When the going gets tough, independent candidate Jack Cherry goes YouTube.
Cherry, 45, is running for Oklahoma House District 93, which, according to his video, encompasses a pretty big swath of south-side Oklahoma City and has lots of warehouses, apartments, strip malls, car washes, his grandmother's former hair salon and his home of 10 years.
As an independent running against Republican Mike Christian and Democrat David Castillo for the district seat being vacated because of term limits by Democrat Al Lindley, Cherry chose an independent means to get his message through.
"I thought it would be informative for the voters. The two major parties aren't doing anything like this, so as a third-party independent, I needed to do everything I can to try to be as informative as possible, not only for my candidacy, but just independents in general," Cherry said.
Enter the net. Enter YouTube. Enter Cherry.
"I produced it myself and my wife put it online for me. She did the post-production things," Cherry said. "I've done some indie film work in the past and I have some experience editing and shooting and everything."
So was born Cherry's four-part series on YouTube. In the opening segment, Cherry introduces himself while a digitzed Oklahoma state flag (how'd he do that?) waves in the background and gives us a windshield tour of District 93, interspersed with biographical information and cutaways of Cherry in front of that magical flag.
We learn that his first home address held by his parents was an apartment (apartment No. 4, to be exact) on Agnew Avenue and that it is on his birth certificate. We learn that when he moved out on his own at age 18, he lived at 1900 South Santa Fe, now an abandoned lot, and that the whole area has strong Cherry family ties going back to the Seventies. He even lived in the United Kingdom for a short time, but always found his way back home.
But wait. Just in case you think he's all eye candy, Cherry gets down to business and explains his stand on a number of issues at 3 minutes and 57 seconds into the nearly 8-minute-long video. And the truth is, back when he posted his video on July 10, he saw the mortgage crisis coming. Cherry is a veteran's affairs mortgage specialist with Midland Mortgage Co.
"The sad reality is that many veterans and many other families are losing their homes to foreclosure in record numbers," Cherry explains in the video. "I favor legislation to help these and other families keep their homes."
