Republican candidate for governor Kristi Noem is offering coattails to her downticket partner in District 1, one of the few strong Democratic districts in the state. Noem stops in Sisseton to boost her tribal relations plan and the only Republican on the District 1 House ballot, Tamara St. John:
Note: if you’re going to offer a coattail video, have the courtesy and marketing sense to say the Legislative candidate’s full name, not just the first name. And maybe instead of cutting off the Legislative candidate at the end, let her bid the viewers a pleasant farewell alongside her kind campaign partner, just to show you really care and aren’t just propping up one of the few Native people you can find in the Republican party to promote a tribal relations plan that will likely gather dust in your administration.
But those are minor production quibbles: the main point here is that the Republican gubernatorial candidate is lending Facebook-Live star power to a Legislative candidate. That’s the kind of synergy that should float all party votes.
Wingnut tribal relations plan 1) Promise to take more kids away from their Native American parents w/o cause.
2) Be sure to make it harder for Native Americans to vote
3) Ensure grant monies for tribes are fairly and equitably distributed to CoK ( cronys of Kristie) before they reach their intended beneficiaries.
4) Maintain plausible deniability in case new AG is not the unqualified toady.
Relationships with sovereign tribes are all about addiction, mental illness, denim jackets, and condescension. “They” have no other issues worth mentioning.
Makes sense for Comrade NOem to go to a strongly democratic district to blather. Notice that she also went to Hot Springs to blather about her role in getting the VA to utilize the old hospital there. Comrade NOem will do damn near anything to keep from talking to farmers about her support for the trump tariffs that are a real problem for producers. That Bribe that starts in a week or so is a pretty shaky socialist band aid for the losers of their livelihood. Kind of like sending cattle to a feed yard to fatten them before the kill.
” Farmers for Free Trade, a bipartisan campaign fighting President Donald Trump’s tariffs, has surveyed farmers throughout the United States about the trade war’s impacts. The common refrain has been that this group is worried about the long-term consequences.
While American farmers may be able to sustain their businesses in the near term, they are scared that markets where they have worked tirelessly to build relationships are now being won over by Brazil, Canada, Argentina, or Russia – among other competitors. No aid package will bring back those markets. And even if the trade war ended tomorrow, the damage to important and lucrative relationships with buyers has been done.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kincaid-tariffs-commentary/commentary-trumps-tariffs-could-cripple-american-farmers-idUSKCN1L81NX
Notice Canada listed above? I did and think that has a lot to do with trump and his bully tactics against them to bend to his will. We shall see how this all plays out with the NAFTA.
Can anybody think of a South Dakota governor who was more of a lightweight and more disinterested in serving the state than Noem?
People have criticized Rounds and Daugaard as caretaker governors, which I think is accurate. Neither one had an original thought or vision at any point in their tenures as governor. But Noem represents a lower level of capacity and temperament to become chief executive of our state.
My concern with Noem is what I’ve witnessed over the years with the power structure of lobbyists and the list of usual suspects who graze year after year on political appointments, special contracts and lobbying deals. We learned that theft in plain view involving millions of dollars can and does happen in our state government. We learned that the only reason … and somebody who knows differently, please correct me … we found out about EB-5 and GEAR UP was people died from gunfire. In both of these cases, we learned that the bilking of millions occurred over a period of years and not without being noticed by other officials who chose not to act lawfully to stop the theft and bring criminals to justice.
This happened under Gov. Mike Rounds’ administration and continued into Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s administration. I strongly suspect that Smilin’ Mike and his top aides were fully aware of what Joop Bollen, Richard Benda and others were doing under the auspices of the S.D. Board of Regents and the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. I strongly suspect that an unfettered federal investigation of activities spanning Rounds’ terms in office would yield racketeering indictments of several major officials.
The common thread between GEAR UP and EB-5 is what happens to federal pass through funds (and loosely obligated private investments obtained through a federal program) when they are received at the local level. I suspect that this abuse has gone on for a long time, and that the frequency of the occurrence is based on how much criminal minds think they can get away with.
Now that things have become quiet again and the long arm of the law has failed to produce much of a deterrent to the bigger fish, a Noem administration would be fertile ground for more criminality. With a political ham with zero prosecutorial experience like Jason Ravnsborg to serve as the major legal gatekeeper (state attorney general), there will be no resistance to that criminality to run even more rampantly than when Larry Long and Marty Jackley served.
These are the ingredients to a perfect storm.
Representative Noem – Tribes are sovereign. It’s disrespectful to refer to tribes as “Our Tribes.” The proper phrase is “The Tribes”.
You’re just irritated that the Republican candidate has coat-tails and the Democrats couldn’t even recruit one of their own to run for Lt Gov.
Your statement is false and illogical in many ways, Anne.
Billie Sutton has at least as much coattail potential as Kristi Noem, and arguably more. Sutton’s negatives are lower than Noem’s—very few people go around saying, “I just hate Billie Sutton,” but many members of Noem’s own party dislike her.
The Democrats could have recruited any number of Democrats for L.G. Team Sutton chose not to.
“You’re just irritated” suggests that said irritation is my only reason for writing this blog post. I do feel some irritation at Sutton’s choice of a lifelong Republican, but that irritation did not primarily motivate this blog post, and it did not stop me from including that Republican in my nomination of statewide candidates at our August 10 convention.
If any irritation lies behind this post, it is that Noem has the guts to go into the heart of a Democratic district and make a coattail video like this while I have not seen a comparable video from Team Sutton showing Sutton standing shoulder to shoulder with, say, Jenae Hansen in Lake Norden, or Brett Ries in Watertown, or Toni Miller in Hartford, or John Koch in Freeman, or Susan Kelts and Lilias Jarding and Pat Cromwell in Rapid City.
Running mates appear to be irrelevant to the discussion of this video. Noem doesn’t show Rhoden in this video; is he making similar videos for Legislative candidates elsewhere? (That would actually be good advertising!)