Until I read Will’s column, the only thing I knew about North Dakota governor Doug Burgum was his gift card strategy.
Here is a taste of Will’s “Meet the unusually qualified presidential candidate you’ve never heard of“:
If he ever was a child, as that is commonly understood, the now-66-year-old must have been a handful. By the time he was a teenager, he had started a number of businesses, including a neighborhood newspaper. Later, hearing that he could make $40 cleaning a chimney in an hour, he avoided a minimum-wage job, bought a black coat and top hat and became a Dickensian chimney sweep.
After Stanford business school, there was a stint at the McKinsey consulting firm, where he had an epiphany: He saw an Apple II computer — and the future. He says he “bet the farm” (a small one bequeathed by his father), mortgaging it to help launch Great Plains Software, staffed mostly by young North Dakotans. Great Plains prospered, and Microsoft bought it for $1.1 billion. (Don’t call him a billionaire; he says he owned only 10 percent of the firm.) Microsoft hired him, and he reported directly to Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. Elected governor in 2016, he was easily reelected in 2020.
His state of 780,000 produces three barrels of oil per resident every two days. While the Biden administration begs foreign dictatorships to pump more oil, it blocks pipelines that could transport North Dakota’s oil to the West Coast, which would result in Japan signing a 20-year contract for it.
Discussing governance with Burgum is like conversing with a Gatling gun. It involves a rapid-fire fusillade of his achievements (e.g., cutting $1.7 billion from his state’s $6 billion general fund) and aspirations (e.g., ending irrational immigration policies that enable Canada to poach high-skilled immigrants whose U.S. visas have expired).
The 2024 presidential election will, he thinks, be decided in 20 counties in seven swing states. Rural areas are red, metropolitan areas are blue,and the decisive demographic will be college-educated suburban women. North Dakota, however, might be the most pro-life state: The state Senate has 43 Republicans, all pro-life, and four Democrats, one of whom is pro-life. A bipartisan “trigger law,” adopted in 2007, which banned abortions except in rare cases, went into effect when Roe v. Wade was overturned. A court blocked this; the legislature modified it. Burgum, a self-described “10th Amendment guy,” would support no federal abortion statute.
If wokeness survives Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s hourly onslaughts (which DeSantis might not survive; talking smack about Bud Light is unpresidential), a President Burgum would not regard fighting it as part of his job description. He would be a presidential rarity, acknowledging the 10th Amendment. (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution … are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”) Cultural issues are, he says, irrelevant to presidential duties.
Governors, too, should tread lightly. Burgum says that if there are offensive or age-inappropriate books in a library, people should talk to the librarian or the library board. Unleash a library police force, and you will soon have a shortage of librarians.
Read the entire column here.
Please start spelling his name correctly.
Good catch. Thanks.