Democrats Attack Rick Berg For Running For Senate After Just One Term In The House

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Written By:
Rob Port

Jun 7, 2012
11:01am

A Democrat Super PAC is attacking Rep. Rick Berg for what they’re calling “blind ambition” in running for the Senate after just one term in the House.

Setting aside the mailings non-issue, and the “Rick Berg hates college students” stuff, I’ve never understood the “ambition” angle.

First, why is Berg’s ambition to serve in the Senate any different than Heidi Heitkamp’s? Heitkamp, after all, hasn’t served in the House at all. Heck, she hasn’t been elected to anything since the 1990′s. Of course Berg has “ambition” for the Senate. So does Heidi Heitkamp, and let me shock you by suggesting that every single candidate running for office in America is doing so out of ambition.

The second reason why I don’t understand this attack is because the Democrats do it too. Quentin Burdick, perhaps one of the most politically successful North Dakota Democrats of all time, didn’t even serve out his first term in the House before he ran in, and won, the special election to replace the deceased Senator Langer. Wasn’t that ambition?

We can look at Senator Kent Conrad’s career path too. Conrad promised to step down from the Senate after one term if the federal budget deficit wasn’t reduced. It wasn’t, and so Senator Conrad was going to step down…until he decided to run for Senator Quentin Burdick’s vacated seat (Burdick, too, died in office).

Isn’t that sort of, you know, ambition?

This is an unserious attack on Berg, but at this point I think the Democrat strategy against Berg is to muddy the water with as many issues like this as possible to keep the debate from being about Obamacare, the economy, the national debt and Barack Obama.