Looking at the Mail

We got 5 pieces of campaign mail yesterday, by far the highest one-day total of this election season. One of them was for the campaign for Yes on 744, the state question that would increase spending on education by 20% without legislator influence. One was for Rusty Sullivan, a candidate for Cleveland County commissioner. I think he's a Republican, but he has what I think is a very effective ad depicting his bipartisanship. On my list of things to look up on the internet before I vote is exactly what the county commissioners do.

Two pieces of mail were from Emily Virgin (D), candidate for our district in the Oklahoma state house of representatives. She won the primary in July in a 4-person race that, judging by local lawn signs at the time, felt like it should have been closer. But Virgin, a former manager for the OU football team, won more than 50% of the vote and avoided a runoff. She canvassed the neighborhood way before I was even thinking about the election, and so when she rang the doorbell, I couldn't think of anything to ask her. Just last week she came by again to get out the vote for the November election, and I was slightly more prepared. Virgin uses the lesson in her campaign literature of a corporate tax break to a private space aviation company called Rocketplane that quickly went out of business as an example of money spent by the legislature that would be better put to use helping out both k-12 and higher education in the state. I asked her how she would be able to tell ahead of time that any particular corporate tax break would hurt the state more than help the state. She gave an answer indicating that it was the transferable nature of the tax break to Rocketplane that should have been eliminated; that Rocketplane should have been required to deliver the results rather than be allowed to sell the rights to the tax break to another company. She was more articulate that I can reproduce from memory. I don't think she answered my question exactly, but she sounded knowledgeable enough and I was impressed with her grasp of the concept.

One other piece of mail came from Aaron Stiles (R), who is running for a house district on the east side of Norman. My family cannot vote for him, so I don't know why we got this mail. But he is running against a Democrat named Wallace Collins, who has the reputation of being one of the more outspoken Democrats in the state legislature. And it got me thinking about the reframing of the health care law passed by the U.S. congress and signed into law by Barack Obama. It has now so thoroughly been relabeled as "Obamacare" that even "respectable" "blogs" like mine tend to refer to it as Obamacare just for brevity's sake. Stiles claims he has the "backbone to stand up to Washington, D.C. and keep ObamaCare out of Oklahoma," and that Wallace Collins voted against a bill "keeping ObamaCare out of Oklahoma". It's a crazy, twisted world when the candidate for office is labeled as soft on health care when he votes against exempting his state from tougher new federal health care laws.

We have not yet received a single piece of campaign mail from any politician running for governor, U.S. senator, or U.S. representative. Tom Cole, our Republican representative, is running unopposed, so this is no surprise. Tom Coburn, our Republican senator, is running against a homeless-looking man named Jim Rogers, a man who doesn't do any campaigning because it's "not his style", and who is one of those "perennial candidates," a class of individuals for whom no long shot is long enough. Tom Coburn definitely doesn't need to do anything to get the vote out. But we have a nominally competitive race for governor between current lieutenant governor Jari Askins (D) and former lieutenant governor Mary Fallin (R). I'm not as tuned in as I should be to local news, but I'm very tuned into yard signs and campaign mail.

Bailout Hypocrisy from Oklahoma's Congressional Delegation

I'm against bailouts. I don't like the fact that public taxpayer-funded money could go to private companies if said private companies are huge, dying and poorly managed. But I'm warming to the auto industry bailout precisely because the final version of the bill will be dispensing loan money with tight controls, unlike the $700 billion in mostly free money with little control that the House and Senate passed in October. It's also less of a big deal because of the math involved: $19 billion is much much less than $700 billion.

But many senators and representatives don't see it that way. Here's a sampling of the hypocrisy just in Oklahoma:

Senator Tom Coburn:

The labor rates of the Big Three are out of sync with labor rates across the nation and it is unfair to ask American taxpayers to subsidize poor management decisions. The only acceptable Congressional action would be the possibility of guaranteeing loans after labor contracts are renegotiated

Senator Coburn voted yes on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, which mandated that Americans subsidize poor management decisions.


Representative Mary Fallin:

With our deficit rising and our economy continuing to shrink, cutting every struggling company a multibillion dollar check is simply not an option. The best way to protect American taxpayers is to ask the automobile companies to work through their problems, reorganize their companies and operate by the same rules that other companies and industries have to play by.

Representative Mary Fallin voted yes on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, which cut many multi-billion dollar checks for dozens of struggling lenders; institutions that now do not have to operate by the same rules that other companies and industries have to play by.


Representative John Sullivan:

Taxpayers should not be asked to reward failure by subsidizing the very business practices that got them into this situation in the first place. Moving forward Congress should focus on helping to rebuild a viable domestic automobile industry through market driven policies, not massive government intervention by nationalizing these companies.

Representative John Sullivan voted yes on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, which mandated that taxpayers reward failure by subsidizing the very business practices that got lenders into this situation in the first place and created a massive government intervention by partially nationalizing certain companies.


Representative Tom Cole:

Unfortunately, another costly investment by U.S. taxpayers does not guarantee that automakers will reform the habits that caused their current spiral. In fact, a bailout may only encourage the status quo.

Representative Tom Cole voted yes on the $700 billion Wall Stret bailout, which encouraged the status quo.