Kristi Noem's Team Told Her to Nix the Dog Story 2 Years Ago

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

Kristi Noem’s Team Told Her to Nix the Dog Story 2 Years Ago
It would have violated the first rule of campaign memoirs: Do no harm.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/06/kristi-noem-dog-killing-story-00156290

Kristi Noem’s story about killing her dog made headlines across America. But it wasn’t news to people who worked on her first book, where the tale made it into a draft of the memoir before the publishing team nixed it.

Then, as now, Noem wanted the story in because it showed a decisive person who was unwilling to be bound by namby-pamby niceties, while others on the team — which included agents, editors and publicists at Hachette Book Group’s prestige Twelve imprint, and a ghostwriter — saw it as a bad-taste anecdote that would hurt her brand. The tale was ultimately cut, according to two people involved with the project.

In other words, they produced a typical pre-campaign book, where the first rule is to do no harm. Somewhat unusually for the genre, that book, 2022’s Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland, landed the South Dakota governor on the New York Times’ bestseller list, adding to the consensus that the Donald Trump devotee had a big future in GOP politics.


What it didn’t do, of course, was spark a weeklong news cycle — and a round of obituaries for that same political future — by including a tale about Noem leading a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket to a gravel pit and shooting him to death after he ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbor’s chickens.

This time around, Noem has a different team in place, as well as a different imprint, Hachette’s conservative-leaning Center Street. And the folks behind her new book, No Going Back, didn’t get in the way of sharing memories about gunning down an ill-trained puppy.

[tanyev]

1. And there's a very bigly audience of one she wanted to impress right now.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. I'm surprised that Noem didn't throw in a little lie such as

Cricket nipped her or bit her and she had a "reason" to shoot her, heat of the moment thing.

She's a monster for whatever reason for shooting that puppy.