Republican state Rep. Nikki Haley won her party’s nomination for governor largely by pointing the dual barrels of transparency and accountability directly at her adversaries and firing away. But as she’s entered the general election against Democratic Sen. Vincent Sheheen, the Lexington Republican now appears to have found herself knocked off balance by the recoil.

The narrative beginning to stick to her campaign: Does Haley walk the walk?

Last week, Sheheen released a decade’s worth of income tax returns to reporters that showed how much he and his wife had earned in the past 10 years and how much they’d given to charity. He challenged Haley to do the same.

It wasn’t the first time Haley had been asked for them.

In a June interview with The State newspaper, Haley called releasing that much information “excessive.” She ended up releasing some tax records later that month, but only hours before voters were to go to the polls for her June 22 runoff against Congressman Gresham Barrett.

In those documents, reporters found she’d been paid more than $40,000 by the engineering firm Wilbur Smith Associates. The firm later told CNN it hired Haley because of her “connections” and “access” to influential people.

It seemed exactly the kind of thing Haley had railed against on the stump.

When asked to clarify her position on transparency in April, Haley campaign manager Tim Pearson said it was important to note that being a legislator is a part-time job, with compensation to match, and so legislators have to have other forms of income.

“Therefore, the state needs income disclosures to ensure it is public who else is paying them,” he said.

The natural question, then, is why did she wait until the day before the vote to release her own sources of income?

Haley was also recently challenged for having a rubber ruler when it comes to how she measures transparency. A strongly worded July 11 editorial in The State accused her of hiding behind a legislative loophole that exempts legislators from having to release their State House emails under the state’s open records laws.

The married mother of two refused to release her emails in the wake of accusations by a blogger that the two had been romantically involved, calling it a distraction to her campaign.

Sid Bedingfield, a USC broadcasting and telecommunications professor and the former head of CNN’s U.S. network, recalled a similar issue involving Haley that he expected would have been brought up more in her primary campaign. While Haley often said she’d voted against accepting federal stimulus dollars, she had actually voted twice for accepting the money before voting against it.

Bedingfield says the recent branding of her campaign by her critics is something Haley had better deal with quickly and decisively or else it could turn into a larger problem. 

“You sort of put that with the stimulus vote, with the Wilbur Smith money, and it all begins to build a potential case, a narrative that suggests that maybe she doesn’t do what she says,” Bedingfield says. “If that narrative really begins to take hold — the idea that she says one thing and does the other — that could be really damaging to her.”

For her part, Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey responded to criticism of the campaign with a swipe at Sheheen.

“Until he is willing to release a full client list naming all those who have paid him for his work as a trial lawyer, Mr. Sheheen will continue to keep the public in the dark regarding the most important aspect of his income — where it comes from,” Godfrey says.

But Sheheen campaign manager Trav Robertson shot back.

“Obviously, Ms. Haley’s campaign needs a refresher course on ethics laws, which prevents the release of client information,” he said. “Haley is the candidate who did not disclose that she received a secret payment of $40,000 from a company that profited from her role as legislator … it is another glaring example of Ms. Haley’s hypocrisy — she says one thing and does another.”