At the American Enterprise Institute on April 5th, Liz Cheney interviewed Governor Nicki Haley (R-SC) about her new memoir, Can't Is Not An Option: My American Story. Topics discussed included Mitt Romney, the Tea Party, Barack Obama and Obamacare.
This is a link to the 45-minute AEI video: http://tinyurl.com/7x4eguj
Here is my transcript of highlights of Gov. Haley's remarks:
"We all go through challenges. It's not the challenges that define you; it's how you handle those challenges. And now I realize all of those challenges [in my life] were blessings -- every one of them was a blessing in disguise -- because now I know have the strength. I know I don't back down, because every time you go through a challenge you're amazed at what you can accomplish."
"It's so hard to make a dollar, and it's so easy for government to take it."
"Politics is the art of distraction... I was not going to be distracted."
"What I never knew is that the hardest part about my job would be the federal government... What I never thought we would see was the most un-American thing, which is this great American company, Boeing, gave South Carolina a shot in the arm and said we're going to put a plant in South Carolina, create a thousand new jobs in South Carolina, at the same time expanded their employment in the Washington state by two thousand. Not one person was hurt. Yet President Obama and the National Labor Relations Board went and sued Boeing and said they couldn't do it. An American company!"
"That suit got brought down. What was one thousand employees at Boeing is now six thousand employees at Boeing... That's what America is about -- when we move out of the way and let the private sector work."
"I knew I needed a partner in the White House... I did not want anyone that had anything to do with the chaos that is Washington. We have seen where that has gotten us. It is not working, and so I wanted someone outside of Washington."
"I knew I wanted someone who had been on the other side of government when it came to business. I wanted somebody that knew what it was like to create jobs, someone that knew what it was like to start a business but also knows how hard it is when a business fails. Then, I wanted results."
"So I looked at Governor Romney, and I saw that he took this failed Olympics and made it a source of pride for our country. He was a governor that went into a Democratic state, liberal state, and was an executive, cut taxes nineteen times, balanced his budget with an eighty-five percent [Democrat] legislature, and I felt what if we had that in Washington. And then on top of that was the fact that I knew him and Ann. I knew their family."
"I knew how he wasn't just a candidate that wanted to win. This is someone who has thought for the last four years about how he would handle the situation had he been president."
"I am a huge fan of the Tea Party because they're not a party at all. They're Republicans, Democrats and independents who have said they've had enough. They want someone who understands the value of a dollar. They want someone who understands that government works for the people, not the other way around. They want government to understand that their protections and their freedoms and their liberties matter. Those all went into my decision-making, because the first thing I did was I sat down with Governor Romney and said I've got some tough questions for you. I don't want mandatory health care in South Carolina. We can't afford it, and we don't want it. And he said 'First day, I will repeal [Obamacare]. What we did in Massachusetts was for Massachusetts. I would never do a federal, national mandate.' He said he was the governor of a state. You have to be able to govern your state without the federal government getting in the way. I will always support those things.'"
"It was Tea Party values that I asked him questions on and I got responses back. While some members of the Tea Party may be disappointed, you can't please everybody all the time. But there is no one or two people that speak for the Tea Party. That's what makes them great. They don't vote in a bloc. They have independent thinking."
"The mainstream media want to label women as one-issue voters, and we're not. We care about jobs and the economy and health care and education... The media is a little frightened of women."
"What we all agree on, regardless of who that Republican candidate is we may be supporting, we all know what we don't want, and that's what we've had for the past three years. And I think everybody will come back to that in the end."
"What we have seen with President Obama is that he really goes back to that New Deal concept that government can fix all things."
"If you're going to ask every governor in the country to balance their budget, Washington has to balance their budget. That is at the heart of everything we're talking about. They need to prioritize where they need to spend."
"On foreign relations, the hot mic incident says it all. We don't know what President Obama is thinking from a foreign affairs standpoint, and that is scary."
"As the daughter of immigrant parents, who came here legally, put in the time, they paid the money, they came the right way. They are offended by those who don't come the right way... The day we are no longer a country of laws we are going to lose everything that makes us great."
"We absolutely have to enforce our immigration laws, but we also need to look at expanding our workforce visa situation."
"Republicans probably could go talk a little bit more about yes, we do want immigrants. We want them legally. Yes we do think that they're valuable, but they need to be here legally. I think they need to stress that as much as they stress they don't want illegal immigration."
"I hope what my story tells, I hope what everybody feels, is the pride of living in this country."
"If [Obamacare survives in the Supreme Court] our state along with every other state will be devastated, because what you will see in South Carolina alone our annual budget is five billion dollars. [Obamacare] will cost South Carolina ten billion dollars over ten years. We can't afford it. We will go bankrupt."
"I strongly believe the individual mandate is unconstitutional. I strongly believe that states are the best to make these decisions. What I would like to see is Washington being able to give us block grants. Let us decide the best way to spend our money... If we were given that money, we would spend less money, we would be more effective on how we treated patients."
If [Obamacare] goes into place, you will see a lot of private-sector companies just pay the penalty and throw it to government. We will see less quality in health care and higher costs."
"The goal of every state should be how do we get the most health for the least amount of money. What I am asking is, DC don't tell me how to do it. What we are trying to do here in South Carolina is trying to make sure there is transparency from the patient to the doctor, the doctor to the insurance company."
"My hope is that we learn a great lesson from this. The lesson is yes, we need to address health care, every state needs to do it, but every state needs to do it individually with their own programs and their own plans, not through the mandatory side of it."
"Government is in the customer service business. I wanted everybody in state government that answers the phone to understand they work for the person on the other side of the line, that their job was to make sure they solve their problems, that they sent them where they needed to go, and that they made sure they were taken care of by the time they got off the phone."
"Very important going into November for all of us to remember. We need to focus on one thing, and that is President Obama's record. He's going to continue to distract. That's his job. We need to continue to stay focused. That's our job. Look at the economy. Look at the debt. Look at the loss of the credit rating. Look at the gas pump. Look at the fact that we have not balanced a budget. Stay on message. This is a man who came into office as a candidate talking about hope and change. Nothing that he has tried to do has worked, so now he's going to scare the American public into thinking they'd better re-elect him or it's going to get worse. And to have him be such a bully, scold Republicans and say 'I can't believe you're trying to cut and reform these entitlements and to really prioritize spending.' That's exactly what we want. He's going back to the New Deal, looking for government to grow and save everybody from themselves. I'm telling you that the rest of the American public is saying that's not what we want anymore, government messes up more than it fixes, and we realize that now. So I think there is a tremendous opportunity, after seeing him fall apart a little bit, by bullying the Supreme Court, that he has reached a new level of trying to figure out where he's going to go, because he knows he can't go on his record. So, he's desperately trying to make sure he goes somewhere else. What he's looking like is a bully. What he's looking like is he is panicking over a record that he can't defend. And what he's looking like is he hasn't been able to show leadership, and he knows it."
Thanks to Gov. Nicki Haley, every day is a great day in South Carolina.
Michael Zak is a popular speaker to Republican organizations around the country. Back to Basics for the Republican Party is his acclaimed history of the GOP, cited by Clarence Thomas in a Supreme Court decision. He is also the author of the 2005 Republican Freedom Calendar. His Grand Old Partisan website celebrates more than fifteen decades of Republican heroes and heroics. See www.grandoldpartisan.com and @Michael_Zak for more information.
