NYT Mag: “Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, doesn’t care what you think.”

Of course, we knew that — I’ve noted it before (most recently with regard to the Darla Moore affair). But it’s interesting that any national media have noticed it, given the hagiographic coverage she usually receives outside the state.

The State took note of the New York Times Magazine article several weeks back. They saw the “Comet” headline, and noted her wildly hubristic statement that “I don’t lose.”

But they apparently missed the subhead — probably because whoever was doing The Buzz for that edition looked at the piece online, rather than in print.

And that was the best part.

Above is a shot from a PDF of the print edition, which an alert reader shared.

By the way, that little pun — Haley the Comet — reminds me of something I saw in Oxford during my recent visit.

It seems that when Edmond Halley, famous for having first charted the path of the comet, was at Oxford (The Queen’s College), he decided to knock a hole in the roof of his top-floor flat so that he could watch the stars from there. The landlord was VERY accommodating — even though he wasn’t yet the famous Halley of the Comet — and a little observatory structure was built onto the roof.

At least, that’s the way our guide on the walking tour told it. The story may be apocryphal (a few minutes on Google just now failed to confirm it).

But if it’s true, it occurs to me that Halley didn’t care what people thought, either. With him, it turned out all right in the end. With our own Haley, the Comet… that definitely remains to be seen.

Below is the picture I took on Jan. 4 of the building where Halley lived:

11 thoughts on “NYT Mag: “Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, doesn’t care what you think.”

  1. bud

    Haley is just a small gog in the ultra radical GOP that is turning the USA into Plutocracyland. Check out all the attempts by governors from Maine to Wisconsin trying their best to deny workers basic bargaining rights and, worse, trying to disenfranchise voters. Haley’s rather modest efforts to move South Carolina from the 19th century into the 13th will not be entirely successful and will go largely un-noticed by the rest of the country as folks struggle to keep their heads above water. With corporate profits soaring and huge companies like GE paying zero in taxes it is likely that the masses will eventually wake up and smell the coffee and run these reactionary scoundrels out of office. In the meantime Haley will fade into the background as a sort of comic relief to the rest of the political world.

    At the end of the day Obama will win re-election, the “normal” states of the midwest and northeast will come to their senses and elect democrats and South Carolina will continue it’s race to the bottom with Mississippi and Louisiana.

  2. tim

    Not that it matters, but the proper pronunciation of “Halley” is “Hawl-ee”, not “Hay-lee”

  3. Brad

    In Oxford, I think they said it “HAL-ee.” With the “Hal” rhyming with “pal.” I meant to mention that…

  4. Ralph Hightower

    I read that article from the tweet when it first came out and retweeted with “Comet Kohoutek”. I think Nikki is Kohoutek reincarnated because “Comet Kohoutek fell far short of expectations”.

    One of the things she is quoted in the article is “I believe they (the General Assembly) should have to disclose their income and show all their spending online.”

    That attitude is so much like Mark Sanford. What applies to the General Assembly does not apply to the Governor.

  5. Kathryn Fenner (D- SC)

    Well, Ralph, of course it didn’t even apply to her when she was in the General Assembly, did it? She lives in a glass house with all the hurricane shutters pulled down! So much for transparency!
    You have to give it to Sanford–with the glaring exception of his mistress, he walked his talk!

  6. Ralph Hightower

    Kathryn,

    I beg to differ. Sanford was all about frugality, even requiring double-bunking motel rooms and flying coach. But on a trip to China, he flew first class, and our current guvernot, Nikki Haley, is taking the “Ronald Reagan defense” of “frankly I don’t remember” if she flew first-class or coach.

    Sanford’s terms was full of “Do as I say, not as I do.”

  7. Ralph Hightower

    I hope that Dr. Oscar Lovelace decides to challenge Governot Nikki Haley in the next primary, or even Darla Moore challenges Nikki.

    Like Sanford, Haley is full of wacky ideas. Nikki Haley, in her defense of shutting down ETV (yet she appointed a new board of her contributors to ETV) at a recent town hall meeting, said “Let them buy DVDs and surf the Internet.”

    I think she would find that in rural South Carolina, high speed Internet via cable, just doesn’t exist! Now that NTSC is dead, everybody has to have an HDTV or have received a free HDTV converter for their old TV. But where cable doesn’t run, those people are reliant upon TV using rabbit-ears.

    Nikki Haley Countdown: 1389 days, 21 hours, 33 minutes, 14 seconds, 934 milliseconds

  8. Juan Caruso

    It’s a little tougher for non-lawyers (thank goodness we still have any non-lawyer governors) to hide behind the client confidentiality protections created just for lawyers.

    Poor Vincent cam’t hide everything though, and his foes are beginning to look where they shhould have been looking all along.

  9. Barry

    @ Juan

    Yeah, that evil Vincent Sheheen – lol

    Nikki sure ran against trial lawyers in the campaign didn’t she?

    Now she can’t go a day without appointing them to all sorts of boards.

    Funny how her stance changed isn’t it?

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