refusal to support extra direct aid for the state’s farmers,
who had seen $330 million worth of crops destroyed and faced a further
$46 million of losses via the winter crops that couldn’t be planted
in the aftermath. They should be treated like any other business,
Haley insisted, as hundreds of desperate farmers pled for help at the
statehouse, the sector warned of a rash of bankruptcies, and 
commentators across the political spectrum pointed to the massive blow
it would strike to the heavily rural state’s economy. No matter: it
would be a “bailout,” said Haley, and “we do not do bailouts in
the state of South Carolina.” The state legislature passed an aid
bill anyway, though only by overriding Haley’s veto.

Nor did the devastation move her on the crux of the matter, the
state’s still dilapidated infrastructure, with Haley continuing to
serve as an obstacle to roads funding as the 2016 legislative session
got underway. As she begged workers across the country to chip in to
the state’s flood relief fund, she continued to insist on her
$1.8-billion-a-year tax cut, rejecting a GOP plan that raised $700
million for roads while lowering taxes for the highest earners by 1
point. “I will stay at the 2 percent[age points] until they give me
reason to go below that,” she said, vowing “to veto anything that
is a net tax increase.”

This legislative Groundhog Day went on for another five months, with
identical results as the year before. It was only thanks to a
last-minute compromise bill hammered out by lawmakers and sent to
Haley’s desk in June that the South Carolina government didn’t end
up empty-handed for a second straight year. There would be no tax cut
for the rich, nor a gas tax hike. The state would instead borrow $2.2
billion over ten years, facilitated with $200 million a year from
vehicle sales taxes and existing fees. With Haley keeping mum on
whether she’d sign, GOP leader Leatherman urged Haley to “use good
common sense one time” and just sign the bill, warning the votes
were there to nix her veto.

“Over the past couple of years I would hope that she’s learned her
vetoes don’t carry too much weight in the General Assembly,”
Leatherman warned. Haley inked it, “for one reason and one reason
only,” she said, pointing to the bill’s provisions allowing for
the restructuring of the DoT, which had survived in the deal.

The Lucky One

For another politician, the roads debacle might have been a
career-killer, a real-time indictment of Haley’s political and
economic philosophy and her competence as an executive. But Haley’s
political future was kept alive, even reinvigorated, by two unlikely
events.

One was the horrific June 2015 white supremacist murder of nine black
churchgoers at a Charleston church, by a killer whose photos posing in
front of the Confederate flag quickly spread across the Web. The
public outrage that followed fueled a successful push to finally
remove the Confederate flag from the state Capitol, a push that Haley
soon became the public face of and drew national adulation over. By
the time she left office, the episode had prompted observers across
partisan lines to declare her the kinder, more tolerant future of the
Republican Party.

In theory, it shouldn’t have. Haley had rebuffed the idea of
eliminating the flag just a year earlier while running for reelection,
calling her opponent “desperate” for suggesting it, while
asserting that she had “not had one conversation with a single
CEO” about it, and that “we really kind of fixed all that when you
elected the first Indian American female governor.”

After the shooting, she dragged her feet as pressure on her built,
staying silent or insisting a debate about the flag should wait, and
getting behind the effort only after the arrival of out-of-state
protesters on each side of the issue became a possibility. In fact,
her initial response to the news was to put her foot in her mouth by
claiming that “we’ll never understand what motivates” someone
like the white supremacist shooter, and she drew criticism for not
lowering the Confederate flag in the wake of the shooting. Haley
claimed she had “pretty much decided” she would nix the flag days
before her announcement, but just hadn’t said so publicly.

But beyond that, Haley had spent years building a resume as a
hard-line conservative that clashed with this new image. She had
backed and signed into law a carbon copy of Arizona’s notoriously
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discriminatory “papers, please” immigration law, enacted the kind
of voter ID law that Democrats routinely charged was a tool of racist
voter suppression, and wanted Syrian refugees kept out of South
Carolina. She had gone so far as briefly name a member of the Council
of Conservative Citizens, one of the hate groups cited as an influence
in the Charleston shooter’s manifesto, her reelection campaign
cochair.

