On Friday, I went to the Tulsa County Republican Men's Club luncheon to hear various county, legislative, and judicial candidates introduce themselves. (I attended, but didn't buy lunch, because the meeting is still at the Radisson, which is run by Jon Davidson, who chaired the recall effort against Republican City Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock.)

Each candidate had two minutes to speak. We heard from most of the candidates for Judicial District 14 (Tulsa and Pawnee Counties), Offices 4 (north Tulsa County and a bit of the City of Tulsa) and 10 (the whole district). We heard from candidates to replace Sen. Scott Pruitt in Senate District 36 and Rep. Fred Perry in House District 69. Nearly all of the candidates for County Commission Districts 1 and 3 were there.

Most of the candidates made the most basic political mistake: They forgot to say who they were and what they were running for. The MC briefly mentioned each candidate by name to call him or her up to the podium, but by the time the candidate had finished speaking, I had forgotten who it was. The judicial candidates were especially bad about this. Lots of pronouns -- I did this, my career, my family -- but no names. The political candidates usually remembered to work in their name and office at least once at the beginning and once at the end of their two minutes.

Another curious omission came from House District 69 candidate Darrell Gwartney. Gwartney mentioned spending most of his career in public school administration, mentioning being an administrator in the Broken Arrow school system, but he never mentioned his lengthy and most recent assignment as superintendent of Catoosa Public Schools, from 1992 to 2003. He was assistant superintendent at Catoosa from 1990 to 1992.