I’m liking Nikki Haley more and more. Nothing becomes her more than staying in the presidential race.
In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Senator Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) says, “You think I’m licked. You all think I’m licked. Well, I am not licked! I’ll stay and fight for this lost cause. Even if this room gets filled with lies like these—and the Taylors and all their armies come marching into this place. Somebody will listen to me.”
Eighty-five years later, Nikki Haley on Saturday received two out of five South Carolina votes. Might she get to three in some Super Tuesday race a week from today? Yesterday Haley campaigned in Michigan, with—according to The New York Times— “little to no momentum.” Americans for Prosperity Action, the political network created by the billionaire Koch brothers, has given up on her.
Nevertheless, Haley fights on, saying she is “talking about the heart and soul of our country.” In the movie, Jefferson Smith tells his fellow Senators of a camp that would “get boys out of the crowded cities… build their bodies and minds for man-sized jobs. They’ll be behind these desks someday.” Haley speaks of America’s young people: “All they feel is anger and chaos…. I’ll keep fighting until the American people close the door.”Â
Is her campaign a lost cause? Some Southerners after the Civil War called their defeat “the lost cause,” but Clarence Darrow, Winston Churchill, and others reclaimed the term and added to it an imperative, saying, “Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.” French novelist Maurice Druon used that sentence and combined it with, “But the future is long and lies in God’s hands.” Â
### Marvin Olasky is the author of Moral Vision: Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden