July 2024 Archives

Watching the 2024 Republican National Convention from Milwaukee brought back memories of my two times attending the RNC, as a delegate in 2004 in New York City and as a reporter in 2008 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Those links will lead you to BatesLine coverage of those two conventions.

On X (Twitter) on the opening night of the convention, Lafayette Lee complained:

There's widespread frustration with the RNC right now because everyone is craving something more... they just witnessed a miracle, and all the fluff and cringe feels like an insult.

I replied: Conventions are always fluff and cringe. Stage-managed to the Nth degree. No spontaneity allowed. Entirely under the control of the presumptive nominee's team. He dictates platform, rules, who speaks and when. National conventions are fun, but delegates are really just a studio audience for a four-day infomercial.

Officially, the Republican National Convention conducts serious business. Each state elects the number of delegates allocated to each state by the previous convention's rules, according to the rules of each state party. In Oklahoma, each congressional district convention elects three delegates and three alternates, the state chairmen and two national committee members are automatically delegates, and the state executive committee proposes a slate for the remaining delegate and alternate slots which is ratified by the state convention. Each state designates two members each to serve on the Rules Committee (which includes party rules for the 2028 presidential nominating process and convention), Platform Committee, and Credentials Committee. The committees convene the week before the convention to debate and approve a report to the convention. At the convention itself, the delegates vote to approve the committee reports and for nominees for president and vice president. The convention delegates could, theoretically, amend or reject the committee reports.

In reality, the convention is not a deliberative body, and I can't think of a minute of the convention sessions that hasn't been stage-managed since 1976. Some debate has occurred in the Platform and Rules Committee meetings, but because fundraising for national and state party typically depends upon the charisma of the nominee, the nominee's team dictates terms. States run by the grassroots tend to send principled conservatives (e.g. Morton Blackwell of Virginia, head of the Leadership Institute, on the Rules Committee; Tony Perkins of Louisiana, head of the Family Research Council, on the Platform Committee) to these committees, but most states, particularly the states with withered, top-down parties, send placemen who will do what they're told.

An individual delegate can do nothing. In 2004, I wanted grassroots delegates to push for reform of the 2008 primary rules before the 2008 campaign began. But delegates are basically spectators. An individual delegate has no way to reach delegates from other states to organize before the convention. An individual delegate will not be recognized to speak from the floor or even to move for debate prior to a vote or to demand a roll call vote. All I could do was publish a blog entry, like tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean. I seem to recall exactly one reply of interest from a delegate from Iowa.

Delegate "power" is much like the power of the United Kingdom's House of Lords which is much like the life of Schrödinger's cat. It exists theoretically, but if an attempt to exercise that power comes close to success, the Powers That Be will change the thresholds to ensure that the next attempt fails as well.

This year, even committee deliberations were curtailed. Here is how the Platform Integrity Project (archived here) described the RNC Platform Committee meeting:

On Monday, July 8th, 2024, the Republican Party Platform Committee voted to adopt a streamlined national party platform that cut much of the pro-life language that has historically been included, some of it for nearly fifty years since 1976. The process was unprecedented; instead of being allowed to deliberate for two days, the 112 elected Platform Committee members, two from every state and territory, were sequestered without their cell phones. They were not given time to review the draft platform, allowed to form subcommittees, or given the opportunity to offer and openly debate amendments with media present; instead, this year's private meeting proceeded to a short period of speeches followed by a final vote on the platform. The RNC draft was adopted 84-18. You can read it here (PDF).

Tony Perkins spoke to Todd Starnes of Newsmax on July 10th detailing the top-down, dictatorial process imposed by the Trump campaign on the platform committee.

The group circulated a platform committee minority report, which needed to be signed by 25% of the committee members in order to come before the convention as an alternative. What follows is not a minority report as such -- that would be in the form of an alternative platform or amendments to the majority report -- but more of a minority protest of the actions of the majority.

