Once you get elected, your job is no longer to the people who voted for you.

Your job is to the people you represent.

If you're a Democrat or a Republican president, your job is not to represent the half of the country that voted for you, which is where we are today.

Your job is to serve the country, whether they voted for you or not.

[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, the former mayor of Midland, Texas, who's out with a terrific new book, The Middle.

Mayor Patrick Payton, we spoke on zoom, Sure did.

but I figured, let's do this in person.

Let's do it again!

It's good to see you, Alex.

An honor and a pleasure to be with you today.

Likewise.

So you've been both a minister, and a mayor, which was harder?

Yes.

Would be the answer to that.

-Probably being mayor.

-Yeah.

When you're a minister, you're typically surrounded by people who agree with you.

People don't usually come to your church who disagree with you.

It was a large church.

We had over 5000 people there every weekend.

But when you're mayor, you represent people who disagree with you and people who agree with you.

And you've really, no pun intended, have to walk down the middle for the entire city.

And when I was mayor, we had to go through Covid, and we had to go through several other issues that I actually talk about in the book that make it clear that to be a leader, just to be a pastor of a church, was considered a leadership position, to be a leader in this state, in my city, in this country.

You represent all people, not just the people who voted for you.

And so I would say that carried the greater challenge.

When you came into office.

You definitely had aspirations.

Besides, the resilience to survive the pandemic and for your community to be able to thrive beyond Covid.

So what was that aspiration?

If you thought to your mind, you know, what was my chief priority became aware of Covid?

Before I knew that this was going to require us to be in isolation or sequestered for some period of time.

What was the chief aspiration before Covid hit?

Well, really the biggest goal was we wanted to become one of the top 100 cities in the nation.

We knew we had the financial ability to do that.

We knew we were growing.

We knew the world was coming to Midland, Texas, because of the oil and gas industry.

We had infrastructure needs we had to take care of.

We had quality of life projects we had to take care of.

And so our aspiration as an administration was to become a top 100 city, destination city to live in, in the nation.

That lasted for about two months.

And yet you recognize that Midland isn't recognized place that people raise families and have a high quality of life.

But so once the reality set in of Covid, what were the different stages of addressing that as mayor?

Great question.

The stages of it were, first of all, panic.

I can still remember sitting in the basement of City Hall getting phone calls from all across the country.

We had people in different areas of the government.

We had people in different areas of the military who were calling.

And within 24 hours we were already hearing what I would just call crazy stories.

You know, you'd go, I can't believe that.

I'm not sure that's going to happen.

I'm not sure this is going to happen.

And then it just became all hands on deck.

Actually, when I found out about it, I was in Oklahoma City seeing clients, because as a mayor, you're only paid $70 a month.

So I still had a company I had to run.

I was seeing clients in Oklahoma City, it was the fateful night that the Oklahoma City Thunder game was canceled, and everybody started coming, there was a restaurant.

And I spent the next seven hours in a car on the phone with my administration, trying to figure out what we were going to do.

Then it became, I think, Alex, I was surprised at how fast it became fearful and divisive.

If I can say it that way, as you mentioned in the panel earlier, you had news over here saying one thing, news over here saying another thing.

What are we going to have to do?

And the very first meeting I had, one of the first meetings I had was with a group of physicians that came to my office and sat down very somberly and told me, if you don't shut the city down, you're going to have 2000 dead people on your hand in three months.

You better buy refrigerated trucks, it was literally the quote.

And the next group of people was, if you shut this city down, you're a communist, or a socialist, or some form of that, and we're going to run you out of this town.

That's probably where the middle started, because I thought, hang on a minute, we don't know, what we don't know.

We know very little.

We're already acting in extremes.

I'm going to have to start talking to people from all different viewpoints and find a way to be a healthy, protective city.

Also, realizing Alex, Midland is not New York.

We don't live on top of each other very much.

We're not, you know, we're close, but the proximity.

People aren't walking up and down the streets like they were in major cities like San Francisco or New York or wherever the case might be.

So we had to figure out how to best handle the crisis where we lived.

But I would also submit that that's maybe something we have forgotten in our conversation as a country.

Not every city is exactly the same.

We don't all fit the same mold.

