A few weeks ago, when a town-hall questioner lobbed a softball question to Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, she answered in what many pundits now claim could be the death blow to her candidacy.
“What was the cause of the Civil War?” she was asked.
And rather than giving the answer that any ten-year-old American could give, she opted instead for nuance.
The Civil War was fought over “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” she said.
Of course, Haley was right in a technical sense, because embracing or abolishing slavery was all about “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.”