Friday, January 13, 2012

Haley’s Picking Romney Shocks Tea Party

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is betting her future on Mitt Romney’s, exhausting the support that Tea Partyers once supplied her. - Bloomberg

Haley, 39, was elected in 2010 as a champion of the movement that pushed states’ rights and fiscal rectitude. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she was an adversary of the Legislature’s good-old-boy network and became the first woman to run the state that ranks 50th in female representation, said Karen Kedrowski, political science chairwoman for Rock Hill’s Winthrop University.

That such a politician would endorse Romney, whom Newt Gingrich has called someone trying to “pretend he’s a conservative,” was jaw-dropping, Haley’s Tea Party and Libertarian supporters said in interviews this week.