Tulsa boots Bill

Incumbent Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune was turned out of office yesterday in favor of former Secretary of Commerce Kathy Taylor.

More than 75,000 votes were cast. (By comparison, the rather sleepy election in Oklahoma City, in which incumbent Mick Cornett pulled about 87 percent of the vote, drew less than 15,000.)

What can we expect? Michael Bates once characterized Kathy Taylor as the second coming of Susan Savage, and suggested that Tulsa could look forward to More Of The Same upon her election. Taylor, like Savage, is a dealmaker rather than a policy wonk, and if there's one thing Tulsa has in abundance, it's people anxious to make deals.

What fascinates me about this election is that the Tulsa power structure, more or less en masse, decided that Bill LaFortune had become a liability and threw its support to a challenger. The result is cognitive dissonance on a grand scale: the ostensible agent for change turns out to be a Good Old Boy in a dress.

Posted at 7:40 AM to Soonerland