| Don't go into a gun fight with knives is an old piece of wisdom. Perhaps it was invented in the old West or even Oklahoma. Today, Ward Connerly's group in Oklahoma withdrew its application to the Oklahoma Supreme Court to consider roughly 141,000 signatures for a ballot proposal similar to the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (see the Chronicle of Higher Education here, or the Tulsa World here). They need roughly 139,000 valid signatures, which is way too slim of a margin given that some signatures are people have moved, made errors in filling technical parts out, or otherwise rejected for technical reasons. So Connerly did the right thing and withdrew, rather than trying to squeeze out the signatures in a protracted legal battle that would have cost the taxpayer (and Ward) more money. I'm sure my some (but a surprising number won't) not-so-liberal (anti-vote, anti-equality) "liberal" readers will send up three cheers, but I'm going to provide a post-mortem for both them and conservatives. While I'm not in the direct "loop" of the 5 state effort, I'm certainly one of the very few observers with the insight of 3 plus years of work for MCRI and many years of observing the issue. The failure of the Oklahoma initiative was therefore not surprising to me once I saw the numbers submitted. The biggest reason this drive failed is that Ward walked into a thermonuclear weapon fight in Oklahoma, where a fascist dictator of an Attorney General named Drew Edmondson (Democrat) had created a chilling environment in October 2007 by arresting three petition coordinators from a 2005 effort and charging them the ever-so-flexible "conspiracy to defraud the state" charge, a 10 year felony. They're known as the Oklahoma 3 now, while their trial proceeds, and include well-known libertarian petition circulator Paul Jacob (most known for engineering a number of Term Limits drives in the 1990s). Jacob's crime? Helping organize a TABOR-style petition - a taxpayer protection law. Every elite on the planet - or in Oklahoma - was threatened, and far more than MCRI, which of perhaps more hated but less critical to elite pocketbooks. And while TABOR can reasonably be debated as good or bad public policy, they collected almost 100,000 signatures more than necessary. But the Oklahoma system of verification rides on a "referee" appointed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, and he threw it off, citing some signatures alleged gathered by non-state residents. The petition firm had followed instructions of the Oklahoma Secretary of State in accepting gatherers who recently moved into Oklahoma and declared residency (the SoS office told them that anyone could become a resident). The referee rejected a number of signatures on the grounds that those declaring residency must "intend" to live in Oklahoma pretty much forever, and even rejected signatures of people who had moved and were still in Oklahoma and reachable at the time of the review. But the reason was irrelevant. Had it not been that, it would have been something else. Some other reason. Because the establishment was threatened. And ultimately that is why Oklahoma went the way it did for OkCRI. So Jacob and the local group he was assisting were thrown off the ballot. You'd think the victory would be enough for the left. But after two years, and after OkCRI was declared a goal by Connerly and other drive possibilities appeared on the horizon, the Attorney General decided he could both send a message to future petitioners and make it impossible for those on the street (by chilling even the signature gatherers). Jacob's battle continues, and involves both federal and state Constitutional questions. It is one of the front lines in a long-term battle over petitioning rights. But it also means Connerly's group faced an uphill battle, and no doubt that they thought they had brought some guns to the fight but realized that in Oklahoma you need really big guns in the fight against the bureaucracy controlled by a nepotistic "old boys" club (most of organs of state government are blue, despite the "redness" of its presidential votes) that dates back to the era old south (when the Democrats were the true racists of Jim Crow). So I implore my freedom-minded readers to keep an eye on the Jacob story, and remind readers that MCRI itself wasn't smooth going and faced its own temporary road blocks and wouldn't be worried about a single-temporary setback. Still, on that note, it is very likely that the decision to proceed with 5 states this year might have been a bit of a stretch, and that there were organizational things that could have been done better. In every failure there are lessons to be learned to improve the chances for success. These petition drives are very, very hard things, and the boundary between success and failure, even when large numbers are submitted, can be just a tiny input or factor. |
