Port: Does Senate candidate Rick Becker know that he’s a fool?
MINOT, N.D. — “The fool doth think he is wise,” Shakespeare wrote, “but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
U.S. Senate candidate Rick Becker had me thinking about the Bard’s words (from “As You Like It” act 5, scene 1) as he stood in the state capitol building in Bismarck and staged a news conference in support of proposed legislation he cannot sponsor or even vote for.
Prompting much chortling in our state’s political circles, Becker, who is serving out the last weeks of a term in the state House of Representatives, delivered a sermon on the need to abolish property taxes, apparently having forgotten that he decided not to run for another term in his current office.
Becker, he’d do well to remember, is presently a candidate for the United States Senate, a legislative body with no say in state tax policy.
Becker is in the prime time of his campaign for a seat in Congress. The list of national issues he could be campaigning on — from the national debt to inflation to reckless Russian revanchism and the nuclear threat it portends — is a long one. But instead of talking about any of those things, Becker chose to use his time in front of the state capitol press corps to rehash a failed proposal to abolish property taxes.
