Nikki Haley highlights education and economy in visit to Council Bluffs

The economy and education were two of the notes former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley sang to a standing-room-only crowd of enthusiastic supporters at a town hall event Wednesday night at Thunderbowl in Council Bluffs.

In her opening remarks, Haley touched on her upbringing, of being the daughter of the only Indian immigrant family living in a small, rural town in central South Carolina.

“We weren’t white enough to be white, and we weren’t Black enough to be Black,” Haley said. “They didn’t know who we were, what we were or why we were there.”

Haley said that regardless of how they might have been looked at by their neighbors, her parents instilled in her and her siblings a strong sense of pride in the U.S.

“There was never a day they didn’t tell me, my brothers and my sister that even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America,” Haley said.

In a stump speech that lasted about 30 minutes, Haley lamented the woeful state of the country, laying blame at the feet of Republicans and Democrats alike, particularly when it comes to the economy.

She narrowed in on the national deficit and legislation laden with earmarks.

“Republicans and Democrats did that to us,” Haley said. “There are no saints in Congress.”

She pointed to the $2.2 trillion COVID relief bill that was passed “with no accountability” in March 2020. The House of Representatives voted 419-6 for the CARES Act legislation, while in the Senate the vote was 96-0.

Haley lambasted Republicans for bringing back earmarks, which have long been described as wasteful pet projects for politicians’ constituents back home.

“How offensive is that to a taxpayer?” Haley asked.

Haley also took aim at Social Security and Medicare, claiming they would both be “bankrupt” within 10 years.

Instead of raising taxes, which Haley called “the lazy way out,” she wants to cut off younger generations from these government programs.

“You reform the entitlement, but you do it in a way that doesn’t take anything away from seniors or people who are getting ready to retire,” Haley said. “You focus on the new generation.”

Haley wants to raise the retirement age, though she didn’t specify what she thought was appropriate, and expand the Medicare Advantage program to create more competition, which she says will lower costs.

Pivoting to education, Haley claimed that “90 percent of our kids are still under CRT,” or critical race theory, which is an academic concept that states that racism is more than individual bias and that, over time, it is embedded in the fabric of the United States.

Haley also believes that Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, more commonly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, doesn’t go far enough and that any sort of sex or gender education should be completely left up to parents.

“That’s not the role for schools,” she said. “That’s the role for parents. Parents need to decide what their kids need to know. They need to be the ones teaching it, explaining it, dealing with all of that. It should be between families and church and kids, and government and schools need to stay out of that.”

At the end of her remarks, Haley spoke about what she sees as the biggest problem facing the country right now.

“This national self-loathing is killing us,” she said. “The idea that people are saying America’s bad and that it’s rotten and that we’re racist, that could not be further from the truth.”

Haley pointed to her own election to governor of South Carolina — “I was the first female minority governor in history” — as evidence.

“We have to teach our kids that this is the best country on earth,” Haley said. “Capitalism has saved more people in human history than anything else. Socialism never works no matter where it's been tried. … but we need to focus on what will unify this country. And what will unify this country is when we all have a national purpose and we ask our opponents to join us.”

Haley recalled her youth, “how simple everything was,” and she wants to return the country to that time.

“We can go back to that country that is proud and strong,” Haley said. “I believe in that. I have faith in that. And the reason it's important to me is because I want my parents to know that when they came here, they made the right decision. I want my husband, who went to Afghanistan, and all his military brothers and sisters to know that their sacrifice meant something. I want my children to know that their best days are ahead of them and that there's nothing they can't do.”

Haley was appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2017, a position she held for two years. Prior to that, she was the twice-elected governor of South Carolina and she served six years in the South Carolina House of Representatives.

Haley came in a distant fourth in a recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) straw poll, netting 3 percent of the votes from the annual conservative conference’s attendees, behind former President Donald Trump (62 percent), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (20 percent) and Michigan businessman Perry Johnson (5 percent).

CPAC attendees also weighed in on their choice for vice president, giving Haley 10 percent of the vote, which put her in third place behind failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (20 percent) and DeSantis (14 percent).