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In a video that went viral, Kristi Noem, a candidate in the race for governor of South Dakota and a member of Congress, outlined a poem she learned about the shortcomings of others in elementary school. The poem is likely a reference to the the weekly time slot in a Saturday school detention, where students at Jefferson Elementary in Capital, S.D., would recite the names of fellow students they believed to have wronged them. Then they would take a walk around the playground to practice confrontation, cadence and tone. If the situation weren’t so violent, it would probably only be a lesson plan from your high school teacher, but you’re an aspiring state leader, so this is a big deal.
Still, the video wasn’t about Noem’s time in elementary school as much as it was about Noem’s time in college, and how she’s used that experience to decide whether the United States is a good country.
“When you attend an institution with people who speak many different languages, talk about many different ways of life, you can’t help but look around, you say to yourself, all the world’s a place that we want to know,” Noem wrote. “I think about how it feels to be a refugee from a war-torn land. I think about how it feels to be a refugee from a tyranny that concerned our nation for years. I think about how it feels to be a refugee and how those refugees shaped who we’ve become as Americans.”
That’s at least what she was trying to say. It took her a few lines to get there.
Noem has a reputation as a great speaker, someone who can turn a classroom into Vanderbilt Stadium on election day. She’s also a registered nurse, which is something she reminded her audience in October that she was when she brought up to the podium. But in the video that will go viral unless it’s taken down by YouTube, we saw neither the elegant woman with her hands over her heart, nor her smiling face flashing on the big screen, but most of all, she looked like Kristi Noem — not the candidate that has to keep up with the Kavanaugh judiciary but the country-schoolboy who got in trouble at Saturday school.
There are a few steps you can take to avoid falling into the Kristi Noem trap.
First, avoid reciting the same poem over and over to pageants of children. If Kristi Noem really wanted to make a difference, she would have reread that poem to a new generation of students — perhaps in a nursing role, where her biggest accomplishment happens to be making herself comfortable while traveling to and from speaking gigs. She would have explained to some class at some hospital the path to becoming a Republican state leader in elementary school and woven her experience into lofty, loftier campaign speeches.
Second, listen out for students asking poetic questions. According to Noem, she and her classmates were asked by their parents whether they felt American once they learned the poem. “And the reason I share this with you tonight,” she explained to a boisterous audience, “is that I think to this day, there is a debate in our country over how to bring our country back to a time when we’re not so angry and so divided that we can’t talk to each other about anything anymore.”
Noem’s reply wasn’t an endorsement of hate and division but a plug for her policy proposals. “I will go to the Capitol and I will fight until my dying day to make sure we put America first and are not divided in the process,” she said.
But not the hundreds of thousands of young people asking if they’re not American because Noem isn’t going to listen to them.
The poem’s last version is indefensible. You could consider it a short man’s burden. Noem spent 13 years teaching that poem, or that’s what it seemed like. But only once did she make it interesting and listen to others. She was learning an old decay-modem protocol to send a message about a sinister plot in New York. You could ask whether she had begun her political career in elementary school, before the restoration of the old playbook in favor of the new one, or whether she needed to hold a second job as an elementary school teacher if she wished to run for office as an elected official. But it’s probably not right to attack her in elementary school.
The more likely interpretation is that, in her time in elementary school, Noem got to tell a poem about being in trouble for saying something bad about someone else. She produced the poem, a few lines about a bullied kid, as evidence that the students in her school weren’t afraid to express their personal experience. And somehow, instead of condemning the students for their behavior or questioning whether their behavior was wrong, we’re going to celebrate their storytelling prowess.
That’s a nice theatrical touch. But not a great preamble for a political career, particularly if Noem is using her elementary school experience to try and win votes. (“Remember when you were a kid, and you saw your parents make pizzas, and you’d pick up the caller ID, and you’d call it up, and you only remembered their name because it was so weird?” she said. “My gran told me that. She didn’t get my name until she was 22.”)
Maybe Kristi Noem is going to go on to do great things as a state leader. Maybe Kristi Noem is going to discover that there’s more to life than the glassy-eyed stare of teenagers in detention. Maybe Kristi Noem is going to talk to some real victory bars and give some real speeches. But there’s no evidence in her elementary school days that she’s got any grown-up experiences to share — other than one video that’s going viral.
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