"Let's Do The Time Warp Again!"

NYC homicides per 100k residents: 4.8
South Carolina homicides per 100k residents: 17.4 https://t.co/ocDt9yx13T

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 19, 2023

The people who even know where the title to this post comes from, are the people who will remember when NYC was regarded as a "hell-hole."

It was during the '80's (yes, long, long ago, children) and now I realize much of that reputation was probably due to Rudy Giuliani promising to clean up the streets ("broken windows" came along somewhere in there; maybe that was the '90's.  It was the Freakonomics (no, seriously) answer to crime:  fix broken windows and neighborhoods don't look so run down and people don't turn to crime.  Yeah, it never made much sense, but the media chased it as the new shiny object at the time, and Giuliani promoted hell out of it.  I'm quite aware Giuliani didn't become "America's Mayor" until the '90's (and especially on 9/11), but NYC had a high crime reputation in the '80's already.  I remember this distinctly because my brother moved to Brooklyn in that decade, and the Lovely Wife and I visited he and his wife over Xmas one of those years.  And we went sure we were descending into the mouth of hell and the black hole of Calcutta.

Which wasn't true at all. We spent a week, rode the subways daily into Manhattan, wandered around the city to the museums and other tourist sights (never got to the Statue, though!), attended Broadway plays and opera and even a PDQ Bach concert (you who don't know missed some brilliant musical parody and satire).  So we were out all day and all night, and only avoided the subway late at night to go back to Brooklyn by taxi (my brother was street-wise).   I've been back to NYC since, with my daughter the Golden Child, who spent a week at a summer school program there (long story).  She had a lovely time, too.  I even drove into NYC that time, and didn't have that much trouble with traffic.  So I'm not sure NYC ever was a "hell-hole."  But conservatives certainly played it that way, especially back at the end of the last century (which is getting to be more than a generation ago, now).

My point being Nikki Haley is blowing a dog-whistle for people at least this old (points at self) who remember when NYC was supposed to be Soddom and Gommorah and Belfast (during the Troubles) all in one.  My daughter, as I mentioned, spent a week there almost 15 years ago now.  She has no such impression of the city.  She enjoyed herself immensely.  She would know immediately that Nikki Haley is full of shit.  There's also the fact most people younger than Boomers (who are all OLD now) generally regard urban living as desirable, rather than as a crater filled with ghettos and crime and junkies (the other old image of NYC).  So Haley is clearly not appealing to those voters.

She's appealing to MAGA; old people and rich white people who fear a brown planet and think everybody not like them is a danger to them.  That "base" is shrinking rapidly, and never really had that much power. Were it not for the peculiarities of the American electoral system (the electoral college; gerrymandering) we'd barely know they existed.  And even with those conditions, their "power" is on the wane.

People complain that Trump is still trying to litigate the 2020 election in the impending 2024 election.  Haley is firmly facing backwards, too.

It's not a winning posture, for her or the GOP.