We have to respect each other's differences and honor each other's observances of the crisis in their particular area.

So we had to work it out together as a community.

And I don't know how much further you want me to go on that as far as the stages.

And I kind of ended up in a little bit of a back and forth with the Texas Legislature and the governor.

Because they were issuing executive orders, which, if time permits, we should probably talk about the scourge of what I call executive orders in this republic that we live in, this democratically elected republic.

As a mayor, I could issue an executive order to do something, but it was only good for seven days.

And then my council, my legislature, if you will, had to come together and vote to approve that.

So I was, those checks and balances are in play at the local level.

I think we've lost that at the state and national level.

And I was on Fox News one night, and I had just really chose not to do what the governor told me to do, because I thought that there was an abuse at the federal and state level of executive orders.

We already knew we could do everything over Zoom because we had to do that as a city council, and I thought it was time for the legislature to come together.

Actually, after all, the legislators are the elected representatives of the people who live on their street, live on their block, live in their town.

We should be very uncomfortable, in my opinion, when mayors, and governors, and presidents, governed by executive order and not by checks and balances.

So that was part of the what we had to go through with Covid.

We put a mask mandate on the agenda, and we deliberated that and voted on that.

And I think that's the way representative republicanism works.

And I say republicanism not of the party.

There's a system of governance.

And I think we honored those principles.

You know, I had a guest on The Open Mind, a political scientist, who identified, in his mind, that a pandemic was the likeliest event to bring, foster a sense of unity again in the public.

And, was there a period where you, even if it was abbreviated, felt like there was rationality and there was a kind of collective knowledge and appreciation of, here's what we have to do, and we're going to try to, you know, get through this.

Whether that was before the advent of the Covid-19 vaccines or after.

But was there any promise in this community that you, you know, describe as a lot of people with different ideas.

Was there any possibility that there would be, if you want to use the word catharsis, or the outcome being like, raising the morale in these times of hardship?

Yes.

I realize the media had its narratives, I don't mean that negatively.

It was positive and negative.

People were watching national news to figure out what their narrative was.

The meantime, I was talking to the hospital authorities.

I was talking to the county officials.

I was talking to emergency medical people.

I was talking to physicians who were friends, who I'd known and getting their counsel.

And that moment came when I decided, as goofy as you might want to call it, I sat down in my living room next to my fireplace on a leather chair, pulled up Facebook and did Facebook Live at 8:00 every week.

And I found out I was telling our community, here's how many people are in the hospital.

Here's what's happening with deaths, here's what's happening with our, overcrowding in different areas.

Here's the news I'm hearing, and I kept repeating this phrase, this issue is one that you as an individual are going to have to handle.

You're going to have to have discussions with your family and your medical professionals.

You're going to have to work within your personal faith and convictions.

But in the meantime, we also have to watch after each other and take care of one another.

And quite frankly, it was kind of interesting.

I had to cover up the screen because, you know, there's feedback going on and you can't turn that off.

Funny story, I got in trouble by Facebook because I had this little speaker that I would play music on before I got on the air, and I had some old classic rock and roll that I love to have Boston and Chicago and stuff, and Facebook turned me off.

They said I was using media wrong, so I had to quit doing that.

But, you know, I had there were people who were haters who were going to hate.

There were people who were liking what we were doing.

But the answer to your question is, it's when I took the time to sit down and have a conversation with our community, and at any given time, we've had anywhere from 30 to 40,000 people watching a Facebook Live just to get that week's information.

And I think that contributed to our community saying, okay, he's talking to us.

We have personal responsibility.

We have corporate responsibility.

We can get through this together.

And so it was just, I think it was a role of a leader to bring the community together and respect both sides of the opinions, not just me taking a stance over here or stance over there.

Remember, people were living in some form of information that may be right and may not be right.

They were living in great fear, and I think it's the role of a leader to understand that fear, but to speak truth to that even in the midst of uncertainty.

And that's what we did.

We just sat in a leather chair and had fireside chats and expressed the reality of what's happening.

So fast forward, presumably -thanks to the vaccine -Mm hmm.

and the fact that our hospitals, stopped getting overrun and that there was liberalizing relations with people.

I mean, in other words, you went outside you talked to your neighbors, you went to town hall meetings, you went to the supermarket, mask mandates were pulled back, like your opportunity for a second term came at a time when, like there was recovery.