The undersigned, a minority of the committee, elected to the 2024 National Republican Platform Committee, not agreeing in totality with the majority, desire to express our views as follows:

Not having an opportunity to entertain amendments to the "draft" platform document, we submit the following expression for the continued protection of the unborn through support of a human life amendment.

Less than one week ago, our nation celebrated the 248th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That founding document proved a watershed moment in world history. It planted and reinforced in the minds of men and women everywhere the conviction that each of us is endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The Declaration is the heritage of all Americans, always true but likewise always straining to be realized, for the slave as well as for the free, for women as well as for men, for the poor as well as the rich. For Republicans, from the very inception of our party, the words of the Declaration took form in two overarching moral propositions, that is, the rejection and elimination of what our very first platform in 1856 called "the twin relics of barbarism," slavery and polygamy. We note with sober reflection how vast a cost the people of the United States paid for the achievement of that platform's commitments, and how long a period passed before those goals could be achieved.

Today we observe the vitality of a more recent but analogous set of commitments, embodied most prominently in the promise of the Republican Party to preserve the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death. That commitment made its way into the platform of 1976, twelve decades after that original session in Philadelphia. That commitment to a human life amendment and a call for the Fourteenth Amendment's protection application to children before birth has been repeated in every platform since and, by this declaration of principle, we extend it now.

In no season, under no rationale spurred by the exigencies of a political moment, can or should we abandon the high principles that have created and sustained this party, with God's grace, into a third century.

In the coming years, we pledge ourselves to continue to work for the good of every child, every parent, and every family. We rededicate ourselves to the core policy positions endorsed through deliberation and transparency with ever-increasing clarity in previous platforms, with respect to the funding of abortion domestically and internationally, the expansion of alternatives to abortion, support for credits for adoption and all children, ending the exploitation of embryonic human beings, and above all recognizing the application of 14th amendment protections to our developing offspring. These are issues for the ages and not for any single cycle in our national life.

With heaviness of heart but fullness of optimism that the defense of life will inevitably prevail, we resubmit these ideals to our fellow Americans. As before, we do fondly hope and fervently pray that the scourge of abortion will speedily pass away, and to that end we renew our perpetual devotion and ceaseless labor to the cause of life.

Last Friday on X (Twitter), Perkins identified 20 platform committee members who had signed the report. (Archived here.) Mark Allen, one of Oklahoma's two committee members, signed on to the minority report, but the second member, Taylor Broyles, had not.

Alaska: Loran Baxter
Arizona: Alex Kolodin, Susan Ellsworth
Arkansas: Jim Dotson
Georgia: Suzi Voyles
Hawaii: Mark White, Mary Smart
Iowa: Brad Sherman, Tamara Scott
Kansas: Tim Huelskamp, Kristina Smith
Louisiana: Tony Perkins
North Carolina: Kevin Austin
North Dakota: Lori Hinz, Steve Nagel
Oklahoma: Mark Allen
South Dakota: Sandye Kading
Texas: David Barton
Utah: Gayle Ruzicka
Wyoming: Robert "Bob" Ide

Rule 34(a) of the rules approved by the 2020 convention to apply to the 2024 committees not only requires 25% of members to sign a minority report, but requires them to submit that report and signatures within one hour of the committee's vote on the majority report:

(a) No resolution or amendment pertaining to the report of the Convention Committee on the Platform or the Convention Committee on Rules and Order of Business shall be reported out or made a part of any report of such committee or otherwise read or debated before the convention, unless the same shall have been submitted to the chairman, vice chairman, or secretary of such committee or to the secretary of the convention in writing not later than one (1) hour after the time at which such committee votes on its report to the convention and shall have been accompanied by a petition evidencing the affirmative written support of a minimum of twenty-five percent (25%) of the membership of such committee.

I have read somewhere that the rules approved by this year's convention raises the threshold for 2028 to one-third (33.333%).

