Kristi Noem really loved that puppy murdering story
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…
It’s been a busy week for that communications team, and not just for Cricket-related reasons. The book’s fact-checking has also been called into question: Last week, the Dakota Scout reported on a passage of the book in which Noem claims to have met the dictator of North Korea while she was serving as a backbencher in Congress. The improbable meeting never happened.
That first book did very well, setting her up as a national figure. Now she has a different team and a new right wing imprint. Apparently, they agreed with her assessment that dog-killing is an awesome way to demonstrate blood-thirsty Trumpism — and Trumpian lies — and they let her freak flag fly.
She has said that there will be corrections, implying that she knew nothing about this, but has no explanation as to why she read the book aloud for he audio book and didn’t correct it then.
The author of this piece is a political editor at Politico and he goes in depth into the world of campaign books and it’s pretty gross. You should read it all.
Noem’s new book — which doesn’t officially publish until May 7 — meets that standard: Whatever you think of putting down a dog for attacking a neighbor’s chickens, the decision to keep the story in the book also seems to show a political culture so devoted to shocking establishment nostrums that it fails to recognize how loving dogs is a pretty mainstream piece of American culture. (I wrote an entire book about the lengths Americans will go to for their pets, and found it’s the rare factor in our national life that knows no party.)
And beyond the Cricket story, possibly making up an easily disprovable memory about meeting Kim Jong Un — or else confusing one of the world’s most recognizable tyrants with some random other person — is a quality-control problem altogether different from the usual one in which pols fill books with lame cliches. Newspapers and magazines stand behind the things they put out, but in book-publishing, the veracity of a work is entirely on the writer.
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If I were editing a memoir by some public figure in or out of politics, and it included a story about intentionally killing their dog, I would absolutely include it — it’s a fascinatingly unusual tale, so different from the typical self-aggrandizing autobiographer, one that raises huge questions and reveals something about character. I bet audiences would agree.Of course, thinking of the audience in terms of readers rather than voters is why I’m a writer, not a PR ace.
It remains to be seen if this brouhaha turns the book into a best seller and if it does you can bet the publisher will be happy about it. I assumed that Noem’s political career has been grievously harmed by this and not just because of the book but because of her bizarre media appearances trying to defend it. However, I must admit that I’m not entirely sure about it now. Trump effusively praised her over the weekend and Fox didn’t seem overly concerned. This may just make her more beloved than ever among the MAGA cultists because she’s seen as really sticking it to the libs, especially when she said Biden’s dog should be shot as well. Of course, a lot of MAGAs also love their dogs so who knows?
And there’s also the fact that she’s a woman and GOP women are always trying to walk that line between being hard and remaining feminine. Her Real Housewife of Mar-a-Lago makeover was designed to give her cover for the latter but puppy killing may have veered too far into the “hard” category.
In a normal world, this wouldn’t be a question and my instinct has been to say that she’s toast. But now I’m wondering. Could it make her more popular than ever? It’s actually possible.