Washington, Jan 20 (IANS): White House hopeful Nikki Haley has said that "America is not prejudiced against colour", while projecting both incumbent President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump as the "twin threats to democracy" to win New Hampshire where a significant number of independent voters will get to choose their representative in the primaries.
"What I want to do is be strong. We won't know what strong looks like until those numbers come in," she said at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, the media reported.
Haley's personal goal is to do better than she did in Iowa -- where she finished in third place, 32 points behind Trump and 2 points behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in the state's caucuses on Monday.
Polls, however, show she is much closer to Trump in New Hampshire, where she is expected to benefit from a more moderate Republican primary electorate — with undeclared voters participating in Tuesday's contest.
"America has never been a racist country," she told a Fox interview earlier this week. She was asked if she believed if the Republican party was racist.
She said she had grown up in a rural county in South Carolina where she experienced racist tendencies. But her parents inculcated the faith in her that America is not a racist country.
"If my parents had not done that, then every black or brown child would not have had a chance in America," she said, pointing to her own success as becoming both a minority South Carolina Governor and Trump's appointee as the UN Ambassador.
Haley said her achievements would not have been possible if America had not been founded on the equity principle that is all men are created equal.
"The intent was to do the right thing," she said of the country's founding.
"Now, did they have to go fix it along the way? Yes, but I don't think the intent was ever that we were going to be a racist country."
"We had plenty of racism that we had to deal with, but my parents never said we lived in a racist country, and I am so thankful they didn't," Haley said.
Haley pointed to her own achievements of becoming one of the first female minority governors in the country and later Trump's US Ambassador to the UN.
She echoed comments she has made on the campaign trail that too many Americans have a "national self loathing" even though the US is not "racist" but "blessed", CNN that organised the town hall meetings reported.
Haley turned up the dial on another issue frequently tying Trump to President Joe Biden and portraying the pair as twin threats to progress and national unity.
"Do we really want to have two 80-year-old running for president when we have a country in disarray and a world on fire?" she said, before making an equivalence between Trump's legal troubles and the controversies around Biden.
"They are so distracted by their own investigations and their own grievances," Haley said.
"We don't need people that are distracted. We need people who love America, realise that if your time is gone, move out of the way and let a new generational leader come in."
Haley has built up the narrative that she is not simply the alternative to Trump or Biden, but to the whole milieu of modern politics – a "generational" and temperamental change who everyone can get behind, media reports said.