The effort to present a minority report was dropped in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump:

"Given today, and everything that has occurred, if the opportunity were there [for a floor fight] we wouldn't take it at this point," Perkins told POLITICO. "Don't take our silence as being indifferent to what took place, it's just timing."

The Tulsa County Republican Party faced a similar platform challenge in 2012. The platform committee that year replaced the one-page Statement of Principles that had introduced our platform for over a decade with a shorter preamble focused on economic issues. Gone were references to the sanctity of human life, public integrity, religious institutions, and the foundational role in society of families and marriage between a man and a woman.

But the County Convention rules (unlike RNC rules) did not prevent debate and deliberation. Steven Roemerman and I managed to get sufficient signatures from his fellow platform committee members to put before the convention a minority report that restored the previous year's Statement of Principles. Steven and I spoke to the convention on the importance of the principles that had been deleted and stayed focused on the substance of the platform. A libertarianish delegate who liked Ron Paul but not his opposition to abortion spoke in favor of the stripped-down preamble; she didn't want Republicans taking a position on the issue. The author and leading proponent for the new desiccated preamble seemed to be driven by a narcissistic concern about his pride of authorship (he had been pushing to replace the entire platform with his preamble since at least 1999) rather than the substance of what was removed from the platform and spent most of his speaking time complaining that the minority report was a personal attack. The minority report was approved by a wide margin.

What we did in Tulsa County in 2012 would have been much more difficult, maybe impossible, if the pressure for the new language had been coming from the party's presumptive nominee and biggest fundraiser, so no disrespect to the national platform committee members who caved to the Trump campaign. As long as unsuccessful and badly run Republican state parties have as much representation on national convention committees as successful state GOPs, we're not likely to see any improvement in the situation. It will take party chairmen from states like Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida to rally enough delegates from enough states to challenge party rules from the floor in 2028.

MEANWHILE: Since I started writing this last week, Joe Biden has been ousted as the presumptive Democrat Party nominee, overthrowing the results of the Democrat primary season ("fortified" to protect Biden from a primary challenge). Without following any sort of democratic process to choose a replacement, party leaders have anointed Kamala Harris as the new presumptive nominee, and the most vocal Democrat voices on social media seem to be OK with that -- Black Lives Matter excepted.

• The DNC refused to host debates during the primary, even though a vast majority of Democratic voters wanted them. This would have likely allowed America to see the decline of Joe Biden in 2023.
• The DNC changed the primary schedule and created rules that made it almost impossible for non-Biden candidates to appear on the ballot, effectively clearing the field of any challengers to the incumbent president.
• Following the primary where millions of Black voters weighed in, after one poor debate performance, the DNC Party elites and billionaire donors bullied Joe Biden out of the race.

Erick Erickson reported a rumor that Bill and Hillary Clinton came to Tulsa to get George Kaiser's help to push Biden out.

Rumor has it that the Clintons went to Tulsa over the weekend to try to get George Kaiser to commit to helping fund a new path for the Democrats around Biden.

Nothing more democratic then seeking the help of a billionaire banker to override an entire primary season.

I've seen this sort of thing on a small scale: Incumbent that is the prohibitive favorite to win renomination drops out last minute to give his preferred successor a head start over potential opponents. (See J. C. Watts's handoff to Tom Cole in 2002.) Or incumbent school board member wins re-election then quits to allow the insiders to appoint a replacement, who goes into the next election as the incumbent, rather than allow candidates to compete as equals for an open seat. It's not like Democrat leaders were surprised that Biden was losing his marbles.

The USA dodged a bullet Saturday evening, even as one whistled through the right ear of former President Donald Trump. We should all thank God for sparing Trump's life and the sparing America the upheaval that would have followed his death at the hands of an assassin. We pray that God would comfort the family of Corey Comperatore, the fire chief in the stands who was killed by another shot from the terrorist.

