Opinion
Fallin needs a strong fourth quarter to keep 5th District
EDMOND — Well, recruiting is over, our teams have selected their players and with a few scrimmages under their belts they’re ready for the real games. They will face toe-to-toe, hard-hitting gladiatorial struggles during the next several weeks that will test their mettle and endurance.
No, I’m not talking about football, although that season has arrived as well. I’m talking politics.
Last Tuesday saw the selection of the final candidates for lieutenant governor for both the Democrats and Republicans. The only other major race on the ballot was the Republican shootout for the 5th District Congressional nomination between Lt. Gov. Mary Fallin and Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett.
Fallin won the congressional runoff 26,744 to 15,665, picking up 63 percent of the vote. She led in the primary with 16,691 votes to Cornett’s 11,718, a 10 percentage-point spread. But in a field of six candidates dividing 48,287 votes, she failed to pick up the majority necessary to win the primary outright, forcing her into an expensive runoff.
If that seems like too many numbers to digest, that’s unfortunate, because politics is a game of numbers. Rule No. 1 in politics is you have to get more votes than your opponent. Denise Bode spent $1 million in the primary and came in a distant third with less than 10,000 votes. All the money in the world can’t buy you love, and everybody seems to love Mary Fallin.
Fallin has served in the lieutenant governor’s post since 1994, and was in the Legislature for four years before that. She is now the second-longest serving lieutenant governor in the United States.
Will Rogers once said, “The man with the best job in the country is the vice president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, ‘How is the president?’”
Much the same can be said about the office of lieutenant governor. She tried sitting in the chair of the president of the Senate a couple of times, but didn’t get a warm reception. Everyone left. Apparently she’s decided it’s time to pack up and move to Congress, to become the first female Oklahoma congresswoman since Alice Robertson served a single term from 1921-23.
But the numbers in this 5th District race will be interesting. Democrats outnumber Republicans 170,601 to 161,446 in the district, which includes Seminole, Pottawatomie and most of Oklahoma County. There are 46,509 Independents in the district meaning neither party has a clear majority. In a state where more folks registered as Democrats than Republicans in the past year, this congressional seat will be up for grabs.
That’s a change from previous years. When Ernest Istook won the runoff against Bill Price in 1992 after incumbent Mickey Edwards came in third in the primary, Istook came within 100 votes of the exact same figure Mary Fallin received. But only 47,338 votes were cast in the runoff, compared to 42,409 in last week’s runoff.
Compare that to the Democratic primary between Edmond’s Dr. David Hunter and Oklahoma City teacher Bert Smith. Voters cast 39,015 ballots in a lukewarm campaign in which the candidates spent only a fraction of what the Republicans spent. Hunter picked up 24,660 votes, far more than Mary Fallin’s 16,691 in the primary and almost as many as Fallin received in her hotly contested runoff.
Furthermore, 1992 was a presidential election year, and George H.W. Bush and Don Nickles inspired a strong Republican turnout statewide. The Republicans were on the upswing. Still, Istook barely edged out Laurie Williams 123,237 to 107,579. This year, with an unpopular Republican administration, a popular Democratic governor and no U.S. Senate race on the ballot, Mary Fallin may not be the shoo-in for Congress everyone is expecting.
Fallin will have to distance herself from the national Republican Party in order to win. Simply repeating “Faith, Family and Freedom” won’t do the trick. She’ll have to explain why another Republican should join a Congress that has expanded the size of the federal government by one-third since 2000, and has turned a budget surplus — reducing the federal debt — into a deficit nightmare.
She’ll have to explain why another Republican will help end the culture of corruption in Washington. She’ll have to explain how she knows more about the health care crisis than Dr. Hunter. And she’ll have to explain how another nodding head will encourage our troops to be brought home from the civil war in Iraq.
It could be an interesting fourth quarter.
(Walter Jenny Jr., an Edmond resident, is secretary of the Oklahoma Democratic Party and chairman of the Edmond Democrats.)
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