Seeing Kevin Stitt clearly through 19-year-old eyes

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt delivers his State of the State address in Oklahoma City, on Monday, Feb. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Nick Oxford)

I’ve gained knowledge, wisdom, a reasonable amount of professional achievement, not to mention a now 28-year-old daughter of whom I’m immensely proud, since leaving home, finally, for San Antonio to attend Trinity University upon graduating from Bishop McGuinness.

Just to be clear:
Non-Catholic.
Non-everything-else.
Who cares.

Come September, I’ll turn 56, well older than both of my parents when I graduated from Trinity 34 years ago.

Jimini Christmas.

Nevertheless, because I once heard it described this way and adopted it for myself, I still look at the world through 19-year-old eyes.

I see possibilities rather than things that can never change. I don’t have every answer and those convinced they do have none.

I go to sleep after watching baseball highlights, fantastic double plays, amazing catches, spears and long throws from deep in the hole with the same wonder I saw them even before graduating into these 19-year-old eyes. 

I listen to Boston, Yes or New Order and wonder how they still sound new almost 40 or 50 years after I first heard them. I listen to Rush and remain amazed three guys made all that sound. I listen to U2 with the same excitement I first saw them perform “Gloria” on a barge on MTV.

It’s good to be young, especially when you’re not.

I may be cynical about the moment, but not the future.

I can still be wowed.

I like my 19-year-old eyes.

I see the political landscape of our state, populated by salt-of-the-earth yet frequently misinformed and misled voters and think, yeah, the day’s coming, give it 10 years, 15 tops, it will all turn around.

Things remains possible. 

Then there’s our governor, Kevin Stitt, who makes them seem more possible.

That’s right.

Thank our ridiculous, embarrassing, delinquent, bull-in-a-china-shop governor for real faith in Oklahoma’s coming turnaround.

Because Stitt must be the boundary of the pendulum, one that doesn’t swing left and right so much as between thoughtful and aggressively dumb, between affable and altruistic and self-absorbed and egomaniacal. He’s the point at which our state will go no further.

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Believe it.

What makes this realization so clear?

I needed to write about Stitt.

I needed to write about him in the wake of his too-cute and too-clever quote, designed to throw Ryan Walters a lifeline in the wake of the state superintendent’s worst week to date: last week, when we learned the real depth of the state education department’s exodus and the lengths he goes to hide in his office like a frightened little man.

Here it is:

“So you’re telling me we’ve lost 130 bureaucrats up here in Oklahoma City and we’ve still got our education system rolling across the state?” Stitt said last Friday. “Sounds like a good thing to me.”

Like it was meant to be his the funny part of his answer, Stitt went on to say, “Look, superintendent Walters is separately elected … I’m not going to get into how he runs his agency,” like that has anything to do with anything because if he really felt that way he wouldn’t be crying over attorney general Gentner Drummond all the time, who was also elected separately and runs his own agency.

I digress.

I’d banked what Stitt said at the time, but to get the quote right, performed a quick search using these two words: “Stitt bureaucrats”

The headlines I found were far more illustrating than a week-old quote.

Take a look …

“Oklahoma governor signs executive order banning DEI bureaucracy in state institutions” (Fox News)

“Oklahoma Gov. Stitt: ‘We want the best and brightest minds on our state Supreme Court’” (Tulsa World), which was his way of saying the sole appointer to the court, a power he doesn’t have, should be him.

“Treat, McCall top Stitt in tribal compacting case at Oklahoma Supreme Court” (KOSU)

“Stitt or Drummond? Oklahoma Supreme Court will decide who represents state in tribal compacting case” (KGOU)

“Stitt again decries McGirt in State of State” (Cherokee Phoenix)

“Okla. Supreme Court rules State Legislature had authority to override vetoes of tribal compact extension bills” (Fox23.com)

“Analysis: Republicans now say it might be okay to ignore the Supreme Court” (The Washington Post), a January story atop which is a picture of Donald Trump and Stitt at a 2020 roundtable discussion at the White House.

You get the idea.

Is he for anything beyond himself?

Other than ending good faith efforts to identify the finest government and higher education talent with the biggest possible net?

Who’s Stitt trying to serve?

He’s in constant battle with the legislature despite Republican super majorities in both bodies. He’s in constant battle with the tribes. He’s in constant battle with the attorney general, another Republican, who’s just trying to keep things legal. He’s in constant battle with anybody or any body that dare assert their own constitutional authority.

He’s for anything that consolidates power in himself and against all things that don’t … including the actual folks who make government run as effectively as it possibly can, without whom we’d be lost, workers, when he’s shooting for a condescending laugh, he calls “bureaucrats.”

But we need them.

And need him less.

Stitt is so see-through, so transparently and self-centeredly corrupt that he’s bound, eventually, to usher in an age of no more like him.

I’m closing in on 56.

My 19-year old eyes still believe.

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