At least Nero fiddled in Rome the whole time it burned.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem chose to absent herself for a two-day trip to Washington, D.C., this week while the per capita stats placed her state No. 1 in the nation for new COVID-19 deaths and No. 2 for new infections.
Between Nov. 16 and 17, she met with a series of Trump Cabinet members who will soon be out of a job and unable to do anything for South Dakota, even if they were so inclined. One thing they could do was provide Noem an opportunity for Noem to post pictures of her meeting with them when she could have been back home addressing a crisis.
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The main event of her visit was an invitation from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to address the new Republican members of Congress in a hall at the Capitol. She was, of course, maskless, as were the others in attendance, though they were seated at an approximation of social distancing.
“To the next generation of Republicans in Congress, remember where you came from,” tweeted this one-time congresswoman, now a governor who had left hospitals crowded with the sick and dying to travel 1,486 miles from her state’s capital to tweet about not forgetting the folks back home. She also tweeted a photo of her and her husband, Bryon Noem, chilling with McCarthy in his office.
“Thanks @GOPLeader for inviting me to speak to the new members and for hanging out with me and Bryon!” she tweeted.
While they were hanging out in the Capitol, the COVID-19 dead back home came to include 72-year-old William “Buck” Timmins of Mitchell, a legendary teacher and sports referee at the local high school. He died having achieved statewide renown for bringing decency and fairness to the field and for mentoring fledgling referees in doing the same.
“He wasn’t doing any of this stuff for the money and the glory or anything like that,” Cory Aadland, the Mitchell High School activities director, told the town newspaper. “He just wanted to give back. He enjoyed kids. He spent his entire life in education and this was just another way for him to continue giving back to high school sports and young kids.”
Aadland added, “He was kind of one of those quiet, behind-the-scenes-types of guys. He did so much for a lot of people around the state.”
You would hope that such a man would warrant a condolence visit by his governor to his grieving family and maybe the school where he worked. The hospital workers who fought to save him and are fighting to save others could also use some support. All those who are suffering deserve to know their governor is not going to jet off at such a time to further her political fortunes.
A glimpse of Noem’s ultimate ambition came back in September, when a 32-year-old New Hampshire political consultant named Shaun Doherty received a call from a number he did not recognize on his phone’s display. He answered and heard a woman's voice.
“I think she said, ‘This is Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota,’” Doherty told The Daily Beast on Thursday.
Noem made clear that she was aware of a nascent Kristi Noem for President 2024 effort that Doherty had started on various social media sites back in April.
“‘I’m just setting out to make you and everyone else proud, and I promise not to screw up,’ that was basically what she told me,” Doherty recalled.
By any reasonable measure, Noem quickly broke her promise, continuing to oppose mask mandates and shutdowns even as her state became one of the hottest hotspots in the nation. Noem also saw no problem in leaving South Dakota when it was in crisis in October so she could campaign for President Donald Trump in other states. She went to Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, and Florida, where she gave a keynote speech at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
Anyone contemplating a future presidential run is quick to take opportunities to visit the state with the first primary, and Noem made multiple appearances in New Hampshire. Her decision to choose livelihood over lives and reject shutdowns enabled her to cite South Dakota’s low unemployment rate. She said at one point that she paid no particular attention to the statistics for COVID-19 back home.
“We today in South Dakota, we never talked about how many cases we had of COVID-19,” she said during an Oct. 15 appearance with Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski, who would himself become a COVID-19 case a month later. “We never focused on that. Science says we can’t stop the virus. We know we can’t stop it.”
Doherty attended one of Noem’s events in Manchester. He heard a cry from among the audience.
“Somebody actually yelled out, ‘We needed you to run for president [in] 2024,’” Doherty remembered.
Doherty, who briefly saw Noem backstage, said he understood the need to be a touch circumspect about this Noem 2024 effort when she was in the midst of boosting Trump 2020.
“I kept it very simple about the possibility of her running for president,” Doherty recalled. “I said, ‘Sometime in the future when the election’s over and this has calmed down, I’d like to speak with you about this.’ She said, ‘I’d love to speak with you sometime.’”
Noem continued on and remained true to the Trump base even as the virus spiked nationwide, and dramatically in South Dakota.
In a Nov. 13 tweet, she voiced approval of the Sioux Falls Stampede hockey team scheduling a game in an indoor arena where the first 1,000 kids under 12 would get a souvenir jersey but masks were not required in stands and social distancing was only provided on request.
“Here in South Dakota, we’re proving that we can still hold events responsibly,” she tweeted. “Safe family entertainment.”
The deaths in South Dakota continued to mount, coming to include the high school sports official Timmins, who died on Nov. 16. Noem was hanging out in the nation’s capital that day and the next, boosting herself as he and at least 29 other of her constituents died. She tweeted a picture of a rosy dawn when she returned to her virus-torn state.
“Beautiful morning…” she wrote.
The governor of North Dakota had finally agreed to institute a mask mandate, but Noem stood firm. She expressed concern that those who shun masks were being treated unfairly by those who wear them. Her reasoning no doubt appealed to what is becoming the Noem base.
“You may choose to wear a mask and be concerned about the virus, and if people are scared, I’m going to recommend that they should stay home,” she began.
But, she said, those who are not concerned about the virus and choose not to wear a mask should be treated “with respect.”
“Understand they are making a personal decision,” she said. “And if we don’t want to be around them we have the opportunity to do that as well.”
She might as well have said that we should treat with respect somebody who chooses to endanger others by driving the wrong way on a highway and that anybody who feels threatened by that has an opportunity just to stay home.
“I think in South Dakota we can take a different approach than we’re seeing across the nation,” she concluded.
As South Dakota marked its 67,742nd case on Thursday, nobody expected her to join the bipartisan Zoom meeting of governors with President-elect Joe Biden on how best to address the pandemic.
She was busy further advertising herself with a midday tweet that made no mention of the 705 lives lost on her watch so far.
“GREAT NEWS South Dakota’s unemployment rate dropped to 3.6 percent in October!”
