How Kristi Noem missed her shot to be vice-president
A failure to do things by the book
The campaign memoir is an American tradition with a few signature ingredients. These include a flattering headshot, a title superficially stirring but actually meaningless (see Kamala Harris’s “The Truths We Hold” or Ron DeSantis’s “The Courage to Be Free”) and above all a text that is gently self-congratulatory and so insipid as to be entirely unmemorable. Kristi Noem, the telegenic Republican governor of South Dakota plainly angling to be Donald Trump’s running-mate, has released her own contribution to this grand literary tradition. It succeeds on only two of these three counts: the photo looks expensively posed (with a gilt clock and feminist placard in the foreground and an American flag in background), and the title (“No Going Back”) is suitably vapid. But the contents are unfortunately memorable in the worst possible ways.
Explore more
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “She got her goat”
United States May 11th 2024
- America’s federal district courts may soon be harder to manipulate
- Plenty of circumstantial evidence at Donald Trump’s trial
- American pupils have missed too much school since the pandemic
- How Kristi Noem missed her shot to be vice-president
- Why online marketplaces have not killed the estate sale
- Will unions sweep the American South?
- Why the Republicans will convene in a forge of American socialism
More from United States
Mark Robinson has hijacked his own campaign in North Carolina
Who will go down with the would-be Republican governor?
What is the effect of the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ban?
Making sense of the drip-drip of admissions data from American universities
How the right is taking culture war to culture itself
A new “mockumentary” satirises anti-racist activism
Pennsylvania, the crucial battleground in America’s election
Buckets of money, vicious advertising and consultants galore have left the race for the state a virtual tie
Eric Adams’s friends keep having their phones taken away
It can be hard to keep track of all the people around New York’s mayor who are under investigation
Kamala Harris’s post-debate bounce is now visible in the polls
But it comes with two big caveats