Carson's staff thought Coburn's social views and blunt language could marginalize him, or at least get independents and conservative Democrats to abandon him. In an audiotape they circulated widely, Coburn told supporters that "lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom." Another quote had Coburn telling Republicans that "the gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country," and that its "agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom we face today."
"I do think there is a gay agenda," Coburn told me in December. "It's a cultural thing, and what's been good about it? What's good about what's happened to us, in terms of disease, of life-impacting events? If I was gay, I wouldn't want that agenda. If you look at the other side, which nobody ever asks me, is how do I get along with gay people? Great. What's my admiration, can I love a gay person? Yes. Can I hire a gay person? Yes. Can I work with them? Yes, and I have. But I think the family, and this is by no means directed towards the gay community, is under attack from all areas."
Coburn took more flak for saying that he could support the death penalty for abortionists. ("I believe that if you destroy life, innocent life, intentionally, you ought to come under the consequences of whatever your state's law is for doing that," Coburn explained, not a little exasperated, in December. "In Oklahoma, it's the death penalty.") It made great copy, but no one in the state will argue that those remarks hurt him. Coburn won the election by 10 points, even after Carson outspent him by more than $1 million.
"I would say this about Tom Coburn," Carson says. "Like the Sex Pistols said in ‘God Save the Queen,' ‘He means it, man.' Libertarians can say, ‘Yeah, we have an alliance with social conservatives to further our cause, but if we're fortunate we elect these people who don't really mean it.' But when he says homosexuality is a big problem, or abortion should be banned, to the extent he can effect radical change, he will do so." Coburn hasn't exactly contradicted that estimation, voting for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and for the Federal Marriage Amendment 10 years later.
"The best thing I heard from any Republican congressman during that campaign was kind of a backhanded compliment," Gaddie says. "He said, ‘You want a guy like Coburn in the U.S. Senate. You just don't want him in your state.' " It's nice to talk about kicking the federal government off your land and stopping pet projects from springing up in politically advantageous places. But in practice, voters and business interests clamor for those projects. "In other words," Gaddie says, "you want a guy who'll have those principles but won't stop the money from flowing."
‘I Want a Hold on This'
From the outset,
the Senate has made a better home for Coburn than the House ever
did. In the 1990s, Rep. Coburn couldn't propose bills without his
party's approval; those amendment fights were his only way of
shaping the budget process. But in the Senate, any member can
introduce bills. Any member can filibuster.
Coburn was handed the chair of the small Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security, a division of the Homeland Security Committee. It was a fount of hearings on all sorts of government boondoggles: the Small Business Administration, funding for the census, funding for United Nations renovations, a $500 million Defense Travel System that was failing to make travel for Defense Department employees any easier.
"It's not like he was limiting his complaints to earmarks," says The Oklahoman's Chris Casteel. "The guy's done a lot of work on all kinds of government spending. You can't blame reporters for not covering it. You physically can't go to all these hearings."
Coburn also gained the power to slow down or stop a multitude of bills that otherwise could have sailed through the Senate. "Anytime a bill comes up that the sponsor doesn't want to bring to the floor, they send the ‘hotline' around and say you've got four hours before it goes to unanimous consent," one Coburn staffer explains. "Any senator can come in and say, ‘I want a hold on this,' and it takes that out of consideration. So lots of them die unless the sponsors really want to fight for these bills."
None of that won Coburn much attention. Hurricane Katrina did. When the hurricane tore through the Deep South and devastated New Orleans, Democrats (and Mississippi Republican Trent Lott) started agitating for reconstruction funds. Coburn saw a rationale for his crusade to cut earmarks. "Congress needs to go to work now to pay for this massive relief effort with offsetting cuts in other spending bills," Coburn said as the extent of the hurricane's damage and the costs of recovery were first being grasped.
Coburn had a few allies, mostly Republicans, in the Senate. More important, he was demanding a change in spending priorities at the same time influential bloggers were demanding it too.
"Identify some wasteful spending in your state or (even better) Congressional District," the prominent blogger Glenn Reynolds wrote at InstaPundit.com. "Put up a blog post on it. Go to N.Z. Bear's new PorkBusters page and list the pork, and add a link to your post." Soon he lengthened the playbook, telling the bloggers to call their senators, bug them about the spending cuts, and report what they said.
"There wasn't any grand strategy," recalls John Hart, Coburn's communications director. "We realized that Porkbusters was a group we want to work with; they were attracted to Coburn's philosophy and vision." The bloggers didn't contact Coburn either. "I think I was vaguely aware of him, but no more," Reynolds says.
The result: For the first time since ABC News ran the highway bill bribery tape in 1997, Coburn had a popular cause. And this story had longer legs.
About eight months after the Bridge to Nowhere fight, Coburn and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) co-sponsored a bill that would create a database, easily searchable and publicly accessible, of all federal grants and projects. It passed through committee unanimously on July 27, it seemed headed toward unanimous passage, and then...nothing. Some member of the Senate had exercised his right to put an anonymous hold on the legislation, the same tool Coburn had used to kill small spending bills. Congress went into recess, and the proposed law drifted into limbo.
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