This is just amazing:

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a close Romney ally, said it was “offensive” for Democrats to say they’re better for women on reproductive rights. Speaking with reporters at the Republican National Convention, Haley said Democrats drawing attention to the pro-life plank in the party’s platform are merely “distracting” from Obama’s record. Asked if the platform does indeed call for a total ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, Haley replied, “I have no idea. I haven’t been paying attention.” The platform endorses the Human Life Amendment, which would give constitutional rights to fetuses, and thus equate abortion with murder.

I’ve read this paragraph about five times now, and I’m just amazed that a person with a presumably functional brain could get this out without shuddering and collapsing. Haley thinks that Republicans ought to be offended that Democrats are asserting their superiority on matters of reproductive rights? What kind of apology might she be looking for? (“Sorry for reading your platform before you did?”) And the second graph is about as confusing:

Women are not one issue voters, we care about the economy,” she explained. ”These debates [abortion] that you fellas keep talking about, that the Dems keep talking about, is just not where women are… The only people that are saying that the Democrats are the better party for women are Democrats. And they think if they say it enough, we’ll believe it, and that’s probably about as offensive as it gets,” Haley added.

Perhaps she didn’t get the memo that the economy is out, and divisive culture war skirmishes are in when it comes to the Romney campaign, so this is entirely pret a porter.

This gets back to one of my ongoing fixations: minority (and women) Republicans with power who nonetheless try to assert leadership over their own cohorts. Just like Michael Steele during his RNC salad days, and one or two brief moments of Herman Cain’s presidential bid, this sort of leadership campaign just doesn’t work from within the confines of a high-profile Republican position. Steele’s sad antics showed someone desperate to exercise some form of cultural leadership in a context that wouldn’t allow it substantively, and his symbolic outreach (“hip hop conservatism”) was hilariously inept. Cain at times flirted with being angry about the lot of black people in America before inevitably remembering his role as the validator of white rage, and then he had to walk it back. Haley here seems to be trying to demonstrate gender leadership, trying to tell women that social issues don’t matter as much as having firm economic management (from her point of view, anyway). But she can’t do it without jettisoning, well, almost all women. The idea that women don’t care at all about debates concerning their own bodies is a bizarre one. I’m guessing, for example, that quite a few of them are behind Todd Akin’s precipitous collapse in Missouri. The problems here–insulting the audience’s intelligence, feigning ignorance of the party’s platform (or actually being ignorant of it, which is worse for someone opining on the issue for the press), throwing around inflammatory terms with no basis while dismissing legitimate concerns–display an incredible lack of sensitivity to what women outside beet-red states think about these issues, and really more of a contempt for all that to boot. Which is to say that Haley is a politician for the 27%, and no one else. Only she doesn’t really realize it.

Either that, or she’s just Christine O’Donnell in an elaborate disguise. Which I’m not prepared to rule out at this point. I realize that “rising star” Republicans at this point just mean younger, not as white, and perhaps female Republicans with the exact same beliefs, rather than “demonstrating enormous promise as a potential political leader in the future,” i.e. the actual definition of the term. Republicans keep finding more of the former, but the latter remain to be seen. Haley barely held on to win an election in South Carolina, and if she’s the future of the GOP, then there’s no future.