KRMG mayoral interviews

Recently KRMG's Joe Kelley did a 10-minute interview with each of the three Republican mayoral candidates who had previously served in elective office. The ground rules for the interviews display political savvy and a striving both to be fair with the candidates and to get the information that the voters want.

• The interviews will be recorded, not live. (The reason for this is that a savvy politician who seeks to limit his exposure can make an effort to 'filibuster' his available time with lengthy and pointless answers. If the subject knows they're being recorded for later playback, the filibuster is thwarted because we'll just keep recording until we have an answer.)
• The recorded interviews will be approximately 10 minutes, but longer if needed. The interview will be posted in its entirety at KRMG.com and will air on the KRMG Morning News during regularly scheduled interview segments.
• Each candidate will be featured on a unique day of the show. No candidate will be able to see the questions before the interview.
• The questions will include questions unique to that candidate and, time permitting, generalized philosophical questions posed to each candidate.
• Candidates are welcome to bring video recording equipment to use the video as they see fit. (The purpose here is to assure the candidate that we will not engage in editing tricks since they have a copy of the full interview.)
• Each of the three top contenders (Dewey Bartlett, Chris Medlock and Anna Falling) agreed to these terms.

The Bartlett campaign has been trying to avoid questions unique to him; good on Joe Kelley for insisting on asking them.

They were also smart in making the interviews available on YouTube -- much easier to work with than the streaming service that ordinarily handles their audio clips.

Here are the interviews with the three candidates:

Dewey Bartlett Jr
Chris Medlock
Anna Falling

In Bartlett Jr's second segment, he explains why he voted in favor of having Tulsa's taxpayers pay the $7.1 million Great Plains Airlines default, claiming that the airport's credit rating was hurting and 13,000 jobs were in jeopardy. Even if that isn't wildly exaggerated, the right solution was to take that money out of the hides of the stockholders -- Tulsa's Great and Good who thought the Great Plains scheme was a brilliant idea -- not out of the pockets of the taxpayers. Instead, Bartlett Jr apparently prefers to protect his Money Belt peers and sock it to the rest of us.

And as for blaming the previous administration: Mary Smith, Bartlett Jr's own campaign treasurer, was high up in the Tulsa Airport Authority's administration at the time the Great Plains scheme was hatched and sold.

When Joe Kelley asked about the lack of solid information on issues on Bartlett Jr's website, Bartlett Jr said that people could call the campaign to ask about his positions and that he was talking to people on the phone and on the campaign trail. In other words, he's happy to answer questions as long as the answers won't be easily available for public scrutiny.

Here's the clip: