Why Lie?

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it,”

Adolf Hitler

 OKPNS 10/13/08 Pucker Up Time for Chesapeake Twins

For politicians, especially those caught red-handed doing something wrong or immoral, lying has become the standard practice; that and releasing bad news on late Friday afternoon.The hottest races in Oklahoma are the two corporation commissioner races. Democrat Jim Roth, who was appointed to serve the remainder of Denise Bode’s term, faces Republican Dana Murphy. In the other race, incumbent Jeff Cloud, the RINO Republican whose inadequacies have been chronicled here numerous times, faces former state legislator Charles Gray for the 6-year seat.

What makes these races so fascinating? First, incumbents Roth and Cloud should be doing much better in the polls based upon their massive war chests. Up until the incumbents’ ads began airing, most polls showed the races very close. In the wake of his TV blitz, Cloud has opened up a 15 point lead over Gray according to TV Poll, and Roth has only pulled even with Murphy. Insiders believe Gray and Murphy will have mass media presence before election day, which means the current poll snapshots will see considerable movement in the next two weeks.

Two weeks is an eternity in an election, and as public interest in the race heats up, the regulatory philosophy of the two men could come in to sharp relief. Gray says he won’t take money from those he regulates, while Cloud appears to regard those he regulates as a sort of piggy bank. It’s a fascinating moral quandary for Cloud, whose slack work ethic is legendary, but if Gray doesn’t raise the cash to buy mass media, one wonders if we’re not headed toward another Gary Jones versus Jeff McMahan situation in which the public never knows of the transgressions of the incumbent because the press doesn’t care and the challenger can’t buy enough time to inform. Regardless, if Gray raises the cash, and the press shows even a slight interest in this race, it will be a very, very close race.

For his part, observers say Roth has raised more money than any candidate in corporation commission history, yet he cannot shake Murphy, who lost to Cloud in the Republican Primary for Cloud’s seat 6 years ago. With the collapse of his patron’s fortune, it just may be that Roth is so tainted that he can never get to 50%, and given the expected McCain blowout in Oklahoma, Roth appears primed for upset

Second, in a frightening development for the Roth-Cloud ticket, it appears the voters are at least partially linking the job performance of Roth and Cloud. Except for their sell-out votes, they couldn’t be more different. Roth is an energetic, openly gay liberal Democrat managed by a hapless assortment (the Chesapeake clowns; former Democrat party chair Pat Hall, the consultant to crooks Jeff McMahan and Steve Phipps; and of course, the the circus clown of Oklahoma politics, Mike Turpen), and Cloud is a Republican family man with ties to conservatives and a well-known lazy streak.

There’s one area where they resemble conjoined twins: they vote alike, especially when it comes to screwing the consumers and padding the pockets of the multi-millionaires, billionaires and former billionaires who own them. Roth is mounting a defense by going on the offense. Roth’s lack of private sector experience and his shady past has been well documented. His flair for melodrama is almost comical, but he pulls it off with a straight face. Is ability, and need, to fashion the big untruth far surpasses Cloud’s ability in that regard. But the Roth campaign can feel the heat: anybody watching Roth flee the interview at the University of Oklahoma recently saw a frightened man, and one only had to see a few moments of that phony and comical NewsOK propaganda piece to see a gifted and skilled thespian artfully pulling off a charade.

As for Cloud, his ads are predictably listless, bland drivel that lack the audacity of Roth’s but, unlike the dramatic Roth, Cloud’s ads do not attempt to spin the reality of how he’s voted or his own corporate sell-out reputation.

When former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerry was asked in the 1992 campaign if Bill Clinton was a good liar, he responded, “No, he’s an incredibly good liar.” The two incumbents, whether they like it or not, are joined at the hip in defending their foolish and anti-intellectual decisions and the misery they’ve visited on the people who put them there instead of guarding against those who bought them when they got there. If these races become high-profile, the incumbents will be doomed. If not, the incumbents’ war chests, or the lack of major funding for Murphy and Gray, will most likely spell the difference.

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