Take heart fellow DUers

[u2spirit]

I live in Tulsa and we just had a mayoral election. As most of you know, Tulsa is THE buckle of the bible belt and very conservative. Our Mayor, Bill Lafortune is a wealthy Republican. The Lafortune family is beloved in Tulsa for their contributions to the city, including the arts. In a lot of ways they are Rockefeller Republicans. During his term, the crime rate has skyrocketed, businesses have left, and he hasn't spoken to the police chief in months, if not years due to personal conflicts. He did help pass the 2025 project to rebuild the downtown area that is starving for a revival. Enter Kathy Taylor, the Democratic nominee. Personally, I think she's a phony. She was the secretary of commerce in Oklahoma and she owns or owned the Alamo/National rental car service that came to Oklahoma from Florida. She's a millionaire politician. She wiped the floor with Lafortune in the debates. She seemed to have a better understanding of his record than he did. Lafortune went on the local Faux affiliate on the eve of the election for an interview and threw his hail mary. He called her a "liberal". He said that the voters needed to know that he was the conservative in this race and that Tulsa was a conservative town. He said he was pro life and for tax cuts but that Taylor was neither of these things. I worried that this tactic might actually work but on election day, Taylor won with about 53 percent of the vote. The tide is turning. Joe six pack is getting numb to the rhetoric from the right. If we work hard this fall, we can affect a great change in this country's direction by working at the local level for getting out the message and the vote so the congress can have some sensible leadership, and hold the executive branch accountable for all they have done in the last 5 years. Screw Diebold. Let's overwhelm them.

[snowbear]

1. Congratulations!! We just had our mayoral election last Tuesday..

...and the DEMOCRAT won (again!!) here in Anchorage, Alaska too!!

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. You make it sound like they elected the wrong one, regardless

of the party.

[u2spirit]

7. We voted correctly

She has fresh ideas and I think Lafortune was honestly a bit over his head. My problem with her is she spent over a million dollars of her own money on her campaign. That is a hell of a lot of money for a city race. I hope she works out. She did vote for Gore in 2000. I just worry that she's going in to line her own pockets if she's willing to pony up that kind of dough to win.

[BrklynLiberal]

3. Halleluleah!! Thanks for the bright spot on an otherwise dull evening.

:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

[Erika]

4. I found the people at Tulsa anything but conservative

But I did cringe when I saw the road sign to the turn off for Oral Roberts University.

I think that even the Bible belters are seeing through the Christian facade of W.

Congrats.

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. That's great!

You know, I never understand why these local politicians even bring up abortion. When will a mayor ever be involved in an abortion issue??

[RoyGBiv]

6. 2025 Project -- Tangent

Pardon the brief tangent ...

I'm not very familiar with Tulsa politics, but I note your 2025 project sounds a lot like the MAPS project in OKC. (If I'm wrong on that, ignore me.) MAPS and things related to it did some good things for the city, superficially. Downtown has been turned into something of a showplace ... lots of upscale bars, restaurants, a ballpark, enormous movie theatre, a friggin' Bass Pro Shops. Not that all of this was funded by MAPS, but without MAPS, it probably wouldn't be there. My lingering memory of downtown/Bricktown as seen from I-40 is an old, broken-down U-Haul trailer on top of a crumbling brick building. It screamed, "GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN!!!"

Not a good image.

But, despite all this, the underlying point of MAPS, and I'm assuming Tulsa's project, is to benefit corporate business interests, i.e. use tax revenue essentially to fund private business, so of course Lafortune is going to support it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing overall, but it can be managed very poorly and has been to a degree in OKC. Furthermore, despite the rhetoric, the big winners in the scheme are the corporations, many of which aren't even based in Oklahoma. Again superficially, I like what has happened to downtown OKC, but I don't like the fact the city continues to lose what was left of its industrial base while a very small number of people are getting supremely wealthy through a regressive tax. MAPS was supposed to save everything, a lot of poor fools believed that. MAPS made a downtown Disneyland, yeah, but real jobs are still pouring out of the city.

In any case, congrats to Tulsa on its choice of a mayor.

[u2spirit]

8. Lafortune was criticized heavily

After the project passed for dealing with out of state contractors when he had promised to work with in state contractors. It wouldn't surprise me if Abramoff money is even involved. You are correct that it is like MAPS. The raw deal is that Tulsa citizens pay for it and the residents of the outlying suburbs get to enjoy it for free.

[RoyGBiv]

9. Interesting ...

Again I don't know a lot about Tulsa politics, so I'm speculating. But, I wouldn't doubt that awarding contracts to out-of-state companies was a major factor in his defeat. Piss off the wrong local company, particularly in OK and even if it tends to support Republicans, and suddenly its owners/managers are actually encouraging people to vote for the opposition. I've seen that happen on a smaller scale in reverse. The traditionally Democratic state district where I was born suddenly elected a Republican for the first time in history many years ago. The tipping point was that the incumbant Democrat and worked a deal on a local road project that benefited an out-of-state company and employed *NO ONE* locally except in ancillary, service sector jobs. The district has been Republican ever since.

[u2spirit]

10. Tip Oneill

"All politics is local"