Seven-term congressman Tom Cole originally planned to be a historian, but a promise he made to his mother decades ago reeled him into the world of Oklahoma politics.
While Cole was pursuing a promising career in academia at the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s, his mother Helen TeAta Cole was about to make a second run for the state legislature after a disappointing loss.
Her son believed in her, and promised to run her campaign if she chose to run again.
“My mother and I were extraordinarily close,” Cole said. “Most Sundays we’d have dinner together — just listening to her talk about politics and discuss the players, I wondered what it was like to really hold an office.”
That wonder would turn into reality after his mother’s victory in 1978. Cole would go on to run several campaigns, and in 1988, he found himself running and winning the seat he helped his mother win in the state legislature.
Since then, Cole, a staunch conservative, has been sent to the U.S. Congress seven times by the voters of Oklahoma’s fourth congressional district — one of the state’s most liberal areas, which contains OU and Norman.
Cindy Rosenthal, former Norman mayor and director of OU’s Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center, has worked with Cole many times over the years. Rosenthal said she believed Cole’s efforts to be bipartisan helped him get re-elected in the district.
“The district itself — it’s hard to say to what extent it’s a swing district,” Rosenthal said. “Clearly just the evidence that Congressman Cole has not drawn a really strong opponent, from his own party or in the Democratic Party, says a lot about how people respect the job that he’s doing for the district.”
Competitor and Listener
Cole, who studied history at Grinnell College, Yale and OU and participated in a Fulbright fellowship at the University of London, said he enjoyed the time he spent teaching European history at OU and interacting with students, and if politics hadn’t intervened he likely would have pursued a career as a historian.
“It was a great experience teaching at OU. Look, this is a fabulous school, and I’d grown up around it,” Cole said. “At the first football game I ever went to, Bud Wilkinson was still coaching. It was a very comfortable place for me to be. I loved the teaching, I love the students.”
However, Cole’s love of history and competition lead him to pursue a career in politics instead.
“It kind of reminded me — when I was in high school, I played football. And politics is kind of an adult team sport,” Cole said. “A watch party is a lot like a locker room after a game. There’s been a common endeavor, you’ve fought and you’ve struggled. You’ve won or lost — you’ve bonded. But I like the game of it, the strategy of it, the execution of it, and the fact that there was a definitive score.”
And Cole has seen some particularly good scores over the years. Cole won his first congressional election with 53 percent of the vote, but in the six elections following his first, has not once garnered less than 60 percent of the vote. Cole said much of his electoral success was because of his ability to reach groups not previously targeted by Republican candidates.
“You try to be open and look for places you can work together and recognize that good ideas come from both ends and the entire width of the political spectrum — they’re not limited to one party. It’s not like what one group thinks is always right and what another group thinks is always wrong,” Cole said. “You try to pick the good ideas and the things that bring people together rather than tear them apart.”
Cole, a member of the Chickasaw Nation, said his Native heritage has helped him better communicate with the Native American community in the district — something Cole said Republicans often fail to do. Cole said he is also consistently endorsed by the American Federation of Government Employees, a union historically more supportive of liberal candidates.
“You just try and be a very serious and very good representative,” Cole said. “And you don’t limit yourself with going to talk to constituencies that are aligned with you. You try to represent the interests of all your voters. But I am a conservative. There are certainly places that I would disagree with people to the left of me, fair enough.”
Rosenthal said despite Cole’s disagreements with his constituents, he has never shied away from addressing the concerns of the citizens in his district.
“Because the district has some diverse communities and communities with different political profiles, he has always been someone who thinks about the community rather than the partisan makeup of a community,” Rosenthal said. “I’ve always appreciated that.”
At a Norman town hall in August, Cole faced an angry crowd of constituents after he voted yes on the American Health Care Act, the Republican party’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Cole stayed at the town hall for five hours and answered every question.
“Norman and the university community within it is very sophisticated. Even though people may or may not agree with me on specific issues, I don’t think they’re usually upset in the manner in which I talk about issues or confront them,” Cole said. “You make yourself available, you explain your point of view, you listen to their concerns, and certainly you find areas that you can work together on.”
Relationship With Students
Yaseen Shurbaji, industrial systems and engineering sophomore and recently elected SGA president, interned in Tom Cole’s Washington D.C. office and said that although many of Cole’s stances clash with the views of many OU students, Shurbaji said his time in Cole’s office taught him a lot.
“He explains things very simply,” Shurbaji said. “There are concepts in Washington that are very hard to grasp — like entitlement reform, for example. He does a good job of breaking things down, and that probably goes back to the fact that he was a teacher.”
Shurbaji said Cole greatly enjoys making the effort to teach student interns during their time in his office. He holds a time to speak with the interns for an hour daily and gives each a book at the end of the summer.
“He is definitely very wise,” Shurbaji said. “He reads more than anybody I know and is always trying to learn something new.”
Despite this, activists in the OU community have protested several policies Cole has supported under President Donald Trump’s administration.
Cole expressed support for Trump’s immigration ban that some OU students protested. Cole also said Trump made “the right call” in a statement after Trump announced he would rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an action students also protested.
In spite of these disagreements, Rosenthal said Cole has helped secure vital funding for the university and has always tried to support OU.
“He was always a champion for some of the important federal money that came to the university. He’s always been a champion for those kinds of issues,” Rosenthal said. “He is obviously a graduate, and I’ve appreciated personally his willingness to be available and speak to students and be on campus and field questions. He gets tough questions, and it’s not always from supporters that show up to these meetings, but I also think that’s part of the reason why Tom is well respected.”
Cole said he doesn’t think the political climate has been any more chaotic during the Trump administration than it was in the past — it’s simply a different side of the political spectrum agitated now.
Tough questions at town halls aren’t new for him, Cole said, and they haven’t dissuaded him. It appears the love of the race will continue for Cole in 2018, as he said he plans to run for re-election, despite The Tulsa World placing him on the shortlist to replace OU President David Boren.
“To be honest with you, I sort of — like most people — thought, ‘Isn’t there just some way David Boren could just live forever?’ I think he’s done an unbelievable job,” Cole said.
Cole said he has not been involved in any discussions about replacing Boren, and right now he’s focused on yet another congressional campaign.
“There’s an old saying in politics: Everybody knows someone doesn’t like them, only politicians like to count,” Cole said. “You’re going to get that count every two years, and fair enough. But you can be courteous and professional to everybody.”
