Standing just off the campaign trail, State Labor Commissioner candidate John Pfeiffer describes himself in a way that’s unusual for a politician: “boring.” But for Pfeiffer, that’s not an insult—it’s the whole point of why he believes he’s the right fit to lead an agency that, in his words, “doesn’t make the news a lot” but quietly keeps the state running.
Pfeiffer, who spent 12 years in the Oklahoma House of Representatives representing District 38, a stretch that runs “from Guthrie to Kansas up and down I-35” across parts of Logan, Noble, Garfield, Grant, and Kay counties, says his career has been defined by solving practical problems that don’t always grab headlines. For nine of those years, he served as Deputy Majority Floor Leader, working across chambers and branches of government to move legislation forward.
His wife, he notes with a smile, jokes that he’s the kind of person who just wants to do his job and then go home. The Labor Department, he says, is exactly that kind of place.
“The Labor Department’s kind of, you know, that fits me,” Pfeiffer says. “It doesn’t make the news a lot, but it’s there to just do their job, get the things done, move the state forward, and then go on back home.”…