Absentee Governor Kristi Noem’s vagabond hawkery for fascist stupidity has made quite an impression on outside observer Mike McFeely. In a Tuesday column in the Fargo-Moorhead Inforum, the 30-plus-year journalist says Noem has turned her back on South Dakota to boost her own fortunes:
A list compiled by Forum News Service South Dakota news director Jeremy Fugleberg shows Noem traveling to at least nine states on 12 occasions over the past two months. And those are just the out-of-state trips the public knows about. There might be more.
…She is as cynical and opportunistic as a politician could be, shirking her responsibilities as governor as she’s seen a political door swing open because of a pandemic that’s killed 323 South Dakotans and 220,000 Americans.
…Noem doesn’t see COVID as a crisis, only a brand-building opportunity. She has, from the beginning, dismissed the pandemic as a nothingburger. She’s followed the Trump playbook, and therefore the Republican playbook, line for line. With her T-shirt sales, Noem is even cashing in on the denial.
Even as virus numbers swell and hundreds remain hospitalized [Mike McFeely, “Where in the World Is Kristi Noem as Covid Surges? Likely Not South Dakota,” Fargo-Moorhead Inforum, 2020.10.20].
Noem’s wandering doesn’t appear to be making much of a difference for Il Duce, GOP pollster Frank Luntz, whom Noem has praised for helping her team communicate her message to South Dakotans (?), said Tuesday that Trump’s campaign is “the worst campaign I’ve ever seen…. They’re on the wrong message. They’ve got their heads up their asses” and says no amount of campaigning can make up for Trump’s disastrous performance unless he pulls off some miraculous knockout against Joe Biden in tonight’s debate. McFeely lists nine states that Noem is known to have visited in the last two months, and in Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, Biden is polling either as strongly as or more strongly than he was on September 1.
But Noem’s travels have increased her campaign fundraising from $136K in the four and a half months before this spring’s quiet primary to more than $850K between May 17 and October 14. And for Kristi, that’s likely all that matters—not friends and neighbors who are dying, not businesses and churches and that are facing long-term financial woes and closure because Noem won’t take actions proven to control the pandemic, and probably not even the pageantmaster in the White House who has given her this opportunity. She’ll just keep cranking up the bus (and the conflict, which is attention, which is influence…) and looking for brighter lights, bigger crowds, and bigger payoffs than she could ever find in South Dakota.
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I just wonder what it will take for our Governess to pay attention to her only job here in her home state. People here are suffering. Not just old people – as if that would excuse their suffering – but hundreds upon thousands of us who need help. Leadership is needed most when people are in a crisis situation, and no one can honestly look at the situation in our state and deny that we are facing a crisis.
Perhaps South Dakota State, which is a good school, can withdraw her degree, since she is the anti science, anti fact, enabler of Mr Trump‘s death cult. When these cynical Republicans abandoned principled conservatism for cruel populism and national socialism it ruined the party. Governor Noem has received 4.5 million in socialist subsidies for her family’s farm and ranch. Not freedom first. Sarah Palin #2