Port: Instead of ‘small-town values,’ how about just values?
MINOT, N.D. — When Gov. Doug Burgum announced his presidential campaign in Fargo, he spent a lot of time reviewing his small-town biography and then talked about taking “small-town values” to Washington, D.C.
As I watched, I thought, “Someone in the national news media is going to pick up on this and object.”
Sure enough, Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman picked up on it. And he objects.
“Imagine how refreshing it would be to hear a candidate touting their ‘big-city values’ and explaining how important and useful the things they learned in the city can be,” he writes, noting that presidents from big cities, William Taft, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, also liked to play up the small-town theme even though that wasn’t their background.
Of course, Burgum actually is from a small town. Waldman tries to paint him as a hypocrite because the candidate went to college at Stanford, in the Silicon Valley, and when he returned to North Dakota, he started his business in Fargo, North Dakota, not tiny Arthur, where he got his start. But then again, Fargo is a small town by the standards of most other states.