Nevertheless, Haley’s alleged leadership on the issue became a core
part of her political brand going forward and was central to the
largely rose-tinted local media retrospectives of her tenure once she
exited the governor’s mansion, eclipsing — or, more accurately,
erasing — the years of scandals, mismanagement, and cruelty that had
come before. Only a small few seemed to remember. “She is not the
poster child for racial harmony,” said Rev. Joseph Darby, a
Charleston NAACP official and friend of one of the murdered
churchgoers.

The other unlikely boon to Haley’s career was the rise of her former
donor, Donald Trump. Trump and his brand of explicitly bigoted
conservatism proved the perfect foil for this new Haley persona, and
she relished the opportunity to raise her profile and broaden her
political appeal by publicly criticizing him, staking out territory as
the face of the “moderate,” anti-Trump wing of the GOP.

The press gladly went along with the shtick, despite Haley first
making clear she would vote for Trump over Hillary Clinton, and then
officially endorsing him. After Trump prevailed, Haley told a group of
lobbyists and political operatives that she was “giddy” about his
victory and the opportunities it presented to roll back regulations.
Trump soon offered her a job in his administration, as ambassador to
the United Nations (UN), which she accepted, she said, out of “a
sense of duty,” despite having promised just two years earlier to
see out her full second term.

Trump’s win and subsequent job offer gave Haley another unexpected
lifeline. Haley had spent big in 2016 through her political
organization, A Great Day SC — one of the governor’s many vehicles
for corporate pay-to-play — to unseat several old-guard Republican
leaders with whom she had clashed, including Leatherman. She was
largely unsuccessful — only three of her eight endorsees came out on
top, and both Leatherman and the likely next chair of the Senate
judiciary committee survived the onslaught of negative, Haley-financed
ads. That, coupled with lawmakers’ resentment at Haley’s frequent
public criticism, left her with the serious possibility of governing
for her last two years with an embittered and uncooperative
legislature.

Haley was leaving for the UN offices in New York just in time, in
other words, avoiding this embarrassing prospect while notching up
some much-needed foreign policy experience in advance of a future
presidential run. South Carolina’s many remaining challenges — its
decaying roads, shameful levels of poverty and ill-health, and
perma-state of budget crisis — that Haley had failed to meaningfully
address, and in fact largely made worse, would be passed on to her
lieutenant governor.

As she made her exit, lawmakers looked forward to an era where
“we’ll see less vetoes and more willingness to work with us.” In
her final acts as governor, Haley hiked state workers’ pension
contributions, before proposing tax cuts worth more than $1.1 billion
a year.

More of the Same

Nikki Haley’s record in South Carolina offers as good a preview as
you could get of what her potential presidency would look like. It’s
a relatively straightforward story.

Ruthlessly devoted to her own political advancement, Haley forged a
symbiotic relationship with corporate interests and the ultrarich and,
as a result, left the place she was responsible for governing worse
off. A small number of wealthy and powerful people made off like
bandits, while the rest of the state, particularly workers and the
poor, gritted its teeth and suffered. All the while, her
administration racked up a shocking rap sheet of scandals, corruption,
mismanagement, and fiscal irresponsibility, one that left her
political career surprisingly unscathed — a perverse testament to
her political skill.

Throughout her current presidential campaign, Haley has made it
abundantly clear that she would bring the same approach to running the
country. She continues to be the darling of the country’s wealthiest
oligarchs, hoovering up donor cash and proudly touting the backing of
the billionaire Koch network that had supported her while governor.
She wants to bring her program of neoliberal austerity to the national
stage, combining plans for severe tax and budget cuts with calls to
raise the retirement age and other “reforms” to Medicare and
Social Security. She proudly calls herself a “union buster.”

Whether as president, Trump’s possible running mate, or a cabinet
member in a future Republican administration, Nikki Haley likely has a
long, bright future in politics and will continue to float close
enough to power to put her hands on it. The US public should be under
no illusions about what exactly that will mean.

=======

* Niki Haley; South Carolina; Repubican Party;
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