When asked to provide a post for a website called “The Recovering Politician,” I tried to figure out what in the blazes I’m supposed to be recovering from. In fact, in the six years since I left my position as Oklahoma State Treasurer, I have never looked back or regretted either the time I spent in elective public service or my decision to leave after a decade in office. I left when I determined that I had accomplished all that I had set out to do when I first ran for the job.
That’s not to say that there is not much still to be done with the agency, and in fact my successors have developed new initiatives that have improved the operations of the office. I had accomplished everything that I had set out to do. Despite my concern about the advisability of term limits, I do believe that all of us who are privileged to serve in elective office should be willing to limit our own terms and turn our offices over to energetic– and hopefully idealistic– successors when we have accomplished our mission. One should never be a “placeholder” when holding an office of public trust.
In many ways, I was the most unlikely of political candidates. Nobody in my family had ever run or thought of running for political office, but like many who came of age in the 1960s and the 1970s, I was convinced that elective public service was the highest calling a democracy could offer. A chance meeting with a candidate for Oklahoma Attorney General in 1986 gave me an opportunity several months later to join his staff to serve as an Assistant Attorney General, and in that capacity I had the opportunity to serve as the people’s advocate in utility rate proceedings and to represent Oklahoma in a landmark Clean Water Act case, Arkansas v. Oklahoma, that I argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991.
In 1993, I began to think seriously about a race for political office. We had had a bi-partisan tradition in the Oklahoma Treasurer’s office –a bi-partisan tradition of crumminess. Democrats and Republicans alike had been beset by scandals, investigations and indictments. Confidence in our state’s ability to manage our finances with integrity was at an all time low, and as somebody who believed in public investment, I knew that if the citizens of Oklahoma could not trust where and how their tax dollars were managed, they would not be willing to come together to invest in better schools, roads, and health care.
We won narrowly in 1994, a victory that truly would not have been possible had not dozens of volunteers, who normally pay no attention to elections for offices like state treasurer, cared enough about the need to restore integrity to the office that they joined our cause. And I would not have been successful without an outstanding staff who every single day put the interests of our state first. Many of our earlier accomplishments were far from glamorous, involving new accounting controls and speedier processes to convert cash to investable funds. But when I began giving taxpayers a running total of how much money we had saved or earned through cost saving efficiencies without a need for tax increase, they responded, and I believe our work has played a role in the willingness of Oklahomans to support new investments in education and health care over the last decade.
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Robert Butkin: Leaving Politics With No Regrets
