South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem criticized excerpts from former President Barack Obama’s soon-to-be-released memoir, calling it a “ridiculous message.”
“What a ridiculous message,” the South Dakota Republican tweeted Thursday in response to an excerpt from Obama’s latest book, “A Promised Land,” posted at The Atlantic. “Obama had 8 years, including 2 with full control of Congress. He sent our jobs to China, left our healthcare system in disarray, our foreign policy in shambles & our people divided. Instead of blaming Trump, Obama should consider what led to 2016.”
What a ridiculous message. Obama had 8 years, including 2 with full control of Congress. He sent our jobs to China, left our healthcare system in disarray, our foreign policy in shambles & our people divided. Instead of blaming Trump, Obama should consider what led to 2016. pic.twitter.com/9Vv4EUSbLg
— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) November 12, 2020
Obama wrote that he had planned to finish writing the memoir in a year after leaving the White House, but “didn’t fully anticipate” the “way events would unfold during the more than three and a half years.”
“The country is in the grips of a global pandemic and an accompanying economic crisis, with more than 230,000 Americans dead, businesses shuttered, and millions of people out of work,” Obama wrote. “Across the nation, people from all walks of life have poured into the streets to protest the deaths of unarmed Black men and women at the hands of the police. Perhaps most troubling of all, our democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of crisis—a crisis rooted in a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be; a crisis that has left the body politic divided, angry, and mistrustful, and has allowed for an ongoing breach of institutional norms, procedural safeguards, and the adherence to basic facts that both Republicans and Democrats once took for granted.”
In another excerpt from the book, Obama said Americans were “spooked by a black man in the White House” and partially blamed former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin for racial tension in the United States.
“Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party — xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks — were finding their way to center stage,” Obama wrote.
The 768-page memoir will be released Tuesday, Nov. 17.
