It would have violated the first rule of campaign memoirs: Do no harm.
"The ongoing Noem spectacle is, to put it mildly, not the kind of roll-out that typically accompanies a look-at-me book by a national-politics wannabe," writes Michael Schaffer. | Jamaal Turner/U.S. Army Reserve. His Capital City column chronicles the inside conversations and big trends shaping Washington politics.
What it didn’t do, of course, was spark a weeklong news cycle — and a round of obituaries for that same political future — by including a tale about Noem leading a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket to a gravel pit and shooting him to death after he ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbor’s chickens.
The ongoing Noem spectacle is, to put it mildly, not the kind of roll-out that typically accompanies a look-at-me book by a national-politics wannabe. But it is an interesting window into the Washington industry of pre-campaign memoirs — where the goal of defining a brand is often at odds with the goal of producing interesting copy, and where nobody puts a great deal of emphasis on quality control or literary drama.
But just because they’re not usually meant to be read doesn’t mean they’re not meant to be purchased. Especially now, in an age when the line between cable-TV political provocateur and actual elected official has blurred, a book by a telegenic rising political star might sell for the same reason as a book by a talking-head figure like Mark Levin: People buy it as a sort of tribal emblem for their politics.bestseller list, an easy win for its publisher.
Ordinarily, few of the players have much motivation to care about excellence. For the publisher, it’s the politician’s name that’s going to make a book sell or flop. For an ambitious pol trying to build a brand, repeating political nostrums often seems a better way to do so than pushing the literary envelope.
is all about Beltway lit, has argued that campaign books are a place pols tell on themselves by the way they shade things or position stories. But that requires a kind of delving between the lines that for most civilians is different from actually reading for pleasure.
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