I could not imagine Nikki Haley (unlike Sarah Palin) not being able to handle questions from lightweights such as Katie Couric and Charles Gibson, or starting a political commercial with a “I am not a witch” statement. There are some real good tea party candidates out there and some  who the less said the better.  By aggressively  emphasizing that she is pro business, for lowering taxes, and budget cutting – she makes her opponent play defense.

by Walter Shapiro

Watching “Mama Grizzly” Nikki Haley Monday night during the only statewide TV debate in the South Carolina gubernatorial race underscored how different stylistically she is than her mentor Sarah Palin. Unlike Palin in her 2008 vice-presidential debate, Haley exuded no deer-in-the-headlights uncertainty, nor did she play to the politics of class resentment. Instead, the fast-talking Haley came across as poised, supremely confident and very conservative, even by South Carolina standards.

Leading in the polls against hard-charging Democrat Vincent Sheheen, a state senator, the 38-year-old Haley did not need to turn pirouettes or figure-8’s to skate through the debate. While there was never the breakthrough moment that reporters (and, I suspect, most voters) crave, the debate did allow Haley to hammer home her less-government mantra.

At times, it was impressive how many conservative catch phrases Haley could cram into a single debate answer. A question about whether South Carolina should adopt statewide pre-kindergarten classes prompted Haley to declare, “Sen. Sheheen has never seen a spending bill that he didn’t like . . . We don’t need stimulus programs, we don’t need any bailouts. What we need to do is to take our faith-based community . . .” Any second I expected Haley to utter the name “Nancy Pelosi” to punctuate her argument about allowing the churches to take charge of early education.

[….]

Haley is unequivocally pro-business in outlook: “We’re very fortunate that we’re a right-to-work state and we keep unions out,” she said. But it is Sheheen who has the support of the state Chamber of Commerce and has cross-over appeal to traditional Republicans who worry that Haley may be too inflexibly ideological. Former GOP state senator Greg Gregory, who represented Lancaster County (closer to Charlotte, N.C., than Columbia) until 2008, said, “Vince Sheheen is swimming upstream, but he’s the most capable person that the Democrats could have nominated.” While Gregory also had kind words for Haley (“she has a magnetism about her”), he tellingly refused to say for whom he was voting.

But trailing by roughly a 10-percent margin in recent polls (even though anecdotally he seems to be stronger), Sheheen needs an external event or gotcha moment to transform the race. The final debate with Haley Tuesday night in Florence provides him with a frail hope. But then Democrats traditionally struggle to get above 45 percent of the vote in South Carolina.

[….]

In their closing statements, both candidates finally got to frame the debate in the way that each had hoped. For Shaheen, it was to remind voters that Haley represents the same uncompromising philosophy as Mark Sanford (“After the last eight years, we’ve been embarrassed by this state”). For Haley, who has been running as an outsider since she defeated a long-serving state legislator in the 2004 Republican primary, it was to label Sheheen as a (gasp!) “career politician.” (In truth, Sheheen has only served four more years in the state legislature than Haley).

Like Senate candidates Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, Nikki Haley boasts sterling-silver tea party credentials. But my guess is that Nikki Haley will be a political force to reckon with long after most Americans forget the names of the tea party candidate who warned about “Second Amendment remedies” and the one who had to announce, “I am not a witch.”