Yer next Governor
As she tries to slink away from the "Sanfraud Protege" image she worked so hard to contrive...
2010 Race for the Governor
Friday, Jun. 18, 2010
Haley plans to work with legislators
40 things to know about Nikki Haley
State Rep. Nikki Haley of Lexington County says she is not as close with Gov. Mark Sanford as many think. She adds she will govern better than Sanford, leading a conservative revolution to shake up the State House establishment. Don’t think of her as a Republican, she asks, because she is a conservative. Raised in rural South Carolina by immigrant parents, Haley quickly has risen through the Republican ranks and now faces U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett of Westminster in Tuesday’s GOP gubernatorial runoff. Here are 40 things you should know about her:
HER PERSONAL LIFE
Republican gubernatorial candidate, Nikki Haley, answers questions in a one-on-one interview with The State Newspaper.
- TIM DOMINICK /tdominick@thestate.com
1. Haley is a Clemson graduate.
2. She met her husband, Michael, during her first week at college. He was her first boyfriend. The two dated seven years before marrying. Michael Haley is a technician and an officer in the S.C. Army National Guard.
3. The couple has two school-age children who attend Lexington public schools.
4. Haley is an accountant. She started keeping the books at her parent’s clothing store when she was 13 and went through her first audit by the time she was 16.
5. Haley has worked at her parents’ store for most of her career. For about 18 months after college, she worked as an accountant at the Charlotte recycling firm, FCR, before returning to the family business.
6. In 2008, she took a $110,000-a-year job with the Lexington Medical Center Foundation, doing event planning and fundraising. She left in April to campaign for governor full time. “I felt that once that project was over, it would have been irresponsible for me to stay on (at the hospital foundation),” Haley said.
7. Haley’s parents are immigrants from India who started a business in their Bambergliving room. They later moved the women’s clothing store to Orangeburg and finally to Lexington where their store, Exotica International, grew into a multimillion dollar operation.
8. Haley was raised a Sikh.
9. At 24, Haley converted to Christianity and joined a Methodist church. When the Haleys married in 1996, they held two services – one Methodist and one Sikh. The couple’s children were baptized at a Methodist Church and the family attends Mt. Horeb United Methodist Church in Lexington.
10. Haley occasionally attends Sikh services at her parent’s request but says she is not a practicing Sikh. “My older brother made the same decision I did, which was to become a Christian, whereas my sister and younger brother have chosen to remain a Sikh. … We’re very comfortable with it. My family is very comfortable with it. My parents and sisters and brothers respect me for it.”
11. Haley has been in the state House of Representatives since 2004. She beat 30-year House veteran Larry Koon in a runoff.
HER POLITICAL LIFE
12. Haley said she was encouraged to run for state treasurer because of her accounting background. “Treasurer was never an option. I love policy.” Gov. Sanford also encouraged her to run for governor.
13. She voted in an Orangeburg County Democratic primary in 1996 because, she said, there was no Republican primary. She has not voted for a Democrat since.
14. For much of the governor’s race, no one knew who Haley was and she lagged in polling and in fundraising.
15. Timely endorsements from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former S.C. first lady Jenny Sanford helped push Haley to front-runner. “Jenny Sanford meant a lot because it came in the very beginning. It came before any poll numbers were there. It came when I was fourth. ... Sarah Palin’s endorsement was important because it came at such an important time when people wanted to see credibility, when they saw the momentum but wanted to feel more.”
16. Although she is Gov. Sanford’s ideological protégé, Haley said she and Sanford speak infrequently. “I really don’t speak to him that often. …There’s never any advisement that goes on. It’s usually, ‘Saw you speak today. Good job,’ Or ‘Good luck,’ or something like that. It’s always like two-minute conversations.”
17. Haley said Sanford would not be a day-to-day adviser if she is elected.
18. Haley is using the same Washington D.C.-based political adviser as Gov. Mark Sanford – John Lerner.
19. She nearly won this month’s GOP primary outright, receiving 49 percent of the votes.
20. Shortly after Haley took a double-digit lead in the polls, two men claimed to have had sexual affairs with her in 2007 and 2008. They are Will Folks, a blogger and former aide to Gov. Sanford who did some Web site and writing work for Haley, and Larry Marchant, a lobbyist who worked on the campaign of GOP rival Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer. The two men have offered no proof of the alleged affairs. Folks has given three years of phone records, showing he and Haley spoke hundreds of times. Some of those calls were late at night and lasted for hours. Haley has said she and Folks were talking about work. Folks said they were not.
21. Folks, Marchant and Haley worked together in 2008, creating a strategy on how Haley could win the chairmanship of the House’s Labor, Commerce and Insurance committee.
