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A CNN political analyst falsely referred to Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley as “a white governor from the Deep South” Sunday night while criticizing her handling of racial tensions in South Carolina following the 2015 massacre of nine black parishioners at a Charleston church by a white supremacist.
“One of the major elements of the Nikki Haley story is Charleston,” Bakari Sellers, a former Democratic legislator from the Palmetto State, said following CNN’s town hall event with Haley.
“Nikki Haley did not take down the Confederate flag,” Sellers added, attacking the 51-year-old governor for not ordering the Stars and Bars removed earlier in her tenure. “That bothers me when she alludes to it or people state that, because that’s incorrect. Nine people died so that the Confederate flag could come down.”
“But there also has to be some credit given to a white governor from the Deep South being able to go to nine funerals because I saw the exhaustion on her face — being a leader during that time and being able to bridge people together,” Sellers also said.
CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins jumped in to correct the record shortly after Sellers finished, saying, “She is the first woman of color that is running in this.”
Sellers later acknowledged his mistake to the CNN panel and added he “should say she’s a governor of color.”
“Did @Bakari_Sellers just call Nikki Haley a ‘white governor’? What a joke,” tweeted Haley’s communications director, Nachama Soloveichik, adding later in a statement that the former ambassador to the United Nations “won’t cave to the liberal talking heads, and that’s what voters love about her.”
Haley was elected South Carolina governor in 2010, becoming the first Asian American woman to serve as a state’s chief executive.
She had defended flying the Confederate flag at the state Capitol in Columbia, but reversed her position after the June 2015 mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Dylann Roof, who had posted photos of himself online posing with a handgun next to the Confederate battle flag, murdered nine members of the church following a Bible study session, including a senior pastor and state senator.
He is serving nine consecutive life sentences in prison.
“This was an issue about race that required leadership at the time. She was the governor. She stepped up at the time. And did something that was very valuable,” Sellers said on the CNN panel, before pivoting to attack the former governor.
“She didn’t take it down. The blood of nine people took it down. But the fact that she’s not able to bridge that gap — and [Sen.] Tim [Scott] doesn’t do it either — where we have an issue about systemic racism or race in this country. That’s in my spirit,” he added.
Scott last month launched his bid for the presidency at an event in North Charleston, sharing his personal story of success as the son of a single mother raised in poverty who now serves as the only black Republican in the US Senate.
He hit President Biden and the “radical left” in his campaign launch for fostering racially divisive policies based on “grievance” rather than “greatness.”
Haley and Scott are polling in third and sixth place in the GOP primary at 4.4% and 1.6% support, respectively, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
Former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are leading the field at 53.2% and 22.4%, respectively.
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