Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
The unusually qualified candidate you’ve never heard of
NORTH Dakota’s governor was exasperated. North Korean hackers were targeting the families of soldiers who guard the Minuteman missile silos in the state, fishing for information. Gov. Doug Burgum asked the Pentagon for help and was told that the Defense Department’s cybersecurity personnel were stretched to their capacities.
He has the impatience of someone not only knowledgeable about cyber things but whose mental processes orient him toward a future that can be, he believes, glittering — if we will just get out of our own way: “innovation, not regulation.”
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 re-elected 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.
When the Republican presidential aspirants have their first debate Aug. 23 in Milwaukee, Burgum will surely be the only participant prepared to speak about molecular biology. He has read Walter Isaacson’s book “The Code Breaker,” about DNA, gene-editing and the possibility of pharmacological and other medical wonders. These might, Burgum surmises, eliminate entire categories of diseases, which would mean an immeasurable reduction of suffering — and a fiscal crisis. Longevity is a great social achievement and a threat to Social Security and Medicare.
His past — executive success in the private and public sectors — marks him as unusually qualified for the presidency. His focus on the future — on the far horizon, not on stroking the nominating electorate’s erogenous zones — explains his regrets about today’s plebiscitary nominating process. The Democratic Party initiated this after Vice President Hubert Humphrey won its 1968 nomination without competing in any primary, and the GOP soon conformed to the proliferation of primaries.
He is sufficiently unlike the other candidates. He might be noticed in Milwaukee and gain the national attention he merits. But don’t bet the farm on it.