The Left has used the term "stochastic terrorism" to denounce the exposés of Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok) and Christopher Rufo or the comments of State Superintendent Ryan Walters. The argument is that by simply calling attention to the outrageous comments of public school teachers and administrators, they are seeking to inspire some unbalanced person to attack them physically. There's no record that this has ever occurred, but some folks who are careless with their social media posts have been outed as the sort of people who ought not to be teaching Oklahoma school children and are happily no longer employed in that capacity.

The Left's treatment of Trump is a different matter. Not content to call attention to his outrageous statements and actions, prominent voices on the Left speak about Trump as an unparalleled existential threat to democracy, going so far as to depict Trump as Hitler's reincarnation on the cover of The New Republic. Joe Biden himself spoke of putting a bullseye on Trump just a few days before the assassination attempt. If you could go back in time and assassinate Hitler before he came to power, wouldn't you?

There are a lot of questions being raised about the security arrangements at the venue. Why was Trump being guarded by women a whole head shorter than him? Why did law enforcement ignore people in the crowd who spotted a guy on the roof? Why was a building just 120 yards from the stage apparently outside the security perimeter? Rather rehash other people's analyses, I will link them here:

X (Twitter) user MilkBarTV put together, in a single video, eyewitness videos from different angles, correlated by the audio of Trump's speech heard in each, covering the two minutes before shots were fired and the two-and-a-half minutes that followed. (Direct link here.)

???? Watch the real time assassination attempt on Trump from different angles. With countdown from footage of people warning authorities about the shooter to Trump being whisked away. pic.twitter.com/iJTbRNlCEw

— MilkBarTV (@TheMilkBarTV) July 15, 2024

Sean Davis, The Federalist: Biden's Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump's Security to Allow an Assassination Attempt:

They deliberately starved Trump's security team of the resources it needed. And they did it repeatedly, over many weeks and months.

With Trump's security detail understaffed, under-resourced, and stretched to its limits, Biden's security regime reportedly diverted even more resources to a hastily planned Jill Biden event that just happened to be in the area.

Biden's security regime then ordered the most obvious assassination perch in the entire area to remain outside the main security perimeter.

Furthermore, Biden's Secret Service director ordered law enforcement and counter-snipers OFF the roof the assassin used.

If that weren't enough, Biden's security regime also refused to block the line of sight from the assassin's perch to Trump's location. When law enforcement radioed in a suspicious person using a laser range finder at the building and even took photos of him, nothing was done to detain the assassin.

The assassin was so obviously a threat that bystanders at the event begged law enforcement to stop him, but nothing happened. And even as snipers on the roof near Trump saw a gunman on the other roof, Biden's security regime refused to have agents immediately surround Trump or remove him from the stage to protect him from being shot....

They called him Hitler. They said he was an existential threat. They said he would destroy democracy. They said he was the most dangerous person on Earth. Then they denied him security. They kept the rooftop open. They watched the shooter and did nothing. They kept Trump on that stage. And they didn't do a damn thing until after he had been shot in the head.

And we're all supposed to believe it was just an innocent oopsie?

Naomi Wolf: "Lady MacBiden": Wolf was married to a Clinton White House speechwriter, was an advisor to Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's chief campaign advisor in 1996, and was a campaign advisor to Al Gore in his 2000 campaign, which leads to her questions about the choice by Jill Biden's team to hold an event in the same region of Pennsylvania at the same time as Trump's speech, stretching Secret Service resources thin. In Wolf's experience, nothing involving the President or First Lady happens spontaneously or casually. Her current husband, Brian O'Shea, served in military intelligence and private security, and included in this article is a video conversation discussing ten major security practice anomalies that he identified.

A destabilized, desperate First Lady could -- theoretically could, don't sue me -- imagine that she might, via her staff, direct all of the able, experienced Secret Service agents; all the tall secret service agents; to her own event, and to the Vice President's; and that she could thus leave her rival physically exposed in Butler PA; and that she could get away with it.

