How Kristi Noem missed her shot to be vice-president

The marketing campaign memoir is an American custom with a number of signature elements. These embody a flattering headshot, a title superficially stirring however truly meaningless (see Kamala Harris’s “The Truths We Maintain” or Ron DeSantis’s “The Braveness to Be Free”) and above all a textual content that’s gently self-congratulatory and so insipid as to be totally unmemorable. Kristi Noem, the telegenic Republican governor of South Dakota plainly angling to be Donald Trump’s running-mate, has launched her personal contribution to this grand literary custom. It succeeds on solely two of those three counts: the photograph seems expensively posed (with a gilt clock and feminist placard within the foreground and an American flag in background), and the title (“No Going Again”) is suitably vapid. However the contents are sadly memorable within the worst doable methods.

Most surreal and disturbing is the story Ms Noem recounts, with some pleasure, of taking pictures considered one of her canine. Cricket, the ill-fated animal, was a 14-month-old wirehair pointer who ruined a pheasant hunt that Ms Noem had deliberate for her lodge friends. The rumbustious Cricket then completed her day by attacking some chickens (“she was a educated murderer”) and trying to chew the hand that fed her (Ms Noem’s). “I hated that canine,” the governor writes. She then decides to place her down by taking pictures her lifeless in a gravel pit.