I'm not a Republican, so I don't have a horse in the North Dakota primary race for governor, but I've been watching it with bemused fascination. It's a strange thing, seeing someone so touted as brilliant in business run the most comically inept campaign in recent memory. I haven't seen someone so clueless run for office since Joe Satrom crashed a 2004 gay rights rally in Fargo to say he couldn't oppose a measure banning same-sex marriage or since Duane Sand crashed his plane.

Burgum sent off his teary-eyed campaign speech, a rambling affair which included a bizarre tangent about robots in wheat fields, with an incredibly hip song by Minneapolis-cum-Brooklyn band The Hold Steady, "Stuck Between Stations." Whoever chose the music didn't listen to the lyrics, though: It's a song about the poet John Berryman's suicide into the Mississippi off the Washington Avenue bridge. The metaphor was ironic, if not instructive in hindsight to captivated onlookers like me.

Once we finally got a glimpse of his politics for real, we saw him campaign politely from the left in a primary race, which never works, convincing a bunch of BMW liberals and college pals to hop aboard the Burgum bandwagon. Then, when that clearly couldn't work, he tried to buy convention supporters, a move roundly mocked as cynical and crass by the party that's best known for its cynicism and crassness.

Lately, he's pushed hard right, hiring firms affiliated with Ted Cruz to help him try to pass off push polls as the real deal. He accused Wayne Stenehjem, of all people, as being not against Obamacare enough in a wonky, specifically legal sort of way that doesn't even matter any more given Justice Roberts' Supreme Court opinion. He essentially pointed out how Stenehjem was right all along about the futility of the case.

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And if that wasn't bizarre enough, he left any remaining moderate and liberal supporters/sycophants scratching their heads when he decided that an April 10 Steve Stark editorial cartoon ought to be a campaign talking point, endorsing the racist idiot Donald Trump when almost nobody except racists and idiots have done so publicly.

"Pivoting" is an idiosyncratic philosophy tech business people preach to justify erratic behavior so they can claim having no idea what they're doing is a virtue, but in politics it's an undesirable and confusing trait. People want to know what they're getting before they buy. All we've seen so far is a man lost in the woods, a shapeshifter, a chameleon.

A chameleon is a type of lizard. Everybody knows that.

Echola lives in Fargo.