-There was, -Yeah.

there had been some public health, recovery, economic recovery.

But you were exhausted of the divisiveness.

And it doesn't sound like even though on that level, we had overcome this tragedy or grave crisis, you weren't ready for a second term, No.

or the people weren't ready for you, vice versa.

But how do you address the paradox that, you stewarded the ship I mean, you got people through it.

Yeah.

And yet it was not viewed as an accomplishment or what?

Well, I was going to run unopposed.

-I would have had no opposition.

-Yeah.

And to be clear, in the mayoral level, especially in the state of Texas, although it's beginning to change a little bit and I don't think for the better.

Mayoral races are nonpartisan races.

They've become so because of the forces that be, I would have had no opposition.

I would have won a second term without an issue.

I won the first term with nearly 80% of the votes against a two term mayor, who was a great mayor.

But I was exhausted because of Covid.

We had an issue with Chinese protesters that were in Midland for two months that was being run from Beijing.

That was quite an interesting endeavor.

I had death threats.

I had police in front of my house, parked in front of my house.

There were other issues we had to deal with as well.

And over time, you just realize, I think I've done what I was supposed to do.

I think if you have any sense of the divine in your life, I felt like I was elected for that season, to take people through that season.

My time was up.

I'm still very involved in politics, but, I needed to save some air in the balloon in case I decide to do something again.

Yeah, well, that's fair.

Coming out of it now, and looking at the fact that our national politics, is even more ensnared in the vitriol without accomplishing things.

Like, making Social Security solvent for the next generation or erasing some of the national debt, or any of the things that one could aspire to accomplish.

When you look at the responsibilities of the mayor and being fundamentally accountable to achieve certain things for the community, that our national politicians are just utterly dereliction of duty.

How can you bring that sensibility to the national stage?

Well, first thing is, anybody who wants to run for office, I question.

You know, I had somebody asked me one time, what do you think about people who say that they want to be in public office?

I say, well, I'm always cautious of the person who aspires to public office.

I'm more interested in the person who finds out there's a need, and they need to serve to be in public office.

It's painful if you do it right, because once you get elected, your job is no longer to the people who voted for you.

Your job is to the people you represent.

If you're a Democrat or a Republican president, your job is not to represent the half of the country that voted for you, which is where we are today.

Your job is to serve the country, whether they voted for you or not.

My job, if I were a congressman in the legislature in Washington, D.C., of course, I have to represent the people who have elected me, but I'm called to serve the people who did not elect me as well.

We have lost the calling of a representative republic because when people get elected, they then start making decisions based upon whether they can get elected again, and they want to become career politicians.

That's why I think there should be term limits.

I think that should happen immediately.

It's that way at the local level, but it's not that way at the state level, and many places it's not that way at the national level.

I think you should be term limited out, and then you don't have to worry about whether the decisions you make are going to make mad the people who voted for you.

You're going to make the people mad who voted for you.

If you do what's right, because you're going to have to find a place of, the word everybody hates, compromise, in order to move things forward, for the collective.

And collective is a bad word to people associate it with, you know, communism or whatever the case might be.

But you have to be bold enough in who you are and secure enough in who you are as a leader and an elected leader to make the right decision, knowing full well it could cost you your position in office.

And I'd be very careful about any politician, who uses these words, this could cost me my career.

Well, number one, your career should never be a politician.

Your career should be what you do for a living.

Your service is what you do as a politician.

And so I quickly just became enamored with this idea that half the people are going to hate me, and half of them are going to, it's probably worse than that.

Probably 80% of the people who are going to hate me at any given time, but I only had to go to sleep with one person's mental state in mind.

And that was mine.

Whether I had done the right thing, and I had listened to right counsel, and I had listened to both sides of the story.

So when I walked out of that room.

I'd done what I thought was right for the people.

And so, you know it.

Quick story, you know, during all the, the race riots in 2020 and 2021 because of George Floyd incidents and things like that.

Midland made national, Midland made international news because of an incident that had happened with a young black man and his grandmother and police officers in front of a house.

I mean, I remember getting the text message that said, well, congratulations, we're international now.

