Cornett hones message while campaigns bicker about ads
DUNCAN — Republican gubernatorial candidate Mick Cornett said Saturday that Oklahoma needs to change its mindset about education and not use inefficiency in the public school system as an excuse for low funding.
“I’m glad the teachers got the pay raise,” Cornett told about a dozen people at a Duncan diner.
“I’d like to see what we can do from here. But I do think going forward, this state has to show more appreciation for educators. And we have to continue to raise the expectations on what we’re doing on education.”
Asked at an event in Lawton on Saturday about administrative costs in public schools, Cornett said every large public and private organization has inefficiencies.
There is sometimes an attitude toward education, he said, that “when it’s efficient, we’ll fund it."
“Well, that’s not going to work either. You have to always be working on the efficiency and continue to fund it.”
Cornett still offered no specifics on education or the other topics he emphasized Saturday — health, infrastructure and criminal justice reform.
However, honing his message with just over two weeks before the Aug. 28 GOP runoff with Kevin Stitt, Cornett said he was ready to champion public education around the state.
“Right now when you talk about education, there’s all this negativity that comes up,” he said in Duncan. “That may be unavoidable right now. But we’ve got to start looking forward to have a more positive image and feeling about education.”
Cornett was asked in Duncan about his views on home schooling.
“My personal experience has been children that are home schooled
almost always wind up performing very highly academically.
“But what works in your family is not going to work in somebody else’s family so we have to support public schools, too. We have to have charter school opportunities for parents who don’t believe they can get the best education in a regular public school.”
Negative ads
The topic of negative ads in the GOP runoff campaign did not come up in Duncan and Lawton.
So while small audiences in the southwestern towns were hearing Cornett’s stump speeches, the state’s metro area television audiences were targeted with ads questioning whether Cornett was truly a fan of President Donald Trump and whether banking violations in three states during the financial crisis a decade ago by Stitt’s mortgage company made him unqualified to lead Oklahoma.
An outside group supporting Cornett financed the ad attacking Stitt's company which aired Friday morning. Cornett's spokesman, Will Gattenby, issued a statement
saying the allegations were true.
Stitt held a news conference Friday morning to call on Cornett to run a clean campaign. Later that day, the Stitt campaign began airing an ad saying Cornett did not back President Donald Trump or his immigration policies before the 2016 election.
Cornett's campaign made an issue Saturday of the timing of the Stitt ad.
They said the Stitt campaign was preparing to run the anti-Cornett ad at the same time Stitt was at his news conference calling out Cornett.
In an interview Saturday, Cornett said Stitt had implied at his Friday news conference that the Stitt campaign hadn’t planned to go negative “when they already had a television spot delivered to the TV station.”
Donelle Harder, spokeswoman for the Stitt campaign, said Sunday, “Of course we were prepared, as Cornett’s camp has been leaking rumors of negative attacks for weeks.
“When public polls hit showing Cornett down 10 points, they even leaked the timing of their attacks. When Kevin Stitt called for Mick Cornett to run a clean campaign, Cornett’s campaign responded by doubling down on the false attacks.
“Of course we were prepared to respond with the fact that Mick Cornett was on the Never Trump train and said building a wall ‘isn’t going to get us anywhere,’ information confirmed by independent news agencies.”
The ad attacking Stitt's mortgage company was financed by an outside group of donors that previously sponsored television spots to increase Cornett’s name recognition in Tulsa.
Cornett said Saturday that his own campaign had not planned on going negative.
“Now we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do” on ad strategies, he said. “We may have to change strategies. We haven’t decided.”
There are two outside groups — one whose donors are public and whose donors are anonymous — supporting Cornett. Often, outside groups sponsor the negative ads, which allows a candidate’s campaign to stay on the high road.
The outside groups are not allowed to coordinate their activities with a candidate's campaign.
Asked whether he thought one of the groups, Oklahoma Values, aired the ad attacking Stitt's company because of two recent polls showing Cornett down by 10 points, Cornett said, “I don’t think I should guess.”