One Pretentious RINO Implodes
Anyone See a Private Turbo Prop Plane Going Down in Flames Last Week?
Last week we warned of the chaos that would ensue if Rep. Charles McCall were elected Speaker. McCall had created a quandary for a dozen or more legislators that had accepted unreported junkets on McCall’s private jet and others were worried not so much about McCall’s voting record but about McCall’s unsavory list of campaign donors.
Some legislators were warning the Sooner Tea Party that the Speaker’s race was done and that McCall had it wrapped up and was going to be asking the representatives to sign pledge cards at the retreat. But the extra newsletter full of McCall dirt went out at 12:03 am on Monday morning and by12:30 am legislators were forwarding copies and probably calling peers because by 3:00 am Monday morning a good quarter of the the legislators were getting up and opening their email to read the extra newsletter sent out that night. By 5 am another quarter of the legislators had opened the extra newsletter and we saw other opens being recorded by most of the same legislators that had read the extra newsletter before 3 am which meant that the people they had forwarded a copy to actually opened the copy. Leslie Osborn, Jason Nelson, Harold Wright, George Faught, Scot Martin, and Earl Sears were among the top re senders, all of which were running for Speaker or top lieutenants of a candidate for Speaker.
Pressure built immediately on McCall as his backers realized that supporting McCall would mean two years spent dodging accusations of scandals and ammo for primary challengers to challenge many of them as an election year was looming large. Scot Martin’s camp backed off on negotiating with McCall and all three of the other candidates, Sears, McCall, and Martin began pushing hard to get an agreement with John Bennett because without Bennett no one could put together the votes needed to win.
At this point McCall is damaged goods; his team by now has made overtures to the other camps as they cannot risk being left out of a committee post if they stick with a loser. Scot Martin isn’t likely to pick up a significant number of the McCall supporters, most will migrate over to the Bennett campaign or the Sears campaign. Martin himself is going to lose the few conservative supporters he has as Martin can’t guarantee that those representatives will support Sears and they certainly won’t support McCall at this point.
Things will shake out like this; Both Bennett and Sears benefited from the McCall implosion. Martin found his team weakened as his team is playing an end game, knowing the Speakership is not going to be won by Martin and that Martin himself understands this better than anyone. It is highly unlikely that Sears will pull in enough McCall votes to win outright so for now the race is either going to pit Sears against Bennett or result in a negotiated deal between the two camps.
