Randy Krehbiel
Tulsa World
On a hot Tuesday afternoon exactly three months before Election Day, the turnout for Gov. Mary Fallin’s campaign stop at Guthrie Green was not large.
Excluding press, maybe 60 people met the “Mary on the Move” bus. About a dozen of those were carrying signs and chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Mary Fallin must go.”
“When you’re making tough decisions,” Fallin said, “you’re going to make some people unhappy with those decisions.”
Members of this particular group, mostly young adults, said they were unhappy with Fallin’s decisions on gay marriage, economic opportunity and health care.
“There are too many reasons not to be here,” said Chris Shoaf, the loudest of the naysayers.
Shoaf said he was not working with Democrat Joe Dorman’s campaign and scoffed at the notion he and the others were out-of-state advocates for legalized marijuana.
“I live just down the street,” Shoaf said.
Fallin is expected to win a second term, but a confluence of circumstances is making the road a little bumpier than foreseen just a few months ago.
A lot of those bumps have been caused by a revolt in the ranks over education reform and funding. Fallin was forced to back off the planned implementation of the Common Core education standards and accept a revision of the state’s third-grade reading sufficiency act.
This miscalculation has meant formulating state academic standards from scratch and gave Dorman, in his first television ad, the opportunity to say Fallin has “flip-flopped” on the issue.
Fallin disagrees.
“When I became governor, employers said they couldn’t find people with the skills they needed to do the job,” Fallin said Tuesday. “If someone graduates from high school, that diploma must mean that they can read at the appropriate level.
“We know we have to have high academic standards. That’s what I’m going to continue to work for as governor.”
While Fallin spent Tuesday campaigning, the state Democratic Party said it had filed an Ethics Commission complaint against her.
Since April, the Democrats have claimed Alex Weintz’ dual jobs as spokesman for the governor’s office and her re-election campaign violates state law. Weintz has repeatedly said his campaign work has been on his own time and is legal.