And that led to some meetings we had to have where I sat with, members of the black community and myself.

We had to watch the bodycam footage and all these different things, and I decided to call a town hall meeting and just to invite the African American community at the Martin Luther King Center.

And it was a sold out show.

It was overflow rooms.

It was packed out, and I was sitting on stage and had some other council members on stage.

And, I wanted to hear some stories because at the same time, I have told you the story, I was advocating for our community to change the name of Robert E. Lee High School.

I made plenty of enemies in Midland, Texas, when I said we need to change the name of Robert E. Lee High School.

So that was going on, too.

And I just invited people to come up and tell me their stories of what it was like, I don't know what it's like to be African American.

I don't know what it's like to be pulled over by the police and have to worry about it.

So I wanted to hear stories.

I'd taken friends, to lunch to hear their stories, and we were having a great, great evening.

And then all of a sudden, protesters who had bussed in from Dallas showed up and started just going at us and my security detail said, Mr.

Mayor, I'm gonna have to take you out the back door.

And I said, no, you're not.

I'm walking out that front door through this crowd.

And they said, no, you're not.

And I said, yes, I am going to that front door.

What was crazy, though, is I had earned the respect of our leaders, of our community because I wanted to hear them, that they're the ones that made sure I got out the door.

The lesson to that is people know if you mean it or not, and if you really care.

So when you look at the mission of service, and the practical considerations like whether you have a part time legislature, in your case, you had a day job, and you were mayor, so you had the responsibility to the people, but also responsibility -to make ends meat, -Yeah.

that wasn't going to be the salary of the mayor.

But, where did it leave you in your position on whether people should be paid to be in these roles of service and here in Texas, you have a part time legislature that's also not well funded in the sense that the legislators have other jobs and they meet every other year.

But where did it leave you on that question?

Should mayors, be paid a full time salary?

Should every state have full time legislatures or councils?

I think the less the legislature is in session, the better off a free society is half the time, because we're really better off when we learn to be self-governing people and deal with our issues.

It's a difficult question, because it's different to be the mayor of Midland than it is to be the mayor of Chicago or Los Angeles.

There are more things they have to deal with.

I can understand the salary.

So you have to be in the office all the time.

My mayor job was a 40 hour a week job, very easy.

So you say, well, how did you have a company and do that?

Well, very quickly and very carefully.

And you worked on weekends and you worked at nights.

But where I'm left with is, as you mentioned in the panel earlier today, the opinion of Congress, both in the states and national, is so low, and I don't know if anything lower than the I mean, maybe the press and Congress are in a race to the bottom, which means nobody believes they're in it for the right reasons.

When 30% of the people are the only group.

Well, let's put it the other way.

When 75% of the people believe that you're worthless or you're not doing a good job, then you've got to do something to show that you're in it for service.

Part of it is, you look at the issues in Washington D.C.

with people who, on a legislator salary come out multi-millionaires.

Well, there's something wrong with that.

There's fundamentally something wrong with that.

Same thing happens in the Texas legislature as well.

And so there's going to have to be, and I love the young group that we have here because it's going to take people like that.

Who are going to be 25 years old or 30 years old and say, my ultimate goal is not to see how rich I can become, but how much I can serve and live the life of the richness of service.

It means you're not going to be a billionaire, or possibly, but you're going to serve.

And I walked in it with that and left, realizing if you walk in it with that attitude and walk out with that attitude, you've done it the right way.

So, you have the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which gave unlimited, unfettered influence to a single company, a coalition of companies.

But basically the opposite of what you just said, which is we live in a in a model or mindset where, there's constantly an ulterior motive to raise money, to run in this perpetual campaign cycle.

So when Citizens United is the law of the land, and it seems to be this fundamentally intractable problem in American political life, which is what do you do about that?

Well, I don't think it's a corporate problem because whether it's Citizens United, both sides of the political aisle are poisoned by the power of money.

Right.

Which means the politician is poisoned by it.

It's not, I would not just lay the blame on the companies because they want to get things done.

Before Citizens United passed, people are foolish to not think that the power of lobbyists on K Street, weren't any more powerful, money was just being funneled a different way in a different power structure.

So whether it's campaigning, or whether it's governing, you have to have leaders who are willing to look money in the face and say no, or say, that's correct, but you've gotta... What do yo mean, that's correct?