In a POTUS or FLOTUS office, everything is about "deniability". Directions are put on paper as rarely as possible. No one would ever say directly, in 2001, in a Bush Jr. White House, "Don't follow up on warnings about a terrorist attack"; just as no one would ever say directly, in a Biden White House, "Hey, leave a security vulnerability open for President Trump's event in Butler PA."

The outcome that leadership wishes, if it is a bad one, is usually inferred by those around "the Principal", by reading between the lines. The communication tenor is much more like England's King Henry II's line: "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"...

"[S}everal knights [...] took Henry II's outburst--"Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"--to mean that the king wanted Becket dead. They murdered Becket near the altar of Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170."

There has been historic reluctance to challenge any First Lady.

But someone made the decision to surround President Trump with tiny female Secret Service agents, at least one of whom cowered behind him while he was being shot at, and who appeared later not to know how to manage her holster.

All this happened when who knows how many tall, strong, experienced Secret Service agents were just 54 minutes away.

Someone made sure to arrange to be short of a third counter-sniper team; someone made sure to fail to secure a building 130 meters away from the speaker. Someone is directing SS director Cheatle to give nonsensical answers (this is itself a message, about impunity). Most chillingly, to me, is that someone directed a guard in military uniform to point his rifle directly at the van with a wounded Pres. Trump in it, before raising it again.

Dr. Robert Malone has featured a couple of guest posts from a Substack writer with the handle ArnGrimR:

Trump assassination attempt: separating fact from fiction: A careful analysis with maps and photos. ArnGrimR believes that the countersnipers failed to deal with the threat on the roof before he could shoot at Trump because their view was blocked by a tree:

Figuring out the position of the assassin, shows something very remarkable: both sniper teams could not see the assassin, because a tree was in the way. (Look back up, two pictures, the one with the cranes and the bleachers: see the tree, and how it is widest roughly at the height where the shooter would have been?) The shooter, however, had an unrestricted view on the podium, wherever on the roof he would have positioned himself (see dotted red line from edge roof). This explains the fact that neither sniper team did anything. They couldn't do anything, as they didn't see anything.

One of the videos of the rally goers that showed the shooter on the roof gives another important clue: about 19 seconds in, you hear a man yell "He's turning this way!" followed almost immediately with a final 'pop', with a different sound than the previous pops. As the assassin crawled to his right, likely to get a better view of Trump, a new angle away from the Secret Service agents covering him, away from the boom of the first forklift with the speaker array, the counter-sniper team finally got a bead on him, and immediately took the shot. Incredible shooting!

In a follow-up, ArnGrimR considers speculation that another shooter was located on the water tower: He looks at photos and angles and concludes that the shots claimed to be from the water tower make more sense from the known shooter position on the roof.

Another Substacker, El Gato Malo, applies Hanlon's Razor and, drawing on a former Secret Service agent's comments, comes down on the side of incompetence. (Tim McMillan's thread is captured here.)

But Florida Congressman Cory Mills, who served as a sniper in the Army, raised some interesting questions during an interview on CNN.

I've done thousands of advances. I've done thousands of counter-sniper operations with our teams in you know, Iraq and Afghanistan, et cetera. The amount of negligence, the amount of mistakes that were made here, I have a very difficult time not being myself towards this was intentional as opposed to fecklessness....

My point is this, from the perspective of someone who has actually conducted these, these are not difficult advances. This is not like I'm putting together a stage placement in a tight shot. This is about looking at your surroundings. What is my green, yellow, and red route, which is your routes out, in case. What is my actual elements that I need to be looking at as far as mitigating threats or risks or increased levels. Where's my range fan for the sniper that says okay, here's my 100, my 200, my sketch. Here's an area where someone could shoot here....

My point is that this was too easy of a solution. I'm uncomfortable with even having to say it. Trust me, my whole point is that I would like to look at this and say, "Where was the mistake made? How can we correct it in the future? Why was this actually done?"

