September 3, 2014
The Tulsa World
By RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer

The top of the Republican ticket in Oklahoma took a brief “Victory Tour” up the Turner Turnpike on Tuesday, stopping in Edmond and Tulsa to remind GOP voters that they are all on the same team.

That team, said U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, will “make sure we get people who are willing to go out and fight the bad guys and take over this country.”

Inhofe, Gov. Mary Fallin and U.S. Senate nominee James Lankford spoke Tuesday afternoon to about 75 supporters in a conference room at the Oral Robers University Mabee Center.

“A lot of big issues face our state and our nation, but our goal is to keep the momentum going,” Fallin said.

Fallin, Inhofe and Lankford are odds-on favorites in the Nov. 4 general election, although the road got a little bumpy for Fallin over the summer.

Her spokesman, Alex Weintz, said Tuesday’s two-stop tour was to illustrate that the three candidates “all share the same values.”

Inhofe, who will be 80 shortly after the election, good-naturedly noted that people have said for some time that he is too old for Congress, but he said that with 46-year-old Lankford, “our average age is just about perfect.”

He said he is “excited” by the prospect of having Lankford in the Senate, and said he and another party activist “created” Fallin because they first “persuaded her to run” for office.

Turning on his customary torrent of charges against President Barack Obama, Inhofe predicted that Republicans will win a Senate majority “with two or three (seats) to spare” and be able to round up enough disgruntled Democrats to override any Obama veto.

“This president is so unpopular, Democrats will be lining up to override his vetoes,” Inhofe predicted.

Lankford briefly summarized a four-day trip to Central America with five other House members and said it was “very helpful” in understanding the sudden influx of unaccompanied minors into the United States from Honduras, El Salvardor and Guatemala.

Among those he met, Lankford said, were people who were recently deported from the United States “who said, yes, I’m going to spend a few days with my family; then I’m taking off again for Mexico, and I’m going to do this all over again.”

“This conversation … about how to secure our borders doesn’t mean we just secure it on the Texas-New Mexico-Arizona line,” Lankford said. “It means we also have to reach down into Central America.”

Lankford said the Congress members on the trip generally agreed on solutions to the problem, but he added that “now we have to do the politics.”

Fallin, speaking last, touted her accomplishments in office, including government reorganization, education funding, the closing of the holding facility for unaccompanied foreign children at Fort Sill, and resistance to “federal overreach.”

Inhofe endorsed Fallin’s management of the state, saying, “I tell people in Washington, ‘Look what can happen when a state is run properly.’” 

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