A few weeks ago, Asian American candidate Nikki Haley was little known outside South Carolina. Now she is at the center of sensational sexual allegations--and the subject of increasingly vicious racial attacks.

Haley is the leading Republican candidate for governor of South Carolina. She is a Tea Party darling and won a high-profile endorsement from Sarah Palin. But what brought her national notoriety was the stunning claim by a conservative blogger and former colleague that he had an affair with Haley. Another Republican lobbyist has subsequently claimed that he had a "one-night stand" with Haley. Haley has vehemently denied both charges.

Like most people, I knew nothing about Haley until the scandal made headlines. In browsing coverage of the story, I was stunned to see racial slurs peppering the comment boxes. I looked into it and learned that Haley is the daughter of Sikh immigrants and the first South Asian American to hold state office in South Carolina.

But anonymous YouTube commenters have got nothing on South Carolina state senator Jake Knotts, a Republican who supports one of Haley's rivals and who made racist remarks about Haley (and President Obama) in a radio broadcast:

She's a f---ing raghead...We already got one raghead in the White House; we don't need another in the governor's mansion.

Knotts's mind-blowing remarks are like Racism for Dummies: take one false and bigoted notion (President Obama is a "secret Muslim"), add in a dash of cultural ignorance (Islamic turban = Sikh turban), and mash together into one big mess of racist crazy.

Now, Haley's ideology isn't going to win her any progressive friends. She is a hard-right conservative who opposes health care reform, abortion rights, and gun control, who voted to refuse federal stimulus dollars, and who supports harsh anti-immigrant legislation, while packaging these positions in a telegenic presence reminiscent of Sarah Palin (as Josh Marshall observes, Haley's "got the makings of a national politician"). But the racist attacks on Haley should be universally condemned, and they provide a particularly ominous reminder of the hazards faced by Asian Americans in politics.

While Knotts's slur was widely reported, it wasn't even the craziest part of his racist rant. He also advanced this bizarre conspiracy theory: 

Knotts says he believed Haley has been set up by a network of Sikhs and was programmed to run for governor of South Carolina by outside influences in foreign countries.

It's hard not to laugh at this, even as it gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The "Manchurian Candidate" narrative of insidious Asian influences on American politics has been with us for decades, and it is all too often used to delegitimize Asian Americans' participation in politics. Knotts's paranoia is, after all, little different from the WWII-era logic that insisted that Japanese Americans must be agents of a foreign power and hence had to be sent to internment camps.

And it's this idea--that the Asian American remains perpetually a foreigner, and hence a threat to America--that underlies the fear and hatred in Knotts's remarks. Here's Knotts's final jaw-dropping salvo:

She’s a raghead that’s ashamed of her religion trying to hide it behind being Methodist for political reasons...We need a good Christian to be our governor. She’s hiding her religion. She ought to be proud of it. I’m proud of my god.

Wow. You could write a book about the ways in which that statement's insane. What's beneath it is the idea that Haley is "hiding" her true origins, her true beliefs and her true nature behind the cloak of Christianity. If we probe more deeply into the seemingly un-Christian assertion that the convert cannot be a "real" Christian (Haley attends a Methodist church and states on her website that "My faith in Christ has a profound impact on my daily life"), we see that it's yet another claim for the Asian American's foreignness: having been born a Sikh, Haley can never be anything else. I'm sadly reminded of the notorious editorial published in the LA Times about Japanese Americans in 1942:

A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched...So, a Japanese American born of Japanese parents, nurtured upon Japanese traditions...grows up to be a Japanese, and not an American...

And of course, such charges of foreignness are not limited to Asian Americans. It's no accident that Knotts paired Haley and President Obama. We can all recall how Obama had to defend his faith against those who charged he was not a true Christian, and we continue to see (through the crazies of the "birther" movement) how such attacks are also attacks on Obama's Americanness. (Haley, following Obama, has felt compelled to put on her website a section titled, "Is Nikki a Christian?")

It would be easy enough to dismiss Knotts as a racist nutcase, and other Republicans have called on him to apologize. But just as attacks on Obama that began on the extreme right eventually became mainstream, Knotts's remarks have opened the door for other conservatives to question Haley's beliefs and heritage. The same day that Knotts made his remarks, CBN's David Brody published a piece charging that Haley has, over the course of her career, gradually changed her image to reflect a "more Christian tone." While claiming not to be "questioning her Christian beliefs," Brody--like Knotts--suggests that Haley has gradually erased evidence of her Sikh heritage for political purposes. Reposting the story, David Frum put it more bluntly: "Nikki Haley Donwplays Sikh Background." The implication, again, is that Haley's all-American Christian image is a ruse designed to hide her true origins. (The narrative seems to be taking hold: Politics Daily columnist David Gibson headlines that Haley "Stresses Christian Faith Over Sikh Heritage.")

Despite the controversy, Haley may well win the primary on Tuesday, which would make her the odds-on favorite to become the next governor of South Carolina. What are the larger implications for Asian Americans in politics? Although the Asian American population as a whole leans strongly Democratic, the nation's most prominent South Asian American politician is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a conservative Republican. Whether or not Haley is able to replicate Jindal's success will tell us a lot about the future of Asian Americans and the Republican Party. Can Asian American politicians win over white conservatives through hard-right policies and expressions of Christian faith (Jindal, too, has spoken frequently of his conversion to Christianity)? Or will Asian Americans always find themselves under suspicion by the Jake Knottses of our country, who will see them as irredeemable foreigners and a threat to America?

[Note: SALDEF, the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, is asking people to sign a petition condemning Jake Knotts's racist remarks.]