For all the Dems have wrong, they still respect their voters. If only Republicans did, too.
Nationally, and otherwise, Democrats have no leadership.
For instance, unless they can find somebody better, when the Dems take control of the U.S. House of Representatives, as everybody believes they will, they ought to make Pete Buttigieg the Speaker of the House.
They ought to because current minority leader Hakeem Jeffries inspires nobody, just as Chuck Schumer, minority leader in the Senate, inspires nobody.
So why not hire a communicator in chief..
You’d think, in this perilous moment, a moment going on and on, national Dems could at least get their ^%$# together, but they haven’t because nobody wants to give away power and nobody wants to risk what little they have to give others more.
So it goes.
Here at the state level, the characters involved, minority leader Cyndi Munson in the House, also running for governor, and minority leader Julia Kirt in the senate, might indeed have what it takes to get together what national Dems can’t, but we’ll never know until a Dem finally becomes governor again or a big money benefactor moves into the state party apparatus along with a ruthlessly amazing manager who knows how to turn the thing around.
Like, I’ve got a lot of left-of-center politics stuff in my YouTube algorithm but you know what I’ve never seen? Something from Oklahoma’s Democratic Party.
Without the charismatic pull of a super candidate able to be elected governor or money and expertise enough to build an effective state party, one able to run multiple constant ad campaigns — think Progressive: Flo, the Gecko, Passive Progressive — defining the party brand rather than allowing Republicans and pulpiteers to do it for them, state Dems hardly stand a chance.
So, Dems blunder and, around here, get buried. The Republicans, on the other hand, nationally and near, well, they’re kind of a joke and you wonder if their voters are near having enough.
Let’s begin with a couple things Mike Mazzei said at last Saturday’s Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association Gubernatorial Agriculture Forum.
The question was literally this:
What would your administration do to strengthen access to hospitals, physicians, emergency care, and other healthcare services in rural Oklahoma. What changes, if any, would you support to regarding Oklahoma’s Medicaid policies as part of that effort?
What did the slow and creepy talking Mazzei say?
Healthcare is very personal for me. I was in a car accident many years ago, and fortunately, through faith and family, I pulled through a long, difficult season.
Whenever we talk about healthcare in Oklahoma, we have to talk about Sooner Care. The state’s Medicaid program provides healthcare to 1 million Oklahomans, but an audit was done a few years ago by our friend [state] auditor Cindy Byrd that found there were 1.6 billion dollars of questionable expenditures every year. And you know what the legislature did about it? Absolutely nothing.
It’s true, Mazzei was involved in a 2009 car accident that included an apparent recovery that took so long he twice led the senate in missed votes. Also, none of it has anything to do with rural healthcare.
To the same question, attorney general Gentner Drummond posited rural Oklahoma would lose 27 of 90 hospitals in the next five years if expanded Medicaid were to go away.
Mazzei?
He brought up an old audit that never found fraud, only that many recipients failed to have their income properly verified, which is a staffing problem, while the number he offered was twice the actual number.
Read here and see.
A clown.
Later, Mazzei was asked to how he would strengthen rural schools, the questioner noting those schools are at the center of their communities.
Mazzei began by saying he married a teacher — irrelevant — and spent the rest of his answer on literacy, that “500,000 students are not good readers,” which is unacceptable and that he’ll hire a statewide literacy directory his “first week in office.”
Nothing about funding, which could collapse given his tax plans. Nothing about teacher pay or retention. Nothing about the costs of pulling state education out of the ditch and, most of all, nothing about rural schools.
All he knows are his talking points and he thinks it’s enough.
It’s why both Drummond and Munson crushed him at the forum.
But are Republican voters listening. I guess we’ll find out on August 25.
Meanwhile, as explained in a story penned by Oklahoma Voice’s Emma Murphy, state rep Tom Gann (R-Inola) is trying to get his arms around the whole smelter issue that may or may not come to his town, but speaker of the house Kyle Hilbert (R-Bristow) won’t let him.
Not only did Hilbert deny Gann’s request, as Murphy reported, “to hold an interim study about aluminum smelters,” he was also denied house resources to push out a news release, aimed at his constituents, explaining why no such study would take place.
“They don’t want to be transparent, they just want the narrative to support their position,” Gann said, to which the only reply would appear to be, “representative Gann, welcome to your own party.”
My favorite part of Murphy’s story was this two sentence paragraph:
Hilbert’s office declined to comment or answer any questions from Oklahoma Voice. Hilbert has publicly supported the Inola Shelter.
You’ve got to love it. Or hate it.
“The people in Inola are desperate for information,” Gann said.
You think Gann is only right now understanding this is how his party works, leaders making decisions in the dark, unwilling to put their public voice behind them.
Finally, this.
James Taylor, in a runoff with Robert Franklin to get the Republican state superintendent nomination, who brought his 20-year-old communications director, Lane Brown, with him to an on-set interview with KFOR, did not quite finish said interview because Brown killed it the moment he became the subject.
Brown, you see, likes to call people he doesn’t agree with “r-tarded” and one who support the adoption of children by homosexual couples as “a f-g.”
Read all about it and see the tweets here.
Also comical was Brown, who Taylor stammered to refer to as a “volunteer,” getting Brown to kill the interview mid-interview, lest it embarrass Brown any longer, as though Taylor doesn’t pull the strings in his own campaign, while a 20-year-old flunkie does instead.
Spencer Humphrey, conducting the interview, also recalled the time Brown referred to non-Christians as “third-world parasites.”
What a guy.
What a guy to be hired by a guy who wants to educate your children.
Only in the Republican Party could Brown find work, voluntary or otherwise, helping to direct the campaign of a candidate for a high-profile statewide-elected job.
Only in certain quarters of the Republican Party — parts of it — could a guy like Brown be celebrated for his sentiments.
How long will Republican voters put up with it. How long will so-called reasonable Republicans, who want the votes but abhor the bigotry, put up with it?
Yes, it’s a good time for a reckoning.
For both sides, really.
The one that needs to grow up and get organized.
And the one that’s horribly lost its way.
Don’t forget to vote.
Clay, you’re so good at hammering the right nails. Makes a yellow dog like me sad when I think of the current state of the OK Dems. I find it so hard to believe there aren’t any Dems willing to step up and take the reins of leadership, like I said, sad.
Mazzei is betting that his Trump endorsement is all he needs in a Repub runoff that will effectively make him guv. He’s trying to say as little as possible that might deter the base MAGA voters from taking their cue from a president who doesn’t give a shit about those voters.