If your city's being populated by highly educated twentysomething s with choices, you're probably going to succeed.

The spoiled superstar brat wouldn't get far in Oklahoma City. We're very value-conscious. Our city was settled in a land run. Those 10,000 people were desperate for a better life.

We had a branding problem. We have allowed ourselves to be branded by our tragedies. If you said 'Oklahoma City,' chances are the next word out of your mouth was 'bombing.'

I believe in infrastructure, I believe in investing in your hard assets. Where I think government starts to fail is when it starts getting itself weighed down with the social programs. And I think the American public just feels like a lot of that money is tossed aside and wasted.

When you have a lot of construction going on, it sends a message of vitality that builds up consumer confidence. It gets people to spend money when they see that energy, that things are happening.

It`s nice to get president candidates` attention to infrastructure need which is really a ticking time bomb in America. But as important as the dollar amounts are, we need to know that this money is gonna go directly to cities. So we`re gonna be able to put it to use. In previous administrations and in previous efforts on infrastructure, the money has gone through states and it never seems to find its way to the nation`s cities.

People in Oklahoma don't wake up every morning wondering what the government is going to do for them.