Why is Kristi Noem still humiliating herself?

The biggest question in politics right now has to be: why is Kristi Noem doing this to herself?

Let’s do a quick recap. The South Dakota governor is your classic Tea Party-era politician, running for Congress in 2010 and beating an incumbent Democrat. When she arrived in Washington, she was a reliable Republican vote for the anti-Obama House majority — anti-tax, pro-Keystone, anti-abortion, pro-balanced budget, drill baby drill. Her congressional career was pretty unremarkable. She decided after winning reelection in 2016 to run for governor — and won handily despite doing it in a tougher year for Republicans across the board.

Winning the governorship elevated Noem’s national profile and the quick follow-on of the Covid pandemic raised her even higher. Noem emphasized the need to keep the state open, pushing back against calls for lockdown that were, at that point, bipartisan. She refused to implement distancing or mask mandates and bucked pressure on a number of issues. If you asked average conservatives in the middle of 2020 who the best governors in the country were on policy decisions, the answer would probably be Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp and Noem. 

After winning re-election, she embarked on what might be considered an odd but perhaps savvy ad campaign nationally, advertising South Dakota jobs on TV and YouTube in commercials where she stars as an ambassador for her state. On the national level, they read as an appeal for name ID aimed at Mar-a-Lago. On paper, Noem sets up as a top-tier vice presidential candidate for Donald Trump: a telegenic female Gen X governor with a solid record, who has navigated the abortion issue and spoken about it publicly and has that Western Yellowstone flair which is so in vogue right now. She might not be a favorite for the job, but worst-case scenario, she’s your next interior secretary or head of the NRA. And perhaps in 2028, she can run a more conservative version of the Nikki Haley playbook and gain traction.

Forget all of the above. She’s toast. Absolutely toast. And she did it to herself, and — bizarrely — continues to do it to herself. Since launching her book, Noem has received a deluge of attacks for her anecdote about shooting her fourteen-month-old dog Cricket, a story that no thinking politician would put to the page. If deciding to out yourself as the killer of a healthy pup is not enough, the book also contains obviously false anecdotes including a prominent one about meeting Kim Jong-un. 

Noem is trying desperately to spin this as some kind of “her versus the media” conflict, but she purportedly wrote these things herself. Of course, she didn’t — she had a ghostwriter, who you have to feel is going to be collateral damage to this whole situation. But back to the original question: why is Noem still engaging in this Bataan death march of media hits? What can she possibly have to gain? Her spin on both these stories — that the dog story shows toughness, that the Kim Jong-un anecdote will be removed for “undisclosed reasons” — are not things people will actually find believable.

In the social media age, there’s an idea that all the attention you get is good attention. But that’s just not true in this case. Noem has taken a promising career with relatively few critics on the right, lit it on fire, dumped gasoline on it and then launched a mini-nuke directly into the air. Some politicians destroy themselves with gaffes that happen in the moment — the Dean scream, Rick Perry’s oops — but Noem decided to put these things in her book, recorded the audio version herself and only has herself to blame for what this does to her future.

American politics — we’re not sending our best.