Nothing good, that’s for sure.
The Lloyd Oliver Tree
“If he wins, I’m moving to Fredericksburg” said his GOP opponent, Mike Anderson. “I don’t have anything against him personally, but I can’t imagine what that office would be like.”
His criminal history, unusual sense of humor and the unfounded attacks on Anderson, the darling of county prosecutors, mean there is almost no support for Oliver among the people he would be leading if he wins.
Prosecutors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, called Oliver a “joke” and worse. They were vehement about his lack of qualifications to run the office.
Because Harris County trended Republican in 2010, few of the courthouse lawyers and politicians interviewed thought Oliver would win. None knew of contingency plans for a recall election, heightened scrutiny to force an impeachment or other ways to remove a sitting district attorney.
Anderson said an Oliver victory could spark a mass exodus of as many as 100 of the 240 prosecutors in the District Attorney’s Office.
“These are the people we count on to try murders and aggravated sexual assaults and the aggravated robberies,” he said. “It could really be a horrible situation.”
There was a large exodus from the DA’s office after Lykos won in 2008, too. Whether you think that was a bad thing or not probably correlates with whether or not you supported Anderson in this year’s primary. Be that as it may, I don’t dispute the notion that an Oliver victory would be a disaster for the office, precisely because Oliver is a joke and a grifter who has no valid reason for running and has no good vision for how to run the office; indeed, as Patricia Kilday Hart showed last week, the ideas he does have are offensive and harmful. Nothing good comes from an Oliver win, and it’s not just cranky Internet kibitzers like me who think so.
“If he gets elected, I don’t know if he can make it four years without being indicted or removed from office,” said defense attorney Bob Moen. “I don’t wish that upon Lloyd, but after knowing him for all these years, will he make it four years? I think we’d have to check what the office pool is – may have to buy one of the squares.”
Boy, with friends like that, eh? You can still push the straight-ticket Democratic button when you go vote. Just make sure you follow that up by de-selecting Lloyd Oliver before you hit the “cast ballot” button. You can vote for Mike Anderson or not as you see fit, just don’t vote for Lloyd Oliver. And I’ll say again, I sure hope the HCDP is thinking about how to deal with situations like this going forward, because if Oliver doesn’t win he’ll probably file for one of the many available judicial races in 2014, just as he did in 2010 and 2008. We don’t want to have to go through this again in two years’ time, do we?
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