If you were reading National Geographic right now, this would be a poignant story about old bull elephants with failing memories and dimming vision, leading their rapidly thinning herd into one dry waterhole after another.
The headline might be: “Grand Old Pachyderms, Now Leaderless, Wander Toward Extinction.”
But even though you’ve turned to your newspaper’s page where politics meets punditry, you will be reading a similar story. Except it is about the failing old bulls of the Grand Old Party. They’ve been leading their Republican herd into one dry hole after another — dry holes of unadapting social agendas and unimaginative (see also: nonexistent) policy reforms.
Polls have long shown America has grown more tolerant and accepting on social matters — even Republican voters have changed. But the GOP’s leaders have seemed to be wallowing toward political quicksand, a potential prelude to extinction.
And then, on June 17, a bad situation got horribly worse. In Charleston, S.C., an avowedly racist white gunman who loved to pose with the Confederate flag slaughtered nine African Americans in the city’s legendary Emanuel AME Church. Many people of all races began calling on South Carolina to remove the Confederate flag from the capital’s grounds.
After all, that flag was honoring an era when South Carolina’s white population had a state-recognized right to enslave its black population. But timid Republican presidential candidates avoided taking a position — all except Ohio Gov. John Kasich. He courageously declared: “This is up to the people of South Carolina to decide, but if I were a citizen of South Carolina I’d be for taking it down.”
But just as the GOP seemed determined to hasten its decline (perhaps its demise), along came a most unlikely hero-of-the-moment: Gov. Nikki Haley, a 43-year-old tea party Republican. Born and raised in tiny Bamburg, S.C., Haley could never be caricatured as an old-school South Carolina redneck. Her parents emigrated from India. When a local pageant was once held, as The Washington Post once noted, the young Indian American discovered “she could not qualify to become either the white or the black pageant queen.”
Haley came to her own decision in a process that was certainly not ideological.
Earlier this year, the governor’s 13-year-old son had asked her if anyone had proposed removing that Confederate flag. After the slaughter of June 17, pressure to remove the Confederate flag became intense. “I didn’t even have to think hard about it,” Haley told The Washington Post. “It is looking at my kids, knowing where I had come from in Bamberg. …I just couldn’t look them in the face and keep that flag up.”
And so Haley stood her ground in the capital and courageously declared it was time to take down the flag.
Within days, other Southern governors were taking similar action. Presidential candidates miraculously cured their cases of the mumbles.
Someday we may look back and see Nikki Haley’s decision as far more than just a defining moment of South Carolina history. She may have saved the Grand Old Party from the folly of its flailing, failing old bulls.
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