Read excerpts from Newsweek’s coverstory, “Woman On the Verge”:

…Haley is attractive and earthy, with a gleaming smile and a steely resolve…Haley comes across as sharp and articulate. She’s remarkably poised for someone fairly new to politics…“I want you to feel good about your governor,” she said to one guest after another, managing to make it sound heartfelt each time. They ate it up. “She brings something new to our party,” said Henry McMaster, the attorney general who lost to her in the primary and later endorsed her, in his introductory remarks. “We have a new leader for the conservative movement in this country, right here in South Carolina.” …

Haley shies away from talk of breaking racial and gender barriers. She says she’s proud of her heritage and of the accomplishments of Indian-Americans—their educational attainment, their income levels, their philanthropy. But that’s about as far as she’ll go. “Everybody else is looking at this to be something special,” she told me. But “there was actually nothing special about this at all.” Pressed on the matter, she allowed that “the fact that I happen to be an Indian female, of course that brings a new dynamic. But what I hope it does is cause a conversation in this state where we no longer live by labels, but we live by philosophies.”…

Haley says her political beliefs were shaped by her experience working in the family company. “I’m an accountant and a small-business person who saw how hard it was to make a dollar and how easy it was for government to take it,” she says. …