He didn’t run a general election campaign. Did you meet his Mormon consultants from San Diego area? One of them was the Foley aide BTW. Talk about slime, those two consultants personify the word. One of their Dad’s is a slimey consultant from the Los Angeles area and the son got in trouble trying to rig an election at the University of Michigan. Istook never campaigned in Cleveland County, the 3rd largest county in the State. His campaign people brought in by the Mormon Church did not understand Oklahoma. Was up in the office three times and never went back.
The problem is he was such a bad candidate that it cost us some statewide races. A decent candidate probably would not have beat Henry but at least made it closer then 2-1.
In my County it spread like wildfire that Istook was Mormon and then there was the case of child molestation that also came up that he helped bury according to Court records for the Mormon Church.
Then we had the door hangars that were so bad I told the people putting them out in this County to stop hanging them. They blamed Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and John Kerry for abortion — the only problem was that we did not have a Senate race in OK and Dean was not in Congress. We had a lot of complaints about them that cost us more votes.
Romney could win your state.
I retract what I said then. That indeed sounds like he shouldn’t have run. I had presumed he offered himself up to give the party a decent candidate, but that it turned out a worse screw-up than Largent in ‘02, who was expected to win (although personally I thought Largent was a total dolt, especially on the Elian Gonzalez affair where he demonstrated absolutely no knowledge of the rights of children and parents under the Cuban Constitution). I was concerned when I saw we lost all those other statewide offices in ‘06, including that of Brenda Reneau’s Labor Commissioner. I presume her loss was partly a result of what you cited (and the failure, too, to hold Mary Fallin’s Lt Governorship).