Presidential candidate Burgum positions himself as ‘small-town kid’

10/4/2023

Republican presidential candidate Doug Burgum, a North Dakotan with rural roots, says energy independence and strategies to develop a strong economy are central features of his campaign.

What’s more, the North Dakotan says he understands rural America as well as anyone campaigning for the Oval Office.

“I’m just a small-town kid,” Burgum says.

Burgum hails from Arthur, North Dakota, a community of about 300 people. He worked his way through college, North Dakota State University, sweeping chimneys and went on to earn a master’s in business administration from Stanford University and founded a tech company, Great Plains Software, an organization so successful that Microsoft acquired it.

He understands how the economy intersects with the lives of Americans, from people in the trades to entrepreneurs, Burgum said.

“Inflation, among all the ills, is the worst one,” the governor of North Dakota said in Denison during a meeting with local Republicans at Bella Sera restaurant.

Inflation, in essence, saps money from people’s savings accounts as they are sleeping — it’s more than just the higher cost of milk and gas in the waking and working hours, Burgum said.

Burgum said the United States cannot retreat into isolationism as the American economy is so closely tied to those of other nations.

“When we have the world’s largest economy, we make a lot of stuff that other people buy,” Burgum said.

Of the United States’ $25 trillion economy, about half of it is tied to foreign trade.

“We feed and fuel the world; that’s what we do,” Burgum said.

Burgum said the United States’ largest threat is China. But U.S. innovators have the firepower to win the economic battle, he said.

“If you want American manufacturing jobs to come back to this country, if you want to have lower inflation, if you want to have the best possible things for the environment, then every ounce of electricity, every electron, ought to be made here, not someplace else,” Burgum said. “We do it cleaner, safer, smarter, better than anyone else in the world.”

Long-time Republican activist Gwen Ecklund of Denison said Burgum is impressive.

“I think that he has some really vast knowledge and insight that is valuable, and that we are not necessarily hearing from other candidates,” Ecklund, the former Crawford County Republican chair who now leads that organization’s women’s group, said. “I think people will give him a look.”

Burgum makes a strong case for what some in attendance see as President Biden’s shortcomings on the economy and management of the southern border.

 

Ramaswamy offers a strategy for stabilizing the U.S. dollar 

Among a buffet of provocative ideas and policies in businessman Vivek Ramaswamy’s hard-charging upstart presidential campaign, one stood out in the heavily agricultural community of Vail, Iowa, where the Republican held a rally.

Speaking to a Crawford County Republican event, Ramaswamy offered a strategy for stabilizing the U.S. dollar that drew the interest of grain farmers in the audience of more than 250 people gathered inside a welding operation on the western side of Vail, about 10 minutes from Denison.

“Tie it to gold, silver, nickel and agricultural commodities,” he said of the dollar. “That’s it; that’s all we need to do.”

The plan is part of what Ramaswamy said is a single mandate for the Federal Reserve: restore the stability of the U.S. dollar.

“We are working with what exactly the exact basket is,” he said in response to questions on the plan from Political Mercury “But, honestly, the volatility of those is relatively small.”

Would it just be grain or livestock?

“We would just do grain,” Ramaswamy said. “We would go for a limited set of hard commodities and a limited set of farm commodities pegged to historically looking over the last 60 years which have been the most stable. We want things that actually have supply that’s reliable.”

As it stands, the dollar is fiat money. It’s not backed by gold or commodities.

Ramaswamy said he’s opposed to transitioning the U.S. dollar into digital currency as China has done with its currency, the yuan.

“China is doing it because they have a social credit system,” Ramaswamy said. “If you say something the government doesn’t like, if you do something the government disagrees with, even if it’s not technically against the law, that will allow them to just wipe out your bank account.”

Clint Von Glan of Vail, who operates a row-crop and cattle operation — and is the former president of the Crawford County Cattlemen’s Association, which has 400 members, says Ramaswamy’s ag-dollar tie is intriguing and had him thinking as he grilled burgers as he says it is a potential boost for farms.

“I would absolutely think so,” he said. “I would like to know more about it, but it would have to do nothing but good things for us here in rural Iowa.”

Long-time ag consultant Craig Williams of Manning, the chair of the Carroll County Republican Party and a former state senator, said the idea has merit. But he’s not sure how tying corn and beans to the dollar would work.

“Interesting concept,” Williams said. “With gold or silver, you can have a Fort Knox- type storage facility for physical assets that can last indefinitely. You can’t use physical assets for ag commodities. The commodity price is so volatile, I just can’t picture it. What if corn becomes completely displaced by some other commodities? Still, intriguing concept.” ♦

Douglas Burns of Carroll is fourth-generation journalist and founder of Mercury Boost, a marketing and public relations company.