Well, you've gotta be able to, if people are coming to you, and you're doing what they are telling you to do, because they're going to give to your campaign, then you're a compromised individual already, whose integrity is in question.

And so I remember the lawyer for the city, one night I was talking to him and I said, you know, I never get phone calls.

And he said, because you're not for sale.

And that's what it boils down to.

And people are going to say, well, that's naive.

Well, it's only naive until a generation of new politicians says, I'm going to do what's right for my constituents, not what's right for the people who are giving to the campaign only.

The power of money only has power over the person who is held prisoner by the power of money.

And I would say politicians are the ones who are held prisoner.

Right.

Ironically, we were told by President Trump that, I alone can fix the problems in D.C.

because I alone have given to Speaker Pelosi That's right.

-and Speaker Boehner.

-He didn't need the money.

Right.

And he may not need the money, but the fundamental reality or consequence of the Trump administration is a lot of decisions that are still, decisions that we question.

Are they in the American interest?

I mean, most recently, military action in Iran.

In Iran.

And the suggestion that it's because of a certain lobby, that may not be donating to President Trump or making him wealthy if he's already wealthy.

But that is influencing that outcome.

And so, he had the potential to be that figure in our political lives, to say, I'm not beholden to the Republicans.

I'm not beholden to the Democrats.

That's how he campaigned in 2016.

And yet he's governed seemingly in the opposite way.

-Yeah.

-And so I, it's such a puzzle because of the fact that he was a person who could have, who could have taken the role that way.

Should we believe the next person who says that, who says I alone can fix it?

Or let's put it this way, more democratically rather than anti-democratically, and, you know, I am not going to be beholden to either party.

Is there a way for that person to actually achieve those goals?

It's a great question.

It's a long question.

Who's going to change America to fulfill the dream of one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all?

Who is going to fulfill the American Dream, the people have talked about?

Who's going to make us actually be that shining light on a city that the European world looks at with great hope again?

And even some of our enemies look on not with fear, but with respect.

It's not going to be the people who occupy Washington D.C.

or Pennsylvania Avenue that's going to, again, come across as a naive statement, but any of us who are looking at politicians, including myself, as one, who says, you're the answer.

You're the one who's going to change that, then that's shame on the American people.

That's shame on us who have not studied our civics and studied our Constitution and realize the power that we have as citizens to demand better vocabulary out of our politicians, to demand better statesmanship out of our politicians.

If we have a favorability ratio for our elected leaders of 30 some odd percent, that is not a reflection on those politicians.

That is a reflection on us.

That is a reflection on, we the people, who have decided to put these people in charge, who have decided to elect these people.

And until this group of students, until the electorate and everyone else says we're tired of this, we're tired of the right and the left, we're tired.

It was Washington and his farewell address relating to Federalists and Anti-Federalists who said, this two party thing, will tear us apart.

So we need to listen to our first president and take it upon ourselves to say, we're going to change this narrative, and we're going to change this.

And any politician who says they can change it, we're going to hold them in great doubt.

Right.

And just in the 60 seconds we have left, the efforts to enlist that independent spirit in our national midterm, or presidential campaigns, just hasn't worked.

There have been some independents who've run through nonpartisan elections, through ranked choice voting, and have had success.

But I think the reason that Americans, put up their hands and say, I'm done, is because they don't feel like they have any structure on the national level to infuse our politics with that.

So if there is one thing they can do, looking towards the 2026 midterms, to infuse the system, with that mindset of there are structures that can bring about that value system again.

-What would it be?

-I would say get out of the victim circle and get in the active circle.

We are infected with this attitude that just says, I'm done with it.

That's a victim mentality.

And when you sit in a victim mentality, that means you abdicate your responsibility as a citizen of this country to uphold its greater values and demand those greater values of politicians.

It's shown by how many people vote in local elections, don't vote in local elections.

We have to step up to the plate to say, this is my country, this is our country, this is my state, this is our state.

And I'm going to get people around me who are going to be involved in this process.

And any time I run into somebody who says, well, I didn't vote, then I always tell them this then you're not allowed to talk.

Mayor, thank you for your time today.

Thank you very much, appreciate it.

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