But I think that this does warrant a J-13 type of commission where we can actually look at it and say, let's investigate and find out why this happened. So it doesn't happen again. This is not about a political thing. This is about we had an attempt to assassinate a president. We really need to understand what a serious matter. And this was a milliseconds or millimeter difference between this being an attempt, and this being an assassination.

And I can tell you at 160 yards... I am a person of faith. I can't explain one. I hope that it was a corrugated roof and maybe he slipped off on one of the edges of the corrugated roof or he was rushed, but this -- the whole thing just needs to have a better explanation so that the American people and everyone can feel comfortable.

UPDATE: Anonymous special operations experts with apparent access to Secret Service data tell Blaze News that the shot that killed Thomas Matthew Crooks did not come from the visible countersnipers stationed behind the stage, but from almost 450 yards away.

Evidence of the 448-yard shot was submitted to the U.S. Secret Service shortly after Crooks was killed, according to two elite experts who have frequently served in security missions globally. They are often called on to train snipers for the Secret Service, SWAT, and sniper teams at many federal agencies and tactical teams at state and local law enforcement agencies.

The sources expressed a firm belief that the much closer snipers stationed about 150 yards away just behind the speaker's platform did not kill Crooks. When Crooks fired his first shot at Trump, one of those snipers visibly flinched, took his eye from the scope, and raised his head. When he returned to the rifle, the barrel was aimed too low for the trajectory needed to hit the gunman.

Those actions, the experts said, are indicative of what they consider a "B-team" or even "C-team" sniper. Top-tier "A-team" operators don't flinch at the sound of a rifle's report, they said.

The two snipers on the barn behind Trump appeared to be using .308 caliber Remington model 700 bolt-action variants, according to a special operations source who spoke exclusively with Blaze News.

Those are not the types of rifles used by the Secret Service A-team snipers. For normal operations, Secret Service snipers use semi-automatic .308 rifles such as the Knights Armament Co. SR-25 or a high-quality AR-10 variant that has interchangeability with the SR-25. For long-range operations, they use bolt-action .338 Lapua Magnum rifles, the source said.

The sources, speaking anonymously because they are not part of the official shooting investigation, showed Blaze News visual evidence, including telemetry data from the sniper's rifle, indicating the distance and the 10 mph wind blowing at the time of the shot....

Crooks suffered at least three gunshot wounds after he opened fire on President Trump and the surrounding crowd, according to a Blaze News source with direct knowledge of tactical operations at the Butler site.

The source said a SWAT team based in Butler County cleared the inside of the building on which Crooks was perched when he fired his rifle. Contrary to a statement issued by Cheatle, there were no Secret Service or other law enforcement officers inside the building, according to the same source.

MORE: Pittsburgh-based political reporter Salena Zito was there, standing next to the stage, and describes the mood before the rally and after the shots were fired:

I was four feet from the stage, in a causeway with about five other journalists. My daughter, a photographer, was next to me. Her husband was next to her....

Some people in the crowd might have thought they heard fireworks. But I knew exactly what it was. I own a gun.

I looked up at the president. He touched his ear. I was shocked to see blood on his face. A smear of red across his cheek.

Suddenly, he was surrounded. Everyone went down.

My daughter hit the ground. My son-in-law lay on top of her. I threw my body next to theirs. Immediately, a security officer was on top of me.

"ARE YOU OKAY? ARE YOU OKAY?" he asked....

I've since seen videos of what happened. People were screaming. But all I remember hearing was an eerie silence. With that kind of crowd, you'd expect pandemonium, a stampede. But I never had a sense of chaos....

I'm still in shock. I can't make sense of any of it right now. As a journalist, you're always looking 360 degrees around you at all times--but for details, not for danger.

The whole thing was deeply disorienting. We've all seen enactments of this sort of violence--in movies or documentaries--but when you experience it, it doesn't happen that way. There's no soundtrack, no visual signposts. It's just unreal.

What's clear to me after today is that if someone is determined to commit an act of political violence, they will find a way.

