Gov. Haley’s SOTU Response Gets Praise & Criticism

Gov. Nikki Haley’s response to President Obama’s final State of the Union address Tuesday night is getting both praise and criticism, with much of the criticism coming from her own party. She offered a tacit rebuke of Donald Trump when she said, “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices”.

Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Haley did a remarkable job with in her speech.

Nikki Haley, governor of South Carolina, testifies at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on a complaint made against Boeing Co.by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), in North Charleston, South Carolina, U.S., on Friday, June 17, 2011. It’s run by incompetent people and so I’m willing to express my anger and I wasn’t insulted at all and she said that there are some angry people – there are millions of angry people.

“There’s other people in the media, there’s people in my state, I think we’re seeing it across the country”.

Haley, seen by many as a potential vice presidential pick for the GOP, acknowledged her comments were aimed partly at Trump.

In a swipe at some Republican presidential candidates, he warned against “voices urging us to fall back into tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us or pray like us or vote like we do or share the same background”.

DONALD TRUMP: By the way, I have a massive lead in SC. They also want to make opposition to immigration a GOP litmus test. A party that rejects Nikki Haley as a spokeswoman is one that doesn’t really want to build a governing majority. “One of the weakest weakest recovery on record, and by far the weakest recovery ever on record”, Trump said. In this election year, Haley noted, “some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference”. “We’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion”. I said to myself, huh, she’s right.

Her critique of BHO’s speech “expanded the theme of who is and who is not qualified to be a Republican, and the Republican Party is now anti-conservative”. She’s had lots of governing experience, for one.

Responding to Ann Coulter’s tweet about theoretically deporting Nikki Haley, the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party called the idea “despicable”.

She didn’t mention Trump by name in her State of the Union response, but Wednesday made it clear that she had him in mind. “Part of this is just the primary process playing out”, he said, adding, “I think he understands that we have to have a unifying, inclusive message”. “The President has read news accounts of it, so he certainly is aware of her response”, he said. But, that said, you get the drift here.

In her speech Tuesday, she spoke for what was once the consensus among mainstream Republicans, whose timidity on the migration issue has grown in proportion to Trump’s ascendancy. She was even able to give her opinion on what a Republican administration might do if the GOP wins the White House later this year-without sounding overly political.