The Minority Leader

Is Sen. Tom Coburn an extreme social conservative, a libertarian hero, or both?

David Weigel from the July 2007 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Later that year, Coburn opposed millions of dollars in pork spending for a highway bill coming out of a committee headed by Pennsylvania Republican Bud Shuster. Coburn opposed the bill, but one of Shuster's staffers contacted Coburn's office with a promise to grease his palms. "I originally spoke to your boss, to your office, last September," the staffer said in a phone call, "and we had notified you that there was $10 million in the bill for your boss. We're upping that by $5 million."

It was a beautiful political gift. Coburn's staff saved the message and passed it on to ABC's Evening News. For one news cycle, Coburn became the hero of activists and congressional Republicans who had been waiting for someone, anyone, to blow the whistle on the majority's decline.

"We understood that backroom deals, horse-trading, veiled threats, and indirect bribes have always been a part of Congress and every other legislative body in the world," Coburn wrote after the affair. "We may have been naïve, but we weren't that naïve. Nevertheless, it did seem strange to us that this Republican Congress was so intent on passing a bill that contained more pork than all of the highway bills Congress had passed in the previous 20 years."

The bill did pass; it just didn't include several million dollars in bribes to the doctor from Oklahoma. Coburn's next encounter with the national media was the Schindler's List controversy in 1997, when he condemned NBC for airing the "full-frontal nudity, violence, and profanity" of the uncensored Holocaust drama. He got more negative attention in 1998 when he gave his first visual presentation, to Hill staff and interns, of the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and the immediate need for abstinence education and condom use. The image of Coburn shifting his glasses with one hand and pointing to pictures of diseased genitalia with the other was hard for D.C. reporters to shake. And subsequent comments about AIDS didn't help his image. It was fine when he requested an audit of federal spending that ended up showing that minority AIDS sufferers were getting inferior care. It was alarming, though, when he didn't disagree with the suggestion that Fidel Castro's AIDS policies were worth emulating. Among other things, Cuban AIDS patients were removed from their homes and put in quarantine centers. Coburn thought Castro had the right response to the outbreak. "The reason that such programs have been successful in Cuba is because of accountability," he told reason in 2000.

Coburn doesn't stand by his Schindler's List criticism: He says he made a mistake in attacking the network and the film, calling the blowback "the worst experience in my life save the death of my father." But he has no apologies for the Cuba business. Coburn believes that the United States made a mistake in not treating HIV/AIDS like tuberculosis or other deadly infectious diseases, with a containment plan and routine testing. "We need partner notification and contact tracing," he has said, "just like we've done with gonorrhea for 20 years in this country. We've never violated anyone's civil rights." AIDS activists naturally bristled at the comparison between tuberculosis, which is communicable through the air, and diseases transmitted through blood transfusions and sexual intercourse. Nonetheless, Coburn wrote the AIDS Prevention Act of 1997, which would have implemented this strategy. It was battered (and defeated) by the American Civil Liberties Union, Gay Men's Health Crisis, and other activist groups.

"If everyone was able to make the right decisions, if everyone has the right information, you could have libertarianism," Coburn says. "But you need to make sure people have that information. Government can educate people to make the right choices."

In 1999, serving his final term in the House, Coburn proposed amendment after amendment-more than a hundred in all-to force votes on the earmarks in an agriculture bill. It was as close as a representative can get to a filibuster, and it maddened his leadership. But in 2000 he fulfilled his pledge and quit Congress, and the Republicans lost his House seat to a 33-year-old Clinton White House Fellow named Brad Carson.

‘Oh God, He's Going to Run as Tom Coburn'
As he packed up his congressional office, Coburn said a bitter adieu to politics. "Six years is enough," he told reason in 2000. "There are not many normal people up here." He signed on as the chairman of Americans for Limited Government, a new conservative think tank that declared: "We do not seek power. We do not seek fame. We are not partisan." He accepted the leadership of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, where he made news by disagreeing both with gay activists (he favored abstinence education) and with aspects of President Bush's policies (he was for increased use of condoms as well).

Coburn agonized watching the new Republican president and Congress in action. "It was painful," he says. "I watched as the Republicans expanded entitlements without a funding source. They grew the government and grew earmarks by, what, more than 1,000 percent?" (Close: It was about 875 percent.) "And they did that as a tool for legislative fiat and campaign finance. They didn't do the hard work of oversight. It didn't make the government smaller and more efficient. It did the exact opposite: made it larger, heavier, and less efficient."

In October 2003 Oklahoma's 54-year-old Sen. Don Nickles, a Republican, made the surprise announcement that he was quitting politics. The Club for Growth and other old Coburn allies pushed him to enter the race. He initially demurred; he had just beaten cancer again and wasn't up for another election. But in early 2004 he declared his candidacy for the Senate.

As Coburn dithered, Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys had rushed into the fray and built a vast war chest on top of $60,000 from 13 Republican senators. With his cash advantage and head start, Humphreys was able to run ads blasting Coburn for his opposition to bills most Republicans had gladly supported-spending for Oklahoma and for intelligence programs. Coburn fired back by pointing out how those bills had been larded up with earmarks. Coburn dominated the Republican primary with 61 percent of the vote, winning 76 of 77 counties.

His next opponent was Brad Carson, the wunderkind Democrat who had taken over his old House seat. The Coburn nomination was seen as a break for the Democrat even before Carson pounced on Coburn's gaffes and a scandal over whether he had wrongfully sterilized a patient. The nurse who assisted Coburn denied this, and a lawsuit the patient filed against him had been dismissed. "It's hard to say how many points the scandal took off his margin," says Chris Casteel, a political reporter for The Oklahoman. It gave Carson a leg up; the record of Coburn "nay" votes and quasi-filibusters in the House provided plenty more ammunition for a negative campaign.

"We hammered Coburn about wanting to cut highway funds," Carson told me in December 2006. "We hammered him on the PATRIOT Act, and the fact that he told a very libertarian person [at a campaign event] that he opposed it, but when we debated that on Meet the Press he said he would support it."

Carson chuckles when he's asked to evaluate Coburn's libertarian credentials. "Even in a year when the Republicans were riding high," he says, "when the president was going to win the state by a landslide, Coburn could not afford to be a libertarian. The attack on me was never ‘Brad Carson wants more federal spending.' It was ‘Brad is pro-homosexual, pro-abortion.' "

When Carson attacked the 1997 highway bill vote on Meet the Press, Coburn said, "I did vote against it, but I made sure that every bit of that money went to Oklahoma." His primary victory speech was laced with anti-spending, anti-pork applause lines, so much so that Kevin Gaddie, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma, remembered thinking, "Oh God, he's going to run as Tom Coburn." But he didn't win the election simply by crusading against earmarks and pork. He also campaigned heavily against social liberalism.