Nikki Haley扶不上牆的原因

Nikki Haley’s unfixable problem

So Haley’s problem is that she turns off a lot of voters of both parties, and of the groups that she does appeal to, there simply aren’t enough voters to win the Republican nomination. She just doesn’t excite enough people to win.

In New Hampshire, a common observation among outsiders watching Haley’s rallies is that the crowds just didn’t seem that fired up. Yes, they applauded her applause lines, but not in the loud, raucous way that a truly enthusiastic crowd would do.

At her final rally on election eve, Haley got a good crowd at a big hotel in Salem. The room held about 500 people, and it was packed, with all seats filled and people standing along the walls and the media scrunched into the back. Anybody who has attended events in a room like that knows if 500 people want to make a lot of noise, if they want to be really, really LOUD, they can. But this was not that. It wasn’t exactly quiet. Haley received applause for her key points. But it wasn’t excited. The same thing happened, on a smaller scale, at a number of Haley’s other New Hampshire events.

Some observers pointed to the rote nature of Haley’s campaign appeal. She delivered the same speech, virtually word-for-word, at each appearance. At the end, music came up, and she spent a lot of time shaking hands and posing for pictures. In the final weeks of the campaign, after she was stung by the what-caused-the-Civil-War question, she took no questions. While they can sometimes lead to embarrassment, questions are a real source of spontaneity in campaign appearances. They allow the candidate to stretch and sometimes reveal his or her personality. Haley, an accountant by training, doesn’t stretch.

“It’s her lack of spontaneity that kills her,” the longtime political analyst Chris Matthews, who hoped for a Haley victory, wrote in the liberal Washington Monthly. “She is scripted … sticking to the script killed her.” A New York Times wrap-up of the New Hampshire campaign quoted an independent voter who considered voting for Haley but decided against it because he felt Haley never really asked for his vote. “She’s very scripted,” the voter said. “She’s not a very — I don’t want to say natural politician, but a natural person.”

On Wednesday night, when Haley appeared in North Charleston, her first rally since arriving from New Hampshire, she delivered a stump speech that was almost word-for-word the speech she delivered for weeks in New Hampshire. The script goes on.

Nikki Haley’s unfixable problem