South Carolina’s Young Governor Has a High Profile and Higher Hopes

NY Times ^ | July 2, 2011 | KIM SEVERSON

[don-o]

“We are now what every state is going to want to look like,” Ms. Haley said in an interview in her office almost six months into her administration.

“We are now the state that is very excited,” she said, referring to a catchphrase — “Get excited” — that she uses in virtually every speech, bill signing and elementary school tour that comes her way. “The people are now in charge.”

snip

But the governor’s focus on the policies of President Obama has offered the most substantive contribution to her national profile. She regularly criticizes his policies on health care and spending, and has called him a bully for his administration’s stance on a $750 million jet assembly plant that Boeing opened in North Charleston in June.

The National Labor Relations Board sued the aeronautics giant over the plant, contending that Boeing picked South Carolina, a right-to-work state — where workers cannot be required to join a union — to retaliate against union workers in Washington State who struck three years ago.

Ms. Haley, who has support from more than a dozen governors on the issue, testified recently before a Congressional oversight committee on the role of the board. Her point? The federal government must stop getting in the way of economic growth in the states.

Later, in a conference call with reporters, she that said she wanted the president to intervene in the lawsuit and that her job was “to be loud and annoying and in his face.”

[eater-of-toast]

She’s a real tiger; I like that about her. But she needs a bit more national political savvy. She was a just a state rep before becoming governor and sometimes it shows. If she would expand her horizons a little, she’d realize that the rest of the country does not want to look like South Carolina, to put it bluntly, nor should it. And I say that as someone who lives in South Carolina. Let’s be honest; this is one of the poorer states.

[don-o]

She’s a real tiger; I like that about her. But she needs a bit more national political savvy. She was a just a state rep before becoming governor and sometimes it shows.

I would be interested in what constitutes "national political savvy" in your mind. Seems to me that the governor of a critical early primary state is going to get a very quick tutorial and her core beliefs and instincts are correct as far as I can tell.