Kristi Noem's Political Career Just Took a Big Hit | Opinion

Say what you will about the Bidens, but when their dog Commander went on a White House biting spree, they didn't walk him out to the South Lawn for a summary execution.

There are differences one can find between Commander, a German Shepherd sent to live in a less stressful environment, and Cricket, a 14-month-old female wirehair pointer who took a bullet from South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—a story the governor shares with baffling enthusiasm in an upcoming book.

There are also differences between the scenes of the two dogs' crimes—the hardscrabble prairie of the Dakotas, where Noem delivered the harsh sentence some 20 years ago, and the modern-day White House, a building she may now never occupy as a result.

Political-year memoirs are designed to deliver one message: "Look how awesome I am." They are usually a chore to navigate, thick with self-congratulation and sparse in newsmaking revelations. In that regard, you have to hand it to the governor for sparking days of buzz ahead of the release of No Going Back. The problem is, the title proves ironically prophetic as she watches her political aspirations collapse amid a stunning failure to read the room.

America isn't buying her testimony on the gravity of Cricket's sins.

City and suburban dog owners would do well to grasp that in our rural hinterlands, harsh fates sometimes await dogs who pose a danger to people or an impediment to the function of a farm or ranch environment. That said, Noem's book doesn't exactly paint a picture of Cujo terrorizing the landscape.

The governor describes an unfortunate hunt where Cricket not only failed to show the required disciplined attention to pheasants, but directed her appetites instead toward some neighbor's chickens on the way home. Embarrassing for Noem, I'm sure, but she doesn't exactly stoke support for the death penalty by describing the pup as "the picture of pure joy...going out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds, and having the time of her life." Maybe it's just me, but I do not read that passage and think, "This dog has to die."

Yes, Cricket did nip at Noem as she tried to corral her canine exuberance that day, but even that will not lead readers to nod approvingly as she concludes, "I hated that dog," calling her "untrainable," "less than worthless," and "dangerous to anyone she came in contact with."

"At that moment," Noem writes, "I realized I had to put her down."

Pause for a moment and consider not only that she did it, but that she is so proud of it that she touts it two decades later in a book clearly designed to boost her chances at the vice presidency, if not an even higher office. Then consider that a collection of editors and the governor's own advisers thought this would be a great thing to share in the thick of a fateful political year.

It takes a special blindness to miss the obvious revulsion this story would provoke across political and cultural lines. Part of the chorus of reaction has come from pockets of the hunting and ranching communities weighing in to say yes, the occasional dog might meet such a fate under the most egregious of rural circumstances, but the bar is simply not met here.

Donald Trump may or may not have any enthusiasm for dogs, but he surely has a nose for the kind of optics disaster that should narrow his running-mate list. And if Noem has indeed put a metaphoric bullet through her short-term political prospects, it is not so much for shooting a dog when she was in her 30s. It is for revealing today that she sees America as a country that would thrill to this weird badass prairie princess act.

What was the governor thinking? Whom did she envision reading that chapter, pumping a fist, and yearning for her to be a heartbeat from the presidency? The doubling and tripling down made it worse, as she took to social media to blame softies for failing to see this as evidence of her talent for facing "painful decisions," bolstering her appeal to people who are "looking for leaders who are authentic, willing to learn from the past, and don't shy away from tough challenges." That's a lot. Does she think the imagined grit she showed in dispatching Cricket is evidence of fitness for the rigors of the world stage?

There are plenty of other pages in No Going Back that will properly describe the attributes that make Noem a good governor, and might still lead to future higher office. She has many talents, and at 52, plenty of time to get past this bump in the road. But if the "Cricket chapter" has derailed her for now, somewhere across the Rainbow Bridge, there is a wirehair pointer happily chasing birds and taking credit.

Mark Davis is a syndicated talk show host for the Salem Media Group on 660AM The Answer in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and Townhall.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.