Ryan Taylor First TV Ad Shows The Likable Class Warrior

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Written By:
Rob Port

May 23, 2012
8:01am

Governor Jack Dalrymple wasn’t the only candidate to launch his first television ad yesterday. His Democrat challenger Ryan Taylor has his first ad out too, and it’s well-done and plays to Taylor’s strengths. He is photogenic, where Dalrymple is not. He is charismatic, where Dalrymple is not.

A friend in the media wrote to me last night saying, “I like Ryan Taylor. He is a good dude. Misguided yes on policy, but he is totally likable. I like him better than the gov. His first ad is way better than the govs first ad in my opinion.”

Taylor’s ad comes off with a degree of authenticity that Dalrymple’s ad, which has all the appeal of a pitch for used cars, does not.

The problem? Taylor is authentically a class warrior.

I had to chuckle when Taylor mentions that he won’t be running a lot of television advertising. He makes it sound all folksy and down-homey, like he’s doing us all a favor, but really it’s because of what a Democrat friend told me recently: “He’s not raising any money.”

Television advertising is expensive, and Taylor doesn’t have a lot of campaign dollars nor is anyone projecting any financial windfalls for him.

What was less a laughing matter was Taylor’s line about “greed” in North Dakota. I’ve written before about Ryan Taylor’s class warrior tendencies, as well as his desire to run a campaign that presses on some of the divisions created by the state’s oil boom.

Everyone in western North Dakota is living with oil impacts. Crowded housing. Roads overtaxed with too much traffic. Crime incidents that are increasing with the population. But what not everyone in the west is living with is mineral rights. Some North Dakotans are making a bundle off of oil royalties and some are not.

That creates a divide among the state’s citizens, and Taylor hopes to exploit that divide for political gain. This ought to scare North Dakotans.

Taylor is the sort of candidate who believes that a failure to tax something is the same as a subsidy. Taylor has also talked in the past about slowing the oil boom down with more red tape and taxes.

Whatever challenges oil may be presenting the state in the short term, the last thing we should want is a leader who wants to institute crippling long-term policy as a “fix.”