NIKKI HALEY IS THE PUNDIT CLASS'S NEW HOPIUM

The New York Times asked some of its opinion columnists to rate the candidates' performances in last night's Republican debate. Nikki Haley made some Never Trump right-wingers swoon:

David French: Here at last was a conservative who called out Trump’s profligate spending, a pro-life politician who gave an appropriately pragmatic answer to the challenge of national legislation, and a foreign policy hawk who dismantled [Vivek] Ramaswamy’s isolationism on live television. All of it warmed my old-school Reagan conservative heart. If there’s any life left in the old G.O.P., Haley gave it hope....

Bret Stephens: The star of the evening. Confident, prepared, sane and projecting the aura of someone who can win a general election.

And now David Brooks is besotted:

Wednesday’s debate persuaded me that the best Trump alternative is ... Nikki Haley....

Haley dismantled Ramaswamy on foreign policy. It was not only her contemptuous put-down: “You have no foreign policy experience and it shows.” She took on the whole America First ethos that sounds good as a one-liner but that doesn’t work when you’re governing a superpower. Gesturing to Ramaswamy, she said, “He wants to hand Ukraine to Russia, he wants to let China eat Taiwan, he wants to go and stop funding Israel. You don’t do that to friends.”

Similarly on abortion, many of her opponents took the issue as a chance to perform self-righteous bluster — to make the issue about themselves. She was the only one who acknowledged the complexity of the issue, who tried to humanize people caught in horrible situations, who acknowledged that the absolutist position is politically unsustainable.

This talk warms right-centrist pundits' hearts, but Nikki Haley has to survive Iowa and New Hampshire. Supporting the war in Ukraine? The recent NBC/Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa Republican caucus voters says that 43% of them would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supports continued aide to Ukraine, and only 35% would be more likely. On abortion, 54% would be more likely to vote for someone who supports a national fifteen-week ban, while only 24% would be less likely.

Pundits who are desperate for an end to Trumpism have been watching Ron DeSantis's campaign implode, have seen Tim Scott's failure to launch, have noted that most GOP voters despise Chris Christie. They should be gradually emerging from the grip of denial. They should understand that it's Trump's party and there's nothing anyone can do to change that until defeat, the law, or a fatal blood clot removes him from electoral politics.

Some of them, I think, were slowly beginning to accept reality. Then they watched Haley debate and ingested the hopium again.

So now she'll get massive amounts of mainstream media coverage. And I'm calling it now: While this is taking place, her poll numbers (at least in Iowa) will go down. Maybe she'll see an uptick in New Hampshire and nationally -- or maybe not, because how many Republican voters want to be told that Donald Trump is, as Haley said last night, “the most disliked politician in all of America”?

One Never Trumper at the Times wasn't buying the Haley hype:

Ross Douthat: A perfectly competent and therefore insufficient performance for a polished candidate without a clear rationale or lane.

Exactly.