Sen. Jim Inhofe, former Tulsa Mayor, congressman, and Oklahoma's longest serving US Senator, died Tuesday, July 9, 2024, after suffering a stroke on July 4. He was 89.

Some moving tributes have been published. The obituary on the Stanley's Funeral Home website speaks of Inhofe's devotion to his family, his love of flying, and his many years of work in and advocacy for African nations. The morning of July 4:

While Jim's accomplishments in Oklahoma, our country, and across the world speak for themselves, his favorite role was that of being Pop-I: husband of Mom-I, father to their four kids, and grandfather to twelve whom he loved beyond measure. Time spent with his grandkids focused solely on teaching, loving, and serving them. His countless acts to serve each of them were always followed with "That is what Pop-Is are for," a testament to the life he led. Our Pop-I loved cooking breakfast for everyone at the lake, teaching the kids to fish in the bay in South Texas and at the dock at Grand Lake, rides in the tractor and the Boston Whaler, bringing them on long morning walks, the Sunset Club, porpoise patrols, ice cream for breakfast, grandkids' sporting events, guitar playing throughout the year and guitar carols at Christmas, at the hangar watching planes take off and land, High Noon, chopping trees and splitting logs, and Pop-I's food traditions throughout. The morning of July 4, the day of his stroke, he read Day 186 of Bill Bright's Promises, walked Mutt, cooked breakfast for Mom-I, called his daughters and son, set up an umbrella at the dock for grandkids, visited with longtime neighbors, worked on several outdoor projects with his son Jimmy, and more. Indeed, for 89 years, he never stopped moving. In fact, we realize now that he was old for the first time during his last 4 ½ days. He instilled a love for Jesus, family, friends, and hard work in his family. He never asked anyone to do anything he would not do. He saw the best in people and always reminded us that you never know what someone else is going through. He cared about others more than himself and the world is a better place because of the love that he showed to everyone he met for more than 89 years.

The Petroleum Alliance of Oklahoma wrote:

Our hearts are heavy as we mourn the loss of Senator Jim Inhofe. A lifelong supporter of Oklahoma's oil and natural gas industry, Senator Inhofe worked tirelessly to improve America's energy security and national defense.

Petroleum Alliance President Brook A. Simmons reminisced on one of his favorite memories: "When climate activists printed wanted posters featuring his image for COP 21 in Paris, Senator Inhofe proudly autographed them and handed them back to protestors."

He embraced the detractors and wore their scorn as a badge of honor! America truly needs more like him.

The legacy mainstream media made sure to refer to him as a "climate denier" in their obituary headlines.

For my tribute, I thought it would be interesting to look back to his early years before politics and his first election efforts.

For the first half of the 1960s, you'd be more likely to see society-page mentions of Mrs. James Inhofe, nee Kay Kirkpatrick, than her news-page mentions of her husband. In the run up to their December 1959 wedding, there were numerous stories of receptions and showers for Inhofe's "widely feted bride-elect," the "center of a pre-nuptial social whirl." The engagement announcement mentions that she was the grandchild of pioneer Tulsans (Mr. & Mrs. J. N. Kirkpatrick and Mr. & Mrs. Linden Wallace Crosbie), that both graduated from Central High School and both started college at University of Colorado but finished in Oklahoma (she at OSU in mathematics, he at TU in economics). Kay was teaching at Edison High School, while Jim was working with his father at Mid-Continent Casualty Co. The two of them both grew up in the Bren-Rose neighborhood; a few years after they were married, they moved to the address in that same neighborhood where they spent the rest of their lives together. The wedding also got an elaborate write-up in the newspaper.

In 1966, Jim Inhofe filed to run against incumbent Republican state representative Warren Green. Green, who owned an auto repair service in Brookside and was president of Southtulsans Inc., a suburban chamber of commerce, was the first elected to represent House District 71, after the federal-court-ordered redistricting of 1964. It was a close race, but Green won, defeating Inhofe 1,396 to 1,162.

