The former South Carolina governor instead said it was a dispute over how ‘government was going to run.’

The former South Carolina governor instead said it was a dispute over how ‘government was going to run.’

Nikki Haley declined to say that slavery was a cause of the Civil War on Wednesday evening, placing the blame, instead, on the role of government.

The former UN Ambassador and South Carolina governor, who has seen her star rise in the first-in-the-nation primary state, was appearing at a town hall event in Berlin, New Hampshire, when a voter asked her to identify the cause of the war.

“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run,” she responded. “The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was or argument?”

The questioner, who could not be easily heard off camera, was apparently unpersuaded by Haley’s response. When she asked him what he believed the cause of the war was, he replied that he wasn’t running for president.

    • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
      30·
      11 months ago

      Nah, she’s a nutjob. Nobody is suddenly going to vote for her because she has one normal take, but her (southern) constituency will absolutely take offense if she says anything beyond “states rights” or some such bullshit.

      • drmeanfeel@lemmy.world
        13·
        11 months ago

        Probably lost a few by not saying “I’m not familiar with the Civil War, perhaps you’re referring to the War of Northern Aggression?”

      • Caradoc879@lemmy.world
        61·
        11 months ago

        Even the democrats and liberals in the south seem to have a strange inability to accept that the civil war was about slavery. They all say it was about taxes and shit.

    • d00phy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      11 months ago

      She’s been positioning herself as a more sane version of Trump. She says slavery caused the war, and she has to change up her whole strategy because she would have lost any Trumpers considering her.