New Berg ad stirs up controversy

FARGO — The digital posterity of YouTube can be revealing.

Case in point? Turns out the specific concept for North Dakota Republican Rep. Rick Berg’s first Senate campaign ad isn’t all that original.

Berg made his campaign’s commercial debut earlier this week in an ad offering a personal campaign pitch from Berg and his mom, Francie.

But when Florida blogger and Virginia native Kenton Ngo stumbled upon Berg’s “Mom” ad on Friday, he noticed something:

The exact concept had been done before — just last year, in fact, by a former Democratic state lawmaker in Virginia.

As Ngo wrote on his website, “recycling ads is nothing new, especially when the focal point is one of the most enduringly positive concepts in America: a candidate’s mother.”

However, Berg’s ad is executed nearly the same way as the ad produced last year for Ward Armstrong, the former longtime minority leader in the Virginia House of Delegates who went on to lose his last race.

The similarities between the ads are noticeable in both the content and the production: mother and son sitting at the family table with a spread of family photo albums, the joking banter, a proud mom describing her son’s hardworking youth with a policy pitch slipped in, even the hand-written display font.

North Dakota Democrats latched on to the gaffe by accusing Berg of “plagiarizing an East Coast politician’s ad.”

“In Washington, Congressman Berg has been an active player in the petty partisan squabbles that are driving our country off the cliff, putting his own national political career and Washington political games before the interests of North Dakota,” Dem-NPL spokeswoman Alison Kelly said. “Now, Berg is approaching his Senate campaign with the same cut-andpaste Washington approach.”

Berg’s campaign spokesman Chris Van Guilder offered the following statement in response and did not answer questions from The Forum about Berg’s ad, such as why the two ads were so similar in production.

“Rick Berg is committed to balancing the budget, reining in wasteful spending, reducing burdensome overregulation, and growing our economy,” Van Guilder said in his statement to The Forum. “It’s no surprise that barely 24 hours after he had an important piece of bi-partisan, pro-jobs legislation signed into law, Democrats launched this completely baseless attack against him in an effort to avoid a discussion of the issues important to North Dakotans.”

Kristen Daum is a reporter at The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, which is owned by

Forum Communications Co.

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