(Green was a primary target many years later. Running for re-election as District 35 State Senator in 1988, Green finished third of three in the GOP primary, which was won by attorney Don Rubottom. Green served 12 years in the State House and 12 years in the State Senate.)

Later in 1966, Inhofe shows up as Tulsa County chairman and campaign coordinator for J. Robert Wootten, GOP nominee for Lt. Governor.

Jim Inhofe got a second chance in 1966: District 39 State Sen. Dewey Bartlett was elected governor, the second Republican in state history, succeeding the first, Henry Bellmon, who was limited to a single term. Bartlett resigned his State Senate seat, triggering a special election. District 70 State Rep. Joe McGraw resigned his seat to run for Bartlett's State Senate seat, and Jim Inhofe filed to succeed McGraw. (This article states that Inhofe ran for Bartlett's seat in 1964, but reports from 1964 show Bartlett unopposed for the Republican nomination that year.) A pre-primary endorsement ad featured well over a hundred names, many of them prominent.

Inhofe won the special primary, receiving 668 votes to attorney Richard Hancock's 544 votes, and 10 votes for J. C. Gibson.

A reader posed a question to the Tulsa World's Action Line: How could Jim Inhofe run in two different districts without moving? The answer: You don't have to live in the district to run, but you have to live in the district if elected.

Ads in the run-up to the special general election featured Inhofe with Gov.-elect Bartlett and Joe McGraw. "Back Bartlett! Vote Republican Tuesday, December 20." Inhofe defeated Democrat Patricia Anderson by 1,917 votes to 440, and McGraw also won handily. Just 9 days later, Inhofe took the oath of office as an elected official for the first time.

Vanity license plates was the topic of one of Inhofe's first legislative proposals to receive press attention. A $10 additional annual fee would be collected, of which $9.50 would go into the state's general fund.

FROM THE BATESLINE ARCHIVES:

Ten years ago, Sen. Inhofe eulogized long-time Republican activist Art Rubin, who persuaded him to run for office:

Art never asked you to do anything. He told you. So we sat down on these little round stools that they had at the Beacon Grill, and he says, "I want you to run for the vacancy that's been created because Dewey Bartlett's now the governor." And I said, "Art, I'm not going to do it.... First of all, I've got all these kids at home," and Art said, "It's a part-time job." And he's right, it was. And I said, "I don't have any organization," and he said, "You need an organizer." And he looked up, and there was a lady walking across the Beacon Grill, her name was Millie Thompson.... he said, "Millie, come over here. I want you to head up the 'Volunteers for Inhofe' -- he's going to run for the state legislature."

Now I know that there are people -- 'cause I'm kind of extreme and you know that -- there are people in here who don't like me. You won't raise your hand, you won't acknowledge it now, but I know you don't. So -- but if you don't like me, don't blame me, blame Art.

POLITICAL CONTEXT:

In 1967, when Jim Inhofe became a member of the State House of Representatives, the State House had 74 Democrats and 25 Republicans, the State Senate had 39 Democrats and 9 Republicans, both U. S. Senators were Democrats, the U. S. House delegation consisted of four Democrats and two Republicans; the Republicans (Districts 1 and 6) represented Tulsa County, the old Cherokee Outlet, the Panhandle, and Oklahoma west of the OKC metro area.

At the beginning of 1966, Oklahoma had 949,211 registered Democrats, 231,744 Republicans, and 4,270 independents. 509,539 voted in the 1966 Democrat primary, while only 94,002 votes were cast in the Republican primary. Early in 1967, a group of Democrat legislators (including the infamous Gene Stipe) proposed banning GOP nominees from the general election ballot unless they could muster at least 30% of the primary votes received by the Democrats.

But things were beginning to shift: In 1964, Oklahoma had chosen Democrat presidential electors for the first time since 1948, but it would turn out to be for the last time ever, down to the present. And in 1966, Oklahoma had not only elected its second Republican governor but its first-ever GOP attorney general and labor commissioner.