46th Star - Continuing to Rise (part 3) |
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Often Oklahoma’s representatives discovered that the surest way back to Oklahoma lay in pursuing higher office in Washington. In 1972, James R. Jones began a climb to power that culminated in chairing the critical House Budget Committee. There it ended, for in 1986 Jones gave up his House seat, only to lose the race for one-term incumbent Don Nickles’s Senate seat. Eight years later, the Fourth District’s Dave McCurdy made the same effort with the same effect. Unbeatable in his own district, he lost the 1994 Senate race to Republican Inhofe, who then completed the last two years of David Boren’s term. Boren had resigned his Senate seat to assume the presidency of the University of Oklahoma. Brad Carson, a Rhodes Scholar like fellow Democrats Carl Albert and David Boren, gave their party fresh hope when he finally broke the GOP’s Oklahoma congressional monopoly, reclaiming the historically Democratic Second District in 2000. Four years later, Carson repeated Jones’s and McCurdy’s mistake, ending his House career by losing the U.S. Senate race to Tom Coburn—the same Tom Coburn who had preceded Carson as Second District representative. As proof that the state’s Democrats were not ambition’s exclusive victims, Republican Steve Largent gave up his perfectly safe First District seat in 2002 to launch an unsuccessful campaign to become Oklahoma’s next governor. |
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Above: Brad Carson (D-OK, 2001-2004) campaigns in Grant County. A conservative Democrat, Carson was never afraid to take on the conventional thinking of the Democratic Party. He argued that the Democrats needed to look at the roots of political crisis not in race and class but in culture. (Courtesy Brad Carson) |
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Above: Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK, 1995-2000 House; 2005- Senate) visits with constituents in Sand Springs. A practicing physician, Coburn continues to oppose abortion, press for legislation for HIV testing, and advocate for more money for veterans’ health care. In his short time in the Senate, he has become a watchdog on pork barrel appropriations and regularly opposes such bills–even to the chagrin of members of his own party. (Courtesy Office of Tom Coburn) |
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Left: Never afraid to voice his opinion, James M. Inhofe (R-OK, 1987-1994, House; 1994-, Senate) admits he is very, very rigid in the things in which he believes. As chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, the senator vehemently denies the existence of global warming. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, he argued that human rights “do-gooders” were too concerned with finding abuses in Iraqi prisons but failed to appreciate that American troops were dying in the war-torn country. (Courtesy Office of James M. Inhofe) |
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