And on the Other Hand: Oklahoma Democrats Will Fight Where They Stand: Live from the Roasterie CXXXVI: May 30, 2014
Rebecca Schoenkopf: There Will Be Blood: Oklahoma Democrats Will Fight Where They Stand: "The Pottawatomie County Dems...
...My mother, current chair of the Pott County Democrats, had uncharacteristically permitted plastic cups for water, soda, and sweet tea. I threw them out before she could wander in and start worrying whether we shouldn’t wash and save those too. Environmentalism has its limits. For weeks my mother was absolutely convinced no one would come to the Dems’ big fundraiser for the year.... I was washing all the dishes because I didn’t want my mother’s friends to think she’d raised a daughter--in California, where I doubtless live with my common-law husband, Osama Bin Laden--who saw a pile of dishes and blithely ignored them....
I’ve been going to Oklahoma since I was a little girl, to see my grandma, who made rag dolls and loved Jesus and Mary with every bit of her heart. Thirty-five years ago, a big day out in Pott County was a trip to Van’s Pig Stand for lunch and then the Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s heritage museum to look at the weavings, and the photos from their Trail--not of Tears, but of Death. Thirty-five years later, it still is.
Shawnee, the seat of Pottawatomie County, has a grimy but still kinda cute Old West downtown. Its straits aren’t nearly as dire as they were a few years back. Sure, there’s an awful lot of empty storefronts still, but the ones that are hanging on all have customers in them.... The K-mart and the mall out on Kickapoo haven’t murdered downtown totally dead....
The governor, Mary Fallin, well, she’s a treat. She’s a Tecumseh hometown girl made good, if by “good” you mean “shutting off access to the PX for families of National Guardsmen”--so they won’t have to offer discount goods to the filthy homosexuals some of those guardsmen are married to.... But while everyone insists a Democrat could never win in Oklahoma, Fallin’s predecessor was Shawnee boy Brad Henry, a Dem.... The state’s got 30,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, with about a quarter of a million independents to liven things up.
And here is what we hear, in whispers:
A sheriff guarding the metal detector at the county courthouse – as if our constitutional right to wave a gun around no matter when is somehow suspended at the courthouse door – says of Mary Fallin, “She was a good country girl from Tecumseh. Don’t know what happened, ‘cause she lost her way.”
A woman in the sheriff’s office downstairs in the basement comes outside to tell us how angry she is that Mary Fallin turned down Medicaid expansion. Now her son is “too poor” to qualify for the subsidies that would let him buy insurance. She’s not happy about Fallin pooh-poohing the school storm shelters either. And she doesn’t know a soul who is. Nobody wants government so small it can drown a schoolchild....
Jerry Falwell, Grover Norquist, Jim Inhofe and the like have poisoned the electorate with an angry God who just hates it when we help our neighbors. They might vote in medical marijuana, but that’s because rednecks like marijuana too. They might vote some Dems locally, but most of those would be considered conservative Republicans in a saner state. Also, they’re racist as f--- and totally unashamed of it. James Lankford is a smarmy son of a bitch, and I’ve got as little doubt he’ll be Oklahoma’s next senator as I doubt my Grandma Jeani loved me.... The discourse is, how you say, less than civil. Because that’s what Jesus wants, I guess.
But all around the state, the workers--always old ladies: the almost-gone Roosevelt Dems, their Baby Boom daughters now retired themselves--are staffing their phone banks, putting on a show, and then staying till midnight to mop and clean up. They’re filling their slates with first-time candidates. They’re commenting on Wonkette. Wonkers meet up in OKC.... And they’ll die with their boots on. Leather boots. They’re still in style for manly footwear...
