Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: End of year edition, with Nikki Haley still in the spotlight

Isaac J Bailey/POLITICO (from March):

I Know What Nikki Haley Has Gone Through. That’s Why Her Rhetoric on Race Infuriates Me.

The presidential candidate has long used her family’s experience with discrimination to establish her political brand. But to win a GOP primary she is diminishing that painful history.

I empathize with Nikki Haley’s struggle with race because in many ways her struggle mirrors my own.

She and I were born 310 days apart in 1972. We both grew up in predominantly Black rural regions of South Carolina, she in Bamberg, the county seat of one of the state’s smallest counties, and me in the tiny town of St. Stephen in Berkeley County…

But Haley often only empathizes with people like me when it advances her political pursuits. The discrimination she endured, which she used to craft her political brand, magically disappears (or its edges are sanded down) when she speaks to a crowd of people who want to believe it never existed. At times, she has weaponized her story against Black and brown people who don’t identify as conservative or the policies that might uplift them.