22. Haley lost the committee election. She was removed from the committee by House Speaker Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston and assigned to the Education and Public Works committee. Haley blamed the defeat on Harrell, whom, Haley said, was punishing her for her bill to increase the number of on-the-record votes cast by lawmakers. Harrell has denied the claim.
23. She has missed the majority of Education and Public Works committee meetings and subcommittee meetings this year, including those debating bills to ban texting while driving and to suspend driver’s licenses for teens who drop out of schools.
24. Haley said she had a busy schedule as a mother, lawmaker, professional and candidate. “I was very much involved and on the floor of the Legislature as much as possible. But when something had to slip, the committee meetings were the ones that I sacrificed.”
25. Haley said the media got it wrong, quoting her as saying she did not remember if she flew business class or coach on a 2007 trade mission to China with Gov. Sanford and others. Haley said she flew business class. She was unaware, at the time, that state law requires state officials to choose the cheapest possible airfare. “All I knew is it was scheduled by the Department of Commerce and it was approved by the Budget and Control Board. ... (The press and others) made an issue of something that I didn’t know was not handled properly.”
26. She cast two 2009 votes to include $350 million in federal stimulus money in the state’s budget. Haley called the votes “procedural.” One of those votes was for second reading of the budget, typically the decisive vote in the House. Haley’s roll-call voting bill, her signature campaign issue, would require a recorded vote for second reading of the budget.
27. Haley said she did not know the state could reject the money – even though a dozen of her colleagues voted against accepting the money. “(I) found out afterward we didn’t have to take it. We could fight it.” Had she known the state did not have to accept the stimulus money, she says she would have voted not to take it.
28. Haley has introduced 13 bills since entering the state Legislature in 2004. One has become law – exempting salon employees who only shampoo hair from acquiring a cosmetologist license.
HOW SHE WILL GOVERN
29. Haley said introducing legislation is not the only sign of leadership. She has served on conference committees and co-sponsored tort reform and worker’s compensation bills. “Being the author of a bill and being part of a solution to a problem are two totally different things. … I jumped on (existing bills) and worked on those as opposed to stepping out there and creating things of my own. I wanted to fix what was already in the process.”
30. Some fellow Republican lawmakers worry that, if Haley wins, she will continue the antagonistic legislative-executive relationship that has existed for years between Gov. Mark Sanford and House and Senate members. That toxic relationship has often resulted in legislative gridlock. Haley said she is not “reactionary” like Sanford is. If elected, she plans to give lawmakers a list of her priorities each session and encourage them to pick three. Then, she will work with them from the committee level up to get bills passed. “In order to really lead with the Legislature, you have to be predictable. … I would must rather deal with what’s wrong with a bill (on the front end of the process) and make it right as opposed to waiting for it to get to the floor and just saying no to it.”
31. Haley said her staff would use only public e-mail subject to open records laws. “No personal e-mails. That’s actually going to be a rule from the beginning. …The best thing for us to do is learn from the lessons of the challenges of Gov. Sanford. I don’t want that to happen again for me or anyone else.”
32. Haley said she will issue a detailed schedule and notify the lieutenant governor when she leaves the state. “I want to have some privacy, but when you’re a public servant, you have to kind of open everything up to the people. … People should know when I’m in the office. They should know when I’m having meetings.”
33. Haley has campaigned to limit government spending. But she has cast at least one vote for every state budget since she has been in office with one exception. Her votes include one for the 2008 budget which spent all of a $1 billion surplus.
34. She defends those votes by noting she voted to sustain many of Sanford’s budget vetoes. Most lawmakers have little influence drafting the budget, she said. The work is done by a handful of influential lawmakers, she added.
ISSUES
35. Government transparency is Haley’s top campaign issue. She would push for a law requiring lawmakers to reveal their income and clients in order to disclose conflicts of interest. She also has introduced bill that would limit state spending increases, impose term limits on lawmakers and require lawmakers to cast more votes on the record.
36. Haley and her husband earned $196,282 in 2009, according to tax documents provided to the media Thursday. The Haleys gave $971 to charity.
37. She has denied media requests to view e-mails from her State House-issued e-mail account, saying turning them over would be a distraction from running her campaign. The media requested the e-mail records after blogger Will Folks said the two had communicated through the source.
38. Haley favors eliminating income taxes for small businesses. Haley also supports comprehensive tax reform, though she would oppose any reform plan that would increase any individual tax.
39. She supports school choice – tax credits for parents who sent their students to private or parochial school or home-school them. “If we’re (choosing) in preschool and we do that in higher ed, why would we not do it in the years that matter most, which is K-12?”
40. Haley said she would not accept campaign donations from New York school-choice advocate, Howard Rich. “While anybody can give contributions. ... I do believe those contributions are somewhat tainted…”
John O’Connor
and Gina Smith
Read more: http://www.thestate.com/2010/06/18/1...#ixzz0rDIbYSVP
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Originally Posted